Michael Dittmar

The growing conflicts in and about oil exporting regions and speculations about volatile oil prices during the last decade have renewed the public interest in predictions for the near future oil production and consumption. Unfortunately, studies from only 10 years ago, which tried to forecast the oil production during the next 20-30 years, failed to make accurate predictions for today's global oil production and consumption. Forecasts using economic growth scenarios, overestimated the actual oil production, while models which tried to estimate the maximum future oil production/year, using the official country oil reserve data, predicted a too low production. In this paper, a new approach to model the maximal future regional and thus global oil production (part I) and consumption (part II) during the next decades is proposed. Our analysis of the regional oil production data during past decades shows that, in contrast to periods when production was growing and growth rates varied greatly from one country to another, remarkable similarities are found during the plateau and decline periods of different countries. Following this model, the particular production phase of each major oil producing country and region is determined essentially only from the recent past oil production data. Using these data, the model is then used to predict the production from all major oil producing countries, regions and continents up to the year 2050. The limited regional and global potential to compensate this decline with unconventional oil and oil-equivalents is also presented.

The scientific data about the state of our planet, presented at the 2012 (Rio+20) summit, documented that today's human family lives even less sustainably than it did in 1992. The data indicate furthermore that the environmental impacts from our current economic activities are so large, that we are approaching situations where potentially controllable regional problems can easily lead to uncontrollable global disasters. Assuming that (1) the majority of the human family, once adequately informed, wants to achieve a "sustainable way of life" and (2) that the "development towards sustainability" roadmap will be based on scientific principles, one must begin with unambiguous and quantifiable definitions of these goals. As will be demonstrated, the well known scientific method to define abstract and complex issues by their negation, satisfies these requirements. Following this new approach, it also becomes possible to decide if proposed and actual policies changes will make our way of life less unsustainable, and thus move us potentially into the direction of sustainability. Furthermore, if potentially dangerous tipping points are to be avoided, the transition roadmap must include some minimal speed requirements. Combining the negation method and the time evolution of that remaining natural capital in different domains, the transition speed for a "development towards sustainability" can be quantified at local, regional and global scales. The presented ideas allow us to measure the rate of natural capital depletion and the rate of restoration that will be required if humanity is to avoid reaching a sustainable future by a collapse transition.

Historic data from many countries demonstrate that on average no more than 50-70% of the uranium in a deposit could be mined. An analysis of more recent data from Canada and Australia leads to a mining model with an average deposit extraction lifetime of 10+- 2 years. This simple model provides an accurate description of the extractable amount of uranium for the recent mining operations. Using this model for all larger existing and planned uranium mines up to 2030, a global uranium mining peak of at most 58 +- 4 ktons around the year 2015 is obtained. Thereafter we predict that uranium mine production will decline to at most 54 +- 5 ktons by 2025 and, with the decline steepening, to at most 41 +- 5 ktons around 2030. This amount will not be sufficient to fuel the existing and planned nuclear power plants during the next 10-20 years. In fact, we find that it will be difficult to avoid supply shortages even under a slow 1%/year worldwide nuclear energy phase-out scenario up to 2025. We thus suggest that a worldwide nuclear energy phase-out is in order. If such a slow global phase-out is not voluntarily effected, the end of the present cheap uranium supply situation will be unavoidable. The result will be that some countries will simply be unable to afford sufficient uranium fuel at that point, which implies involuntary and perhaps chaotic nuclear phase-outs in those countries involving brownouts, blackouts, and worse.

" 'Al-Qaeda-link' CERN worker held"; "The star science pupil who grew up to become Al-Qaeda's 'nuclear mastermind'"; "Al-Qaeda scientist held at nuclear base".

An update of our 2009 study, "The Future of Nuclear Energy, Facts and Fiction" using the 2009 and the available 2010 data, including a critical look at the just published 2009 edition of the Red Book, is presented. Since January 2009, eight reactors with a capacity of 4.9 GWe have been connected to the electric grid and four older reactors, with a combined capacity of 2.64 GWe have been terminated. Furthermore, 27 reactor constructions, dominated by China (18) and Russia (4), have been initiated. The nuclear fission produced electric energy in 2009 followed the slow decline, observed since 2007, with a total production of 2560 TWhe, 41 TWhe (1.6%) less than in 2008 and roughly 100 TWhe less than in the record year 2006. The preliminary data from the first 10 months of 2010 in the OECD countries indicate that nuclear power production in North-America remained at the 2009 levels, while one observes a recovery in Europe with an increase of 2.5% and a strong rise of 5% in the OECD Asia-Pacific area compared to the same period in 2009. Worldwide uranium mining has increased during 2009 by about 7000 tons to almost 51000 tons. Still roughly 18000 tons of the 2010 world uranium requirements need to be provided from the civilian and military reserves. Perhaps the most remarkable new data from the just published 2009 edition of the Red Book, are that (1) the best understood RAR (reasonable assured) and IR (inferred) resources, with a price tag of less than 40 US dollars/Kg, have been inconsistently absorbed in the two to three times higher price categories and (2) uranium mining in Kazakhstan is presented with a short lifetime. The presented mining capacity numbers indicate an uranium extraction peak of 28000 tons during the years 2015-2020, from which it will decline quickly to 14000 tons by 2025 and to only 5000-6000 tons by 2035.

The accumulated knowledge and the prospects for commercial energy production from fission breeder and fusion reactors are analyzed in this report. The publicly available data from past experimental breeder reactors indicate that a large number of unsolved technological problems exist and that the amount of "created" fissile material, either from the U238 --> Pu239 or from the Th232 --> U233 cycle, is still far below the breeder requirements and optimistic theoretical expectations. Thus huge efforts, including many basic research questions with an uncertain outcome, are needed before a large commercial breeder prototype can be designed. Even if such efforts are undertaken by the technologically most advanced countries, it will take several decades before such a prototype can be constructed. We conclude therefore, that ideas about near-future commercial fission breeder reactors are nothing but wishful thinking. We further conclude that, no matter how far into the future we may look, nuclear fusion as an energy source is even less probable than large-scale breeder reactors, for the accumulated knowledge on this subject is already sufficient to say that commercial fusion power will never become a reality.

For more than 40 years, the Nuclear Energy Agency of the OECD countries and the International Atomic Energy Administration of the United Nations have published a biannual document with the title "Uranium Resources, Production and Demand". This book, known as the "Red Book", summarizes data about the actual and near future nuclear energy situation and presents the accumulated worldwide knowledge about the existing and expected uranium resources. These data are widely believed to provide an accurate and solid basis for future decisions about nuclear energy. Unfortunately, as it is demonstrated in this paper, they do not. The conventional worldwide uranium resources are estimated by the authors of the Red Book as 5.5 million tons. Out of these, 3.3 million tons are assigned to the reasonable assured category and 2.2 million tons are associated with the not yet discovered but assumed to exist inferred resources. Our analysis shows that neither the 3.3 million tons of "assured" resources nor the 2.2 million tons of inferred resources are justified by the Red Book data and that the actual known exploitable resources are probably much smaller. Despite many shortcomings of the uranium resource data, some interesting and valuable information can be extracted from the Red Book. Perhaps most importantly, the Red Book resource data can be used to test the "economic-geological hypothesis", which claims for example that a doubling of uranium price will increase the amount exploitable uranium resources by an even larger factor. The relations between the uranium resources claimed for the different resource categories and their associated cost estimates are found to be in clear contradiction with this hypothesis.