Nuclear Energy: Mapping the Next 10,000 Years
What needs to happen for the nuclear industry to keep providing well-being to humankind?
Modern civilization's well-being has been closely tied to growth, with the Human Development Index (HDI) correlating well with energy consumption. As in the last century, energy consumption grows at 1-2% per year worldwide, I assume nuclear energy provides a 0.7% output growth for the duration of this extrapolation. This means energy output doubling every 100 years, and multiplying by 1000X every 1000 years. The magic of exponentials gives sufficient pressure that drives innovation and advancements to each era, making techno-futuristic predictions more credible.
The future splits into three phases:
📁 Phase 1: The Familiar Frontier
Current Technology: Light and heavy water reactors, cost-competitive today, will continue to be our workhorses.
Uranium Mining: Currently considered cost-competitive to extract uranium offer a runway of about 60 years, but with incremental improvements, phase 1 could last around 100 years (give or take a few decades, even with the burden of 0.7% growth rate). This is a reasonable time period, attending to NPP development timelines, to new-build, extend lives and power uprate the technology we have today (or similar) and is cost-competitive.
Economic Viability: The cost of uranium ore is relatively small compared to the overall cost of nuclear energy, allowing room for price increases while remaining competitive.
🌅 Phase 2: The Emerging Era
Advanced Mining: As traditional mining methods become uneconomic, we'll need advanced in-land uranium mining or seawater uranium extraction.
Duration: Based on the available resources and our 0.7% growth rate, this gives us between 1,000 and 10,000 years to enter phase 3, depending on technological advancements.
At-sight-technology: This era is defined by the use of technology that we are demonstrating now or soon, but it is not cost competitive yet.
🚀 Phase 3: The Revolutionary Realm
Next Big Thing: Reliable cost-competitive fusion, asteroid mining, or other yet-to-be-imagined technologies would be the next frontier. It will probably be a combination of many technologies that we are not able to even demonstrate at scale today.
Resource Depletion: With uranium resources on earth depleted, we'll need to find innovative solutions.
Final notes
Final note 1: This roadmap omits other possible limiting factors to growth, such as available land, food or freshwater resources.
Final note 2: Put any credible growth rate different to 0.7%/y to nuclear energy in this roadmap, and the output will be very similar.
Final note 3: I think HTGRs and breeder reactors may have a relevant role to play. However, if you want to know why I don’t include them in this critical-nuclear path, ping me.