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The Soviets and the Russians both use breed reactor tech the Russians have the only commercially successful fast reactors in the world the BN600/800 sodium cooled fast reactors. One is on the Caspian Sea making power, and desal water since the Soviet times they are building a new BN800 to upscale the tech. Their fast attack subs had lead cooled fast reactors in them they are the world leaders in that field.

The chicoms also have at least two fast reactors online both for research and future breeding programs. Uranium like oil has a cheap to expensive curve it is currently cheaper to just mine out more of the remaining cheap uranium reserve than to breed PU239 and burn that. The wildcard is ocean uranium the Japanese who also have a fast reactor program have succeeded in making small amounts of yellow cake from seawater they have the price down to $300lb or so mined uranium while it lasts is $80 so no incentive to go after ocean uranium yet and yet is the key word. Uranium reserves at $300 and under are around 8 million tonnes that’s enough for 500 reactors for 50 years or so. To pull 6 billion out of energy poverty and up to EU level energy consumption levels we need ten times that number of reactors or more. One reactor @1GWe supplies 1 million people with 1kWh per hr of electricity that’s roughly the EU average per per over a years time 24/7/365 peaks and valleys averaged out. 6 billion live in energy poverty so we would need 6000 reactors online clearly there is not enough uranium for that unless those reactors are fast spectrum and can breed more fuel than they use. The stockpile of U238 becomes fuel then and you get 100 times the energy out of.every kg of mined uranium. You go from 0.07% fissile to 100% fissile/fertile in natural uranium. It should be a crime against humanity to use uranium in a once through fuel cycle with PWR reactors and in the future likely will be. Every pellet of fuel you throw away is equal to 96 tonnes of coal or 340 barrels of oil. That’s a single thimble sized pellet when used with reprocessing and fast reactors.

Ocean uranium makes any reactor tech sustainable even at $300lb a CANDU reactor has a burn up of 9375 megawatt days per tonne of natural U or 225 megawatt hours per kg when not if the Japanese scale up ocean uranium harvesting even at $660 kg for natural uranium a CANDU reactor in just raw fuel cost would be 0.2933333333 cents per kWh or one third of a cent per kWh.

fuel costs in the CANDU are the lowest in the world needing no enrichment of U235 at all. Take raw uranium turn it into Uranium oxide put it inside pellet form and put those in a CANDU bundle and fission baby fission.

There is 4 billion tonnes of uranium in the oceans and more comes every year via rivers and crustal weathering humans couldn’t draw down the ocean uranium levels at any rate of withdraw vs the incoming erosion rates.

This is why only nuclear power can fuel a species past its first industrial phase where it burns everything in sight. You will run out of things to burn that is just cold hard mathematics.

Those are the two paths humans will have to.chose one. Mine all the cheap uranium then go after ocean uranium on a HUGE scale to only use 0.07% of fissile U235 in it , CANDU help with a conversion ratio of 0.75_0.8 so just over half the total output is breed PU239 in the CANDU itself still total is less than 1.5% energy usage per Kg of mined uranium. If the Japanese can scale up to millions of KG per year from the oceans then that way would work.

The other choice is go to a breeder program with hybrids leading the way having massive outputs of fissile material enough for a dozen or more CANDU reactors on the back end. Or go the fast spectrum reactor that can feed itself and maybe one satellite PWR or two CANDU with reprocessing tech. Either way you get to near 100% burn up with natural uranium and repeated reprocessing.
The Koreans have got the reprocessing costs back in the 1990s down too six tenths of a cent per kWh in pwr reactors they never reprocessed CANDU which they have because at 0.02% fissile material in spent CANDU fuel it is already burned down to depleted uranium levels no incentive to harvest it again. That six tenths of a cent per kWh covered not only reprocessing but making the reprocessed fuel into new pellets and into MOX fuel rods for reuse. At the time new rods cost was 4 tenths of a cent per kWh so here again profit motives won. From a long term resource management strategy reprocessing costs are trivial. Two tenths of a cent only.matters when you can save the two tenths once cheap mined uranium is gone that gap is moot.

Fast reactors would gladly eat 0.02% spent fuel in their breeder blankets breeding it back up to 10% fissile or more in a few years time. Only fast reactors or hybrids can “eat” depleted uranium levels.