Is uranium a renewable or nonrenewable resource?

Answer 1

uranium is a non-renewable resource. When we have used it all up, there is none left. A renewable resource is something like sunlight, which we can use to generate electricity, and even if we use it all today, it still comes back just as strong tomorrow.

Answer 2

Uranium is arguably an inexhaustible -one could easily say 'renewable' then- energy source.

The standard line frequently sounded in the media is that "we would burn out the extant reserves of uranium in a few decades if, at the current consumption rate, we were producing all our electricity in nuclear powerplants".

But this is only a half-truth -perhaps I should say that it is "an utter falsehood" right away-.

The calculations backing the previous statement -uranium only for a few decades, with production peaking and then plummeting down very much like oil- assume that the uranium *available* is only the one found in ores of a given grade -minable uranium, they say-. BUT that is not all of the truth.

American geologist Kenneth Deffeyes found convincing evidence that uranium is logarithmically distributed in the Earth's crust.

Specifically speaking, if you are able to exploit ores ten times poorer in uranium than the ones being used today, then the available reserves multiply 300-fold. If you can still make profit from mining ores still 10 times poorer, then the reserves would again multiply by 300, thereby yielding a total amount of reserves which would be 300x300= 90 000 times the reserves accounted in the "peaking argument" stated previously. So instead of having uranium for say 60 years, we would have uranium for

60x90 000 = 5 400 000 years.

Of course the question is how much down the line can you mine uranium - poorer and poorer ores - and still make profit out of it from an economical viewpoint. But seemingly even with current technology it is possible to accept ores much poorer than the ones used now, which means the premise used in the -uninformed - ecologists' calculations are wrong and must be revised on the increase.

But this isn't still the end of the tale. The metal thorium, which is three times more abundant than uranium can be 'burnt' in breeder reactors, yielding nuclear fuels in the process -uranium amongst them-, which would in turn give energy. It is a bit as if you had something that does not produce energy of itself when burning, but which gives as a byproduct other stuff that does burn and release energy in the process -thereby the term "breeder" for the reactors working on these principles-.

Let's now consider seawater: There is an IMMENSE reserve of uranium there, and it can be exploited assuming that you accept paying $300 per obtained kilogram -with current technology-. This is not as crazy as it looks, because a small pill of even only slightly enriched uranium can deliver the energy contained in a great many barrels of oil, and now there is crisp historical evidence to guess that the oil barrel could sometime in the near future reach the price of $300 per barrel and beyond.

And how long would the uranium in the sea last? Well, at the current consumption rate, this method of "burning the seas" would deplete the estimated reserves of the metal in the seas by less than 1% -or conversely increase the price of the commodity by less than 1%- over a period of 4 to 5 billion (10^9) years, which is the time remaining -in the best case- before our Sun depletes its reserve of "fusionable" hydrogen and terminates its output of solar, 'renewable' energy.

In other words, the timescales involved in the depleting of the uranium reserves on Earth -all of them, not just some uranium in some given ores with some specific technology- are on the order of stellar life cycles, and therefore there is hard evidence to term uranium a Renewable energy source on a par with solar.

Of course, the fuel cycles chosen, the technologies and the general arrangement of things must be such that nuclear proliferation is forestalled, as little waste as possible is produced and we are within comfortable levels of safety.

ALL OF THIS is POSSIBLE and Humankind is on the verge of developing types of Nuclear reactors orders of magnitude safer and cleaner than anything existing so far -4rth, 5th generation of reactors-. They will be so sure, in fact, that even if the probability of an accident is not literally zero -it can never be, but same for anything else-, people who worry should start to care about far more probable catastrophic scenarios, such as a gigantic meteorite colliding with Earth, some unknown virus spreading and decimating the world's population, your home crumbling over you within the next minute -non-zero probability event-, etc.

Moreover and aside from nuclear, we have no other option really, given that the burning of fossil fuels is injecting massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and possibly upsetting the climate in ways that could conduce to global eco-cide, perhaps even turning the biosphere conditions upside down and making Earth uninhabitable for man and many other species.

So atoms for peace, then, and atoms for a better prospective life for everyone on this planet in the future. But reaching this wished for state of things will require political vision, objectivity, patience and lots of hard work. The energy is there, the problem is mostly about organization and coordination between human communities.

Answer 3

Yes, uranium is a nonrenewable resource, because it is a metal and metals cannot be renewed.
Uranium is a non-renewable material.

Answer 4

Uranium is a nonrenewable energetic resource.