No abstract available

[en] Sixty years after first investigations on producing uranium from coal ash, this uranium source of supply has regained a strong interest. While the world consumption of coal keeps rising, several papers tackle radiological health issues. They actually point out big uranium-rich coal-ash disposals that coal-fired power plants generate. These disposals could be washed of their radiological hazards as they suggest. Besides, uranium-bearing coal deposits are also viewed as a potentially economic source of supply for the nuclear fuel cycle. Uranium as a by-product of coal used to remain sub-commercial but recent news releases mention the promising pre-feasibility achievements of Sparton Resources. This Canadian company should soon operate the first ash leaching plant in over 40 years. Furthermore, it has shown significant production capacities. While uranium production from coal ash has remained sub-economic for decades, the emergence of new projects is refreshing the question of resource assessment: how much coal ash do we have? Are they all rich in uranium? Can we produce it all? Sparton has announced that the Yunnan region (China) could produce 145 tU a year from 3 coal-fired power plants. Although these three coal power plants could almost be enough to supply a nuclear one, it is hard to tell how many of the 2300 world power stations could provide uranium. The present study proposes to estimate both the world resources and the production capacities of uranium as a co-product or a by-product of coal. Based on the distinction between uranium-rich and uranium-bearing coal deposits, a review of some potentially promising ore deposits is covered. A parametric study stresses the main uncertainties in the resource assessment, sometimes outlining what could be the bottlenecks of developing projects. Finally, our technical and economic conclusion is thus established, drawing an outlook on how the reserves of uranium from coal ash could vary. (author)

[en] Sixty years after first investigations on producing uranium from coal ash, this uranium source of supply has regained a strong interest. While the world consumption of coal keeps rising, several papers tackle radiological health issues. Besides, uranium-bearing coal deposits are sometimes mentioned as a potential source of supply for the nuclear fuel. While uranium production from coal ash has remained sub-economic for decades, the emergence of new projects begs the questions again. How much coal ash do we have? Are the coal deposits all rich in uranium? Can we produce them all? The present study gives an estimation of both the world resources and the production capacities of uranium as a by-product of coal. It shows that there are significant quantities of technically accessible uranium in the world coal reserves. Yet, most of these quantities correspond to very low-grade ores. Potential reserves should be less than 200 ktU. In terms of production capacities, a realistic potential should not exceed 700 tU/year, that is approximately 1% of current needs. (author)

[en] This poster describes the bivariate supply model that is based on deposit cost and Uranium content, both being functions of grade and tonnage. This model is applied to the case of the United States taking into account known and unknown US deposits,a bias has been applied due to the discovery of bigger and richer deposits. In a next step the supply model will be used in the price formation mechanism which will allow long-term resource depletion to be included in the mid-term dynamics of the price mechanism. Today conventional price formation mechanisms are generally limited to short/mid-term with limited production rates but with no resource depletion

[en] Most recent studies on the long-term supply of uranium make simplistic assumptions on the available resources and their production costs. Some consider the whole uranium quantities in the Earth's crust and then estimate the production costs based on the ore grade only, disregarding the size of ore bodies and the mining techniques. Other studies consider the resources reported by countries for a given cost category, disregarding undiscovered or unreported quantities. In both cases, the resource estimations are sorted following a cost merit order. In this paper, we describe a methodology based on geological environments. It provides a more detailed resource estimation and it is more flexible regarding cost modelling. The global uranium resource estimation introduced in this paper results from the sum of independent resource estimations from different geological environments. A geological environment is defined by its own geographical boundaries, resource dispersion (average grade and size of ore bodies and their variance), and cost function. With this definition, uranium resources are considered within ore bodies. The deposit breakdown of resources is modelled using a bivariate statistical approach where size and grade are the two random variables. This makes resource estimates possible for individual projects. Adding up all geological environments provides a distribution of all Earth's crust resources in which ore bodies are sorted by size and grade. This subset-based estimation is convenient to model specific cost structures. Preliminary results for the US endowment are presented. Although the model still requires some additional sensitivity tests, these results are promising. They showed a slightly more conservative endowment than the estimated undiscovered resources reported in the Red Book

[en] Most recent studies on the long-term supply of uranium make simplistic assumptions on the available resources and their production costs. Some consider the whole uranium quantities in the Earth's crust and then estimate the production costs based on the ore grade only, disregarding the size of ore bodies and the mining techniques. Other studies consider the resources reported by countries for a given cost category, disregarding undiscovered or unreported quantities. In both cases, the resource estimations are sorted following a cost merit order. In this paper, we describe a methodology based on 'geological environments'. It provides a more detailed resource estimation and it is more flexible regarding cost modelling. The global uranium resource estimation introduced in this paper results from the sum of independent resource estimations from different geological environments. A geological environment is defined by its own geographical boundaries, resource dispersion (average grade and size of ore bodies and their variance), and cost function. With this definition, uranium resources are considered within ore bodies. The deposit breakdown of resources is modelled using a bivariate statistical approach where size and grade are the two random variables. This makes resource estimates possible for individual projects. Adding up all geological environments provides a distribution of all Earth's crust resources in which ore bodies are sorted by size and grade. This subset-based estimation is convenient to model specific cost structures. (authors)

[en] In this paper we present a new model of the impact of uranium scarcity on the development of nuclear reactors. A dynamic simulation of coupled supply and demand of energy, resources and nuclear reactors is done with the global model Prospective Outlook for Long Term Energy Supply (POLES) over this century. In this model, both electricity demand and uranium supply are not independent of the cost of all base load electricity suppliers. Only two nuclear reactor types are modeled in POLES. Globally one has the characteristics of a Thermal Neutron Reactor (TR) and the other one has the ones of Fast Breeder Reactors (FBR). The results show that If both generations of nuclear reactors can be competitive with other sources, we see that in many countries their development would probably be limited by the availability of natural and recycled materials. Depending on the locally available alternative (hydro, coal) and local regulatory framework (safety and waste management for nuclear reactors but also environmental constraints such as CO₂ targets), both nuclear technologies could be developed. The advantage of the new model is that it avoids the difficult question of defining 'ultimate resources'. The drawback is that it needs a description of the volume of uranium resources but also of the link between the cost and the potential production capacities of these resources

[en] The European Nuclear Young Generation Forum (ENYGF) is the event organised every 2 years within the European Nuclear Society - Young Generation Network (ENS-YGN) for European young professionals and students. It consists in 3 days of conferences (plenary sessions, workshops, panel sessions, technical and poster session), 1 day of technical tours and 1 day of cultural visits. ENYGF 2015 is dedicated to the dual aspect of the relationship between nuclear power and environment: the impact of nuclear activities on the environment and the contribution of nuclear energy to fight climate change. A great deal of this document is composed of the slides of the presentations