RE:RE:RE:RE:Ohi Unit 3 in commercial operation. Ohi 4 being loaded withYes that is roughly correct. You need the 133 tonnes as the initial fuel load beacause all 193 fuel bundles are needed. immediately (otherwise it will not go critical) but it is not 100% correct to say that only 1/3 is replaced in the next 18 months at the next fuel load. I will have to talk to some PWR fuelling engineers becauase it depends on the fuel burn up and the physics of the reactor plus how many full power days it has been operating. Usually steady state is reached in two to three fuel loads...say about 5 years. The other thing to remember is that 1000MW is now the standard size for PWR designs but many are much larger. All four Barakah units are 1400MW and the EPR designs run at about 1600 to 1750. All of these very large reactors are coming on line in the next year or two.
But in the next few years theses new plants are the fuel equivalent of adding another 168 reactors or so and that is a very large increase in demand for the base fuel as well as enrichment services.
My best guess (calculated guess) is we will see Uranium start to move rapidly up around 2020 but geopolicial tensions could easily advance that date.
But really who knows when? As long as the fundamentals of supply and demand hold true we are going to be in a serious supply deficit in the not too distant future. The market thinks there is lots of Uranium but there is less inventopry now than there was in the last run up so to me that is not the factor likley to cause price increases. It is the prediction of a shortage that will cause it. That is when the market will panic just like it did before.
Cheers
MAlcolm
ajklein00 wrote: Very good explanation, Malcolm.
I assume that the 100 tonnes of enriched uranium (equivalent to your 133 tonnes of U3O8) applies only to the initial fuel loading of a typical 1000 MW reactor. For steady state operations, approximately 1/3 to 1/4 of this amount is replaced every 12 to 18 months and sent to the spent fuel pool. Of course this varies by reactor manufacturer. For example, for the Westinghouse AP1000, typically, 64 fuel assemblies (out of the 157) are removed from the reactor and stored in the Pool every 18 months. So, taking the approximate 1/3 replacement number, the 56 plants coming on line in the next 2-3 years represents about 3 times that number of steady state reactors, or 168. When this 168 is added to the 450 reactors already in operation, this amounts to an equivalent 618 steady state reactors operating in the next 2-3 years. This is quite an initial boost in the next 2-3 years, which leaves me being hopeful for a significant uptick in uranium contracting and pricing.