5676 A.D.

Right or wrong, what is being done to uranium is shameful. Only 0.7% of processed uranium ore ("yellow cake") is fissile U 235, and almost none of it is fissile U 233. The vast bulk of it is nonfissionable U 238; when the U 235 has been extracted from it, it lies around as tailings that, at present, serve no other purpose than to provide the scaremongers with subject material for horror fiction. Yet U 238 can be bred into plutonium, a substance that concentrates vastly more energy than anything scientists have ever dreamed of through the ages, and which must therefore rank as one of man's very greatest inventions.

The steel vessels at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and other places, reports Dr R.E. Lapp (Fortune, Oct. 75), contain more than 200,000 tons of discarded uranium 238. Valued at the equivalent price for coal, this represents a fuel asset of $20 trillion, an amount that makes Fort Knox look like a pauper's junkyard.

So much for the politicos who haggle over a billion here or there in the cost of developing the breeder, which is already well advanced in Britain and Japan, and has been on line for more than a year in France and the USSR. But we are not talking money, we are talking resource depletion; and the 200,000 tons of uranium tailings are not just proved reserves, they are neatly packaged in green-painted boxes, begging to be used. If bred into plutonium, they will fuel the mentioned 800 US reactors for two-hundred and eleven years. And the potential US uranium reserves of 3.5 million tons will fuel those 800 reactors for 37 centuries. So will we run out of uranium?

Yes: in the summer of 5,676 A.D.