Namibia Expands Uranium Mines as Diamonds Lose Shine

Namibia's economy contracted 0.8 percent last year, after expanding 4.3 percent a year earlier, as mining output halved. Diamond production plunged to 929,006 carats from 2.22 million carats a year earlier

Namibian output may quadruple by 2015 as new mines are opened by companies including Extract Resources Ltd., more than doubling uranium's contribution to the economy, according to IHN. The industry accounted for 5.6 percent of Namibia's gross domestic product last year.

If the uranium industry increases by four times then it would be equal to 22.4% of the 2009 GDP.

Uranium companies are planning to spend more than $3 billion starting operations in Namibia
Existing operations, generally, are “only just” profitable at current price levels
RBC Capital Markets cut its 2010 uranium forecast by 11 percent to $44.50 a pound from $50 last month as supplies increase, and said the metal may trade at $55 a pound next year and $75 a pound in 2012

Rio Tinto's is expanding the world's third-largest uranium mine, Rossing.

Extract Resources plans to build the world's second- largest uranium mine in South Rossing (6800 tons/year starting in 2013).

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See also:

Iran Vows to Increase Enriched Uranium Stock Sixfold by 2011

Forget Gold, China Will Double Its Uranium Hoarding This Year

The Gates perception

Technology guru Bill Gates of Microsoft fame gave a sparkling presentation on energy back in February, under the title ‘Innovating to Zero’ (i.e. zero emissions). http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

Oddly he repeated the old saw about renewables being expensive and needing a lot of backup. Strange given that ,in California, wind power is the cheapest energy source on the grid and the main issue in the US is not so much the intermittency of wind as there often being too much wind generated electricity for the grid to handle (see my earlier Blog on curtailment issues: http://environmentalresearchweb.org/blog/2010/04/beyond-baseload.html)

And even more oddly, he didn’t mention the smart supergrid idea, which could balance and manage local variations in supply and demand. You might think that would be right up his street, as someone who pioneered internet information grid systems and applications.

However his main thrust was on innovations in nuclear. He said ‘innovation really stopped in this industry quite some ago, so the idea that there’s some good ideas laying around is not all that surprising’. He backed the so called ‘Terrapower’ idea, in which a mix of fresh uranium and depleted uranium is formed into a log type tube, buried deep in the ground and ‘burnt’ progressively, with the fission reaction running through it from one end to the other, like a candle. So it’s sometimes called a ‘travelling wave reactor’. It’s envisaged that it would take 60 years to burn through end to end , and that the waste products could just be left where they were, underground . Using depleted uranium/ spent fuel to breed more plutonium and run reactors essentially from some of the wastes from conventional nuclear plants , is hardly a new idea, but the travelling wave idea is new- and untried...