A top-down assessment of energy, water and land use in uranium mining, milling, and refining

Whose land is it anyway? Energy futures & land use in India

“…To estimate the area displaced I have therefore used a study by Schneider et al (2013a) who undertook a thorough assessment of primary data relating to several mines across the world. Other estimations for uranium mine and milling land use also exist but either fail to specify which type of mine they refer to (Fthenakis and Kim, 2009) or their estimations are not relevant exclusively for underground mines (Finch, 1998;Poinssot et al, 2014).…”

“…Schneider et al (2013a) estimate the underground mine land use as 196 m 2 /tU which includes both mining and milling operations. In terms of m 2 /GWh, this comes out to 4.2 m 2 /GWh from the mining and milling process.…”

Comparing concentrating solar and nuclear power as baseload providers using the example of South Africa

“…This is still well below the emissions intensity of fossil fuel power plants, but relevant given South Africa's stated plans for a renewed domestic fuel processing industry and the country's currently coal-heavy power sector. Declining uranium ore grades also negatively affect future nuclear plants' emissions, but not by orders of magnitude as sometimes claimed [66,80]. For CSP plants Burkhardt et al (2012) [10], perform a meta-analysis using light harmonization (excluding harmonization of embodied emissions of plant materials and construction activities), resulting in a mean for parabolic trough plants of 23 gCO 2 eq/kWh with an IQR of 15e26 gCO 2 eq/kWh, and a mean for central receivers of 22 gCO 2 eq/ kWh with an IQR of 16e29 gCO 2 eq/kWh.…”

“…5% of globally identified uranium resources are in South Africa, and another 5% in neighboring Namibia [35], although this has little strategic significance as there is currently no Namibian or South African nuclear fuel processing industry. A concern sometimes cited is the energy intensity of recovering lower grade uranium ores, but energy return on investment remains well above 1 in all cases, and no shortage of economically recoverable uranian ores is imminent [54,66]. The available data suggest that for practical purposes in South Africa, there are no fundamental technical constraints for either CSP or nuclear power to potentially provide all or most of electricity demand.…”

Land-use intensity of electricity production and tomorrow’s energy landscape

“…EIA provides data on each plant’s electricity output [ 37 ]. Finch (1997), Eliasson & Lee (2003), Harries et al (1997), and Schneider (2013) survey land area for uranium mining and processing [ 38 – 42 ], mostly in Australia, which averages 0.08 ha/TWh/y when we converted these per ton measurements into electricity units. Fthenakis & Kim (2009) was the only study that provides an estimate for the other aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle: conversion, enrichment, and fabrication [ 12 ].…”