How much uranium?
20th June 2005 David Fleming’s article (June) on the global nuclear industry goes beyond all limits of political and scientific decency in its attempt to defend a fallacious anti-nuclear stance. His contention that ores grading 0.01 per cent (or 100g per tonne) require more energy to process than they can yield is hopelessly wrong, as this amount of uranium oxide could produce approximately 40 MWh of energy, while the mining, crushing, grinding and concentration of the same tonne of ore would consume no more than 30 kWh (0.075 per cent of the contained energy). In fact, the average abundance of uranium in the earth’s crust is just 10g/tonne, which, if recovered, would give about 4 MWh of energy for every tonne mined and processed. Fleming’s belief that no new major discoveries of uranium lie ahead is also hopelessly misguided and clashes head-on with geological logic and experience. Just a few metres of non-mineralised “overburden” are sufficient to mask the signature of a major uraniu
