Well, Silex's commercial prospects may depend upon where nuclear power is headed. Enrichment capacity is still high worldwide, and we're down to $39/SWU in global SWU price. URENCO is so battered that they are now decreasing their enrichment capacity because their costs are too high to keep it at the same level if it's not being used. On one level, this is good for Silex because supply is slightly coming more into alignment with demand, but on the other, I don't know what the prospects are for future enrichment demand.
I do believe that Silex will likely enrichment uranium cheaper than centrifuges, especially given that I think the fundamental physical limits in URECNO-type centrifuges have very likely already been reached. It seems like it's just getting over that initial capitalization cost and how long it will take to pay off. Laser technology is in many ways just taking off, so I think it's likely that if the world needs additional enrichment capacity, Silex has something. I just don't know if the world will need more enrichment. Nuclear power is something that the West is really turning away from. I think it's very doubtful that another nuclear power plant will ever be built in the United States. The nuclear plants being built now down in Georgia and South Carolina are failing, and it's been such a long time since one has been successfully completed. I really don't know if the US will ever build another one.
I can also report that nuclear engineering department at American universities are now deciding to hire more physicists in the realm of nuclear proliferation and nuclear security. Otherwise, they will only be training their nuclear engineering students to do decommissioning of aging reactors. They don't expect there to be many jobs in nuclear power. Provosts at many top universities are increasingly directing more faculty to be hired in more nuclear policy-related areas, and less in areas need for future nuclear power expansion.
Silex may have good short term prospects in the uranium supply area, which is the idea behind Paducah. I think it's very likely that that plant is built. It looks like the US government is likely to support it. The US government for a while was not even supporting the ACP project (DOE didn't give them an expected loan a couple of years ago), so it looked like Silex was the only enrichment technology the government was interested in supporting. Clearly some people who should know something believe that Silex is on to something.
My interest is in American foreign policy and national security, so I don't have a serious stake or really even any strong opinion about whether Silex is commercialized. I could see an argument that if the plant wasn't commercialized, then there may be fewer laser research programs around the world to do the same thing, with fewer people talking and passing around exactly what to do and fewer people with the needed skills. This would be positive if you ask me. But, it also may not matter that much. My sense is that Argentina is interested in building a plant and is finding it really easy to tap into global laser expertise. But if Silex is successfully commercialized? Does this really ramp up interest where it's dangerous, or no? I don't trust past scholarship that dives into all of these questions about nuclear energy leading to weapons or not leading to weapons, etc.... I can see all the vulnerabilities, and all of the technical choices made historically by different countries could have led to more nuclear weapons acquisition if some countries had simply had some more confidence in themselves.
I think future latent nuclear weapons programs are very likely to be laser research programs in hospitals that do research on brain cancer, among a whole host of other possible well intentioned applications. At least this is where a bulk of the development and skills could very likely be obtained. From there it gets complicated how you would monitor weapons development if the skills are so widely accessible. It's not in my opinion a question of empirically looking at declared fuel-cycle facilities. I think those days are ending.
I could see if Silex really took off and was successfully commercialized, however, that a much better debate may start in the United States about what we're actually trying to do in the world. It may not really change much in the world from a proliferation standpoint, but it could force the US to start thinking harder, which it has had the luxury of not having to do since the Cold War. Or, maybe the US isn't really capable of thinking any better. I don't know. I don't think anyone really has any clue about where the United States is headed right now.
So, I guess my interests in Silex are purely from a US national security perspective. I could see possible benefits if it's not commercialized and other benefits if it is. But, I think at a minimum that Paducah is likely to get built. It looks like it depends on where the enrichment market heads from there whether Silex is used for enriching to LEU on a commercial scale. This is something that more people on this forum would probably know better than me.
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