Lecture Series: We Are Not Running Out Of Uranium (Or Any Other Mineral Resources)
Thursday, March 25, 2021, 06:30pm
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Lecture Series:
We Are Not Running Out Of Uranium (Or Any Other Mineral Resources)
Norbert T. Rempe, WIPP-retired
Since at least the middle of the 19th century, supposedly comprehensive assessments routinely underestimate the future availability of mineral resources. At each new pass, resources or reserves are thought to last for only another 20-30 years, or at most perhaps half a century. Enterprises have no incentive to plan or prospect and explore farther ahead. Regional and global estimates are in the main and by necessity based on their limited and short-term data. But the long series of flawed prognoses based on short-term data has hardly diminished their largely uncritical acceptance up to the present.
Fundamentally, we do not (cannot) know the:
- conventional economically mineable inventory
- unconventionally extractable inventory
- currently inaccessible inventory
- yet to be invented and matured technologies
But we have good reason to be optimistic, because the history of pessimistic prognoses of mineral resource availability has consistently been disproven by the facts. On the one hand, mining experience rules since ancient times: “It is always dark in front of the pick.” On the other hand, what in 1952 Carlsbad’s own Wallace Pratt said about petroleum expresses a general truth about the future availability of all mineral resources: “Where oil is first found, in the final analysis, is in the minds of men.”
Norbert Rempe received most of his geological training in his native Germany. He is a legal immigrant and became a United States citizen in 1979. Norbert and his family moved to Carlsbad 41 years ago. He worked as a mining and mineral resource geologist in coal, potash, and petroleum, but dedicated most of his career to WIPP issues and solutions, and to geologic isolation of dangerous waste (both radioactive and chemically toxic), domestically and internationally. After retiring and achieving much appreciated complete personal and professional independence in 2011, he remains pro-bono engaged with WIPP and energy issues, with attempts to solve the South-Y brine well problem, and other community issues such as drugs, gangs, and abortion/right-to-life.
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