The question of fuel supply is an excellent question. Here are some excerpts from the article I linked that involve this issue:
"However, there is only a limited amount of ore from which uranium can be produced at anywhere near the current price, perhaps enough to provide lifetime supplies of the fuel needed by all nuclear power plants built up to the year 2025. Beyond that, uranium prices would escalate rapidly, doubling the cost of nuclear electricity within several decades."
"Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem."
Referring to Breeder reactors and how they extend the life of fuel supply, it says "About a hundred times as much energy is thus derived from the same initial quantity."
"That means that instead of lasting only for about 50 years, our uranium supply will last for thousands of year. As a bonus, the environmental and health problems from uranium mining and mill tailings will be reduces a hundred fold. In fact, all uranium mining could be stopped for about 200 years while we use up the supply of U-238 that has already been mined and is now in storage."
Bare in mind, this article was written in 1990. So this info is dated.
This following passage makes you think more seriously about the possible importance of using Breeder reactors:
"However, it is my personal viewpoint that it is _immoral_ to use nuclear power without reprocessing spent fuel. If we were simply to irretrievably bury it, we would consume all the rich uranium ores within about 50 years. This would deny future citizens the opportunity of setting up the breeder cycle, the only reasonably low-cost source of energy for the future of which we can be certain. By such action, our generation might well go down in history as the one that denied humankind the benefits of cheap energy for millions of years, a fitting reason to be eternally cursed. On the other hand, if we develop the breeder reactor, we may go down in history as the generation that solved the world's energy problems for all time. Future generations might well remember and bless us for millions of years."
If you take the time to read the whole thing, you will probably be impressed. Regardless of where he might be right or wrong, the entire book or article or whatever you want to call it seems very thorough, covers almost every angle, and is very convincing. A good read. I'd like to find more short books or articles by researchers in the field for comparison. Especially given how old the one I found was (1990).
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