McMurray* reported in the introduction to the symposium proceedings of 2005 that the growth potential of nuclear power will depend on the adequacy of uranium resources to meet future reactor uranium requirements and on the ability of the industry to deliver resources to the marketplace in a timely manner. Uranium supply is generally divided into two broad categories – primary supply or newly mined and processed uranium and secondary supply, which includes highly enriched uranium from dismantling of nuclear weapons, inventory drawdown, reprocessed uranium, mixed oxide fuel and tails re-enrichment.
Uranium production or primary supply exceeded demand until about 1990, and the excess was held as inventory. By 1990, however, primary supply was no longer adequate to meet demand and secondary supply was increasingly required to ensure a balance between supply and demand. The disparity between primary supply and demand grew rapidly until in 2003, total demand was satisfied about equally by primary and secondary supply. Availability of secondary supply is, however, expected to decrease to about 15% of reactor uranium requirements by 2020; primary supply will have to increase in proportion to the decrease in availability of secondary supply to ensure a balance between supply and demand. The challenge for the uranium production industry will be to ensure that there is adequate production capacity to replace declining secondary supply and that there are adequate resources to sustain production.
In 2003, 40 production centers in 16 countries accounted for worldwide output totaling approximately 35,385 tU (~70 million pounds U3O8). The production centers operating in 2003 ranged from McArthur River with a yearly capacity of 7,200 tU (~14 million pounds U3O8) to small operations in developing countries that produced between 40 (~80,000 pound U3O8) and 200 tU (~400,000 pounds U3O8) The combined nameplate capacities of all production centers operating in 2003 totaled approximately 47 260 tU (~95 million pounds U3O8). Output from existing and committed or firmly planned facilities is expected to remain about flat between 2005 and 2020. Production capacity could, however, expand by 50% by 2020 through addition of new production centers.
The annual production capacity that a given deposit will support is determined by a combination of factors including resources, mining method, ore grade, geology and environmental constraints. Therefore, exactly how the proposed expansion of capacity from new facilities will be achieved will depend in part on the geology of the resources that are available for development. Unconformity-related and ISL-amenable sandstone deposits contributed 42 and 20% of 2003 production, respectively. Four deposits accounted for the unconformity-related deposit output, while 17 production centers contributed to the ISL total.We can only generalize as to the future makeup of the industry, but there is sufficient information to forecast trends in the kinds of deposits that will be developed in the near term.
For example, Cigar Lake, which is currently under development and will have an annual capacity of 6,900 tU (~14 million pounds U3O8), is the only new unconformity-related deposit that is likely to be developed in the next 10 (or more) years. After Cigar Lake there are no high-grade deposits that could support high-capacity operations in the pipeline for development. Instead, the most likely candidates for development are ISL-amenable sandstone deposits with annual production capacities in the range of 400 (~800,000 pound U3O8) to 1,200 tU ( ~2.4 million pounds U3O8). No other project on the horizon is likely to have even half the capacity of Cigar Lake and some of the deposits with the highest capacity potential have uncertain futures because of environmental opposition.
In a worse case scenario, we may be faced with relying on development of a large number of relatively small-capacity operations to ensure an adequate supply of uranium. At the low end of their range of production capacities, it could take 17 ISL operations to equal the annual output of Cigar Lake. Every new project will require extensive environmental reviews prior to the start of development. At this date (2005), these reviews can take between 3 and 10 (or more) years. Therefore, careful planning by the industry will be needed to ensure that projects being considered for development are submitted to regulatory agencies well in advance of when they will be needed to balance supply and demand. Proposed uranium projects will be competing with other natural resource projects (for coal and natural gas projects for example) for limited permitting capability, so planning will be the key to gaining a priority position in the permitting queue.
*Original URL may contain more material: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1259_web.pdf ; See Murray's complete paper: pp. 27-35.
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