TJ you nuked the thread!
Anyone see how Saskatchewan Uranium giant Cameco closed its Rabbit Lake mine in April?
http://www.mining.com/500-jobs-lost-afte...bbit-lake/
Not a trivial closure -- the US buys 1/3 of its Uranium from Saskatchewan. Sask has bar none the most attractive uranium deposits in the world -- there are good ones in Central Asia but they are so politically unstable. So Sask U3O8 mining should be a good proxy for growth in the Nuke Power industry. Basically there was this Yuge Himalayan sized mountain range that extended from Northern Sask across Hudsons Bay in Northern Canada about 1.5 billion years ago called the Trans Hudson Orogeny. The range eroded over time (there were no trees back then, so erosion of mountain ranges was rapid, think of like a flood of water going across a parking lot, there were no soils and vegetation to control the topographic flow path of water into streams). On the south side of the mountains was a "foreland basin" where sediments accumulated called the Athabasca Basin. Sediments built up in the basin, and due to the high Uranium content naturally occurring in the granitic basement, groundwater picked up some of that uranium in the basement rock but would be forced to drop out that Uranium when it would migrate upwards through tiny cracks in the granite and hit those unconformably overlaying sands usually due to pressure differentials or pH changes. So you get really nice consistent high grade uranium deposits at a max depth of like 800m, which is actually rare. The US technically has the largest uranium deposits in the world in an Appalachian shale called the Chattanooga but it is super low grade, just basically atomic - scale buildups of uranium derived from seawater built up in a deep marine mud. Will never be economic.
when you see comments like "thorium is as common as lead in the Earths crust" which I see all the time on Reddit then be wary -- Th is just like U in the sense that it is indeed a common element but it is very rare to find it naturally occurring in high grade natural deposits. There are some decent Th deposits by Dillon Montana but generally your best bet for obtaining economic quantities of Th is as a byproduct of REE extraction in monazite. Just going through the gangue rock at old mines in China after all of the REEs were extracted is probably cheaper than opening a new Th mine.
Either way the point of this post is to just chime in to TJs point from an economic geology level -- extraction of uranium or Th is considerably more expensive than fracking for nat gas, and with so much pre existing nat gas infrastructure already out there, I don't know how economic opening a bunch of new Uranium plants would be.
On the contrary, would any nuclear power plants become as attractive as hydrocarbon based power if both were faced with equally small regulatory burdens? I am ignorant when it comes to nuclear regulatory restrictions but assume they are very bad.
Anyone see how Saskatchewan Uranium giant Cameco closed its Rabbit Lake mine in April?
http://www.mining.com/500-jobs-lost-afte...bbit-lake/
Not a trivial closure -- the US buys 1/3 of its Uranium from Saskatchewan. Sask has bar none the most attractive uranium deposits in the world -- there are good ones in Central Asia but they are so politically unstable. So Sask U3O8 mining should be a good proxy for growth in the Nuke Power industry. Basically there was this Yuge Himalayan sized mountain range that extended from Northern Sask across Hudsons Bay in Northern Canada about 1.5 billion years ago called the Trans Hudson Orogeny. The range eroded over time (there were no trees back then, so erosion of mountain ranges was rapid, think of like a flood of water going across a parking lot, there were no soils and vegetation to control the topographic flow path of water into streams). On the south side of the mountains was a "foreland basin" where sediments accumulated called the Athabasca Basin. Sediments built up in the basin, and due to the high Uranium content naturally occurring in the granitic basement, groundwater picked up some of that uranium in the basement rock but would be forced to drop out that Uranium when it would migrate upwards through tiny cracks in the granite and hit those unconformably overlaying sands usually due to pressure differentials or pH changes. So you get really nice consistent high grade uranium deposits at a max depth of like 800m, which is actually rare. The US technically has the largest uranium deposits in the world in an Appalachian shale called the Chattanooga but it is super low grade, just basically atomic - scale buildups of uranium derived from seawater built up in a deep marine mud. Will never be economic.
when you see comments like "thorium is as common as lead in the Earths crust" which I see all the time on Reddit then be wary -- Th is just like U in the sense that it is indeed a common element but it is very rare to find it naturally occurring in high grade natural deposits. There are some decent Th deposits by Dillon Montana but generally your best bet for obtaining economic quantities of Th is as a byproduct of REE extraction in monazite. Just going through the gangue rock at old mines in China after all of the REEs were extracted is probably cheaper than opening a new Th mine.
Either way the point of this post is to just chime in to TJs point from an economic geology level -- extraction of uranium or Th is considerably more expensive than fracking for nat gas, and with so much pre existing nat gas infrastructure already out there, I don't know how economic opening a bunch of new Uranium plants would be.
On the contrary, would any nuclear power plants become as attractive as hydrocarbon based power if both were faced with equally small regulatory burdens? I am ignorant when it comes to nuclear regulatory restrictions but assume they are very bad.