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Let's just conclude by talking about a few of
the factors that are you know maybe, more generally than
uranium driving growth and in nuclear and some of
the factors that could be discouraging investments in this sector.
The growth factors of course are it's
a relatively clean technology as we mentioned before.
So this is definitely one of the things you
read about all the time, you actually [SOUND] might
even marvel at the capacity of this technology to
produce the amount of energy that, that it can.
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But in addition to that if you read maybe popular science
magazines and things, or search around on the web, I'd encourage you to do that.
There are a number of new technologies that are just making nuclear
power so much more efficient and safer than it's ever been in history.
So different fuels or like [UNKNOWN] Instead of uranium or different [SOUND]
methods of, of processing the fuel into pebbles.
Or what's called fast breeder that are, might much more efficient use of
the fuel, for instance in a conventional reactor, the amount
of uranium in a fuel rod, in a
new fuel rod might be up to 6 or 7% or something that's not terribly high.
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When the uranium 235 drops below 3%, that fuel
rod is considered spent and needs to be changed out.
So fully 50% of the material that we think of as fuel is not even going to be used
it's just going to have to be discarded and stored and, and things like that.
So, any of these technological improvements
that improve the efficiency you know, have
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a very encouraging potentially impact on the sector.
Especially when you think about the
factors discouraging growth in this sector, because
one of the main ones is, where are we going to put the waste?
Okay, so the extent that you could minimize the
waste that would be obviously a, a huge advantage.
I, but because of concerns about waste and because of
you know several throughout history, as I mentioned, you know,
no matter how safe we, we make this, the question
is have we, have we designed these facilities to handle some
worst case types of environmental, weather,
and potentially Terror type of events.
And if we haven't, we in ca, in some
cases we've seen you know, a couple of disasters.
And these disasters can be, you know, quite, quite catastrophic.
So because of concerns about the long term
you know, where would we store the waste material?
Which hopefully are being improved by some efficiencies over here on the growth side.
And, concerns that can we ever really figure
out how to design and manage these facilities
in a way that accounts for all the
potential bad things that could happen to them.
We've seen the costs associated with citing and permitting
become very high the time delay's very lengthy.
And this is probably, the, you know, the, the
most significant factor, although it's derivative of these others.
You know, the bottom line is the political environment is responding
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And lastly, I just wanted to provide, we, we don't have much data to
turn to in thinking about, you know what labor markets look like in this industry.
But this is data, again, taken from the BLS employment projections, surveys and
projections, and you know, there are some natural, obvious players here.
They don't keep track of a lot of
categories unique to the nuclear power industry, but nuclear
engineers are essentially, you know, demand for nuclear
engineers is expected to stay flat and maybe decline.
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Reactor operators also stay flat maybe decline the only group that we
see a little bit of an increase in is in these technicians.
So, you maybe, you can infer from these projections
what the BSLs at least building into their forecast is
continued pressure on you know, on probably sighting and
permitting and therefore any kind of growth in its industry.
So basically, in the struggle between factors that would
tend towards growth and factors that would tend towards decline.
You know, there is at least a number of folks betting against the growth and,
and not the the headwinds, the industry
facing are going to be much more significant to
the extent there's any growth at least in labor inputs going to be more the type
of occupations that would be used, that
would be needed to keep existing facilities running.
Not occupations that would be needed
to build new facilities, operate new facilities.
But you think more of the, the, you know the technicians here is being the
type of people you might want to you, you would be hiring greater numbers if
you're trying to extend the life of
exist, existing facilities, who've already, facilities that have
already been through the costly process of
permitting and siting and, and things like that.
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Michael J. OrlandoLecturer
