Energy & Resources: Cheap nuclear energy and the myth of resource scarcity

Energy and resources have been part of my work since 2006: as co-founder and long-time CEO of Deutsche Rohstoff AG, today in copper exploration in Argentina, with Aumontis Holding and as co-founder of the nuclear startup NX Atomics. This practice has left me with two convictions: cheap energy is the key to prosperity. And we are not running out of resources.

Cheap energy is the key to almost everything. Energy costs have a direct or indirect effect on the cost of a society’s products and services, and therefore on its competitiveness.

The more developed a society is, the more energy it consumes overall, because there are far more electrical and industrial applications. This is true regardless of the consumption of the individual household and regardless of how well energy can be stored. All developed societies consume more energy as industrialisation and prosperity increase. That is why the main task is to tap the cheapest possible sources of energy.

Nuclear energy: the highest energy density

Nuclear energy is particularly suitable for this, because its energy density is considerably higher than that of wind or solar power, for example. Fully fissioned, one kilogram of uranium releases as much energy as around 2,500 to 3,000 tonnes of hard coal. One tonne of uranium would be enough to supply a city of one million people with electricity for about a year – without large areas of land being taken up by solar panels or wind turbines.

However, this is not possible with conventional nuclear power plants. In today’s light water reactors, one kilogram of natural uranium delivers only a fraction of the energy that could theoretically be obtained, namely less than one per cent. With complete fission in so-called Generation IV fast reactors, however, it is possible.

Fast reactors: nuclear waste and thorium as fuel

With appropriate reprocessing, such reactors can even use the existing residues of previous nuclear power plants (“nuclear waste”) as fuel, or other raw materials such as thorium. The supposed problem of final disposal thus becomes a supply of energy.

Small modular reactors (SMRs): cost is what counts

There are a large number of nuclear startups working on new SMR concepts (small modular reactors, also known as mini nuclear reactors). In my view, companies that do not rely on fast reactors will sooner or later drop out of the competition, because they cannot keep up on cost.

Even within the group of fast reactors, it is crucial that costs are as low as possible – lower than those of coal, gas and renewable energy, for example. Otherwise, in the end, nobody will use this technology on a larger scale. Low-cost SMRs would also be ideal for Free Private Cities.

NX Atomics: electricity at 2 cents per kilowatt hour

As building new commercial nuclear power plants for electricity generation is currently not permitted in Germany, I co-founded the nuclear startup NX Atomics in the USA. NX Atomics aims to offer the world’s cheapest always-available energy: 2 cents per kilowatt hour. This is to be achieved with the VELA reactor, a combination of a fast reactor, liquid fuel, lead cooling and 3D printing of the most important components.

→ More about NX Atomics and the VELA reactor

Contrary to popular belief, we are not running out of resources. This is because the Earth’s crust consists mainly of minerals, which in turn contain large quantities of metals. In many places, the concentrations of certain minerals or metals are elevated; this is known as a geochemical anomaly.

Whether such an anomaly is a deposit worth mining is decided by price alone. If the price were high enough, even extracting gold from seawater would pay off, despite extremely low grades.

Because the fallacy of resource scarcity is so widespread (see Earth Overshoot Day, the day on which humanity has supposedly used up a whole year’s resources, and similar nonsense), here are a few words on the subject.

Malthusian theory: the first great scarcity forecast – and why it failed

In his “Essay on the Principle of Population” of 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus argued that population grows geometrically (exponentially), while food production increases only arithmetically (linearly). In the long run, this would inevitably lead to hunger, poverty and population collapse. He regarded resources, above all agricultural land and food, as fundamentally scarce and limiting.

The theory has been refuted empirically, above all by technological progress such as the invention of artificial fertiliser. Productivity gains in agriculture through mechanisation, fertiliser, pesticides, high-yield varieties and later the Green Revolution made food production grow faster than the population. The world population has grown from around one billion (1800) to more than eight billion. At the same time, hunger and extreme poverty have fallen sharply in percentage terms and, in many regions, in absolute terms as well. Food supply per head has risen.

It is similar with non-renewable resources.

Peak oil: why we did not run out of oil

In 1956, M. King Hubbert predicted that US oil production would peak around 1970 and then decline irreversibly (“peak oil”). The core assumption: geological reserves were largely known and fixed, production would follow a bell curve, and new sources would be too expensive or technically impossible.

What actually happened: after the 1970 peak (approx. 10 million barrels per day), US production did indeed fall for years. But from around 2008 the trend reversed. Thanks to hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling into previously inaccessible shale oil deposits, US crude oil production rose to record levels. In 2025 it averaged 13.6 million barrels per day – well above the old peak and higher than in Russia or Saudi Arabia. Since 2018, the USA has been the world’s largest oil producer. Global oil production also continued to rise and today stands at around 100 million barrels per day.

The dramatic slumps and scarcity crises of the peak oil forecasts never came. Because oil reserves are not a fixed geological quantity. “Proven reserves” grow with technology, prices and exploration. Oil that was too expensive or technically impossible to produce in 2005 became profitable between 2012 and 2020. Hubbert’s model treated reserves as static and ignored innovation. The high oil prices of the 2000s financed precisely the technologies and investments that overcame scarcity. Markets respond to scarcity signals.

As CEO of Deutsche Rohstoff AG, I experienced the fracking boom and the new horizontal drilling technology at first hand in the supposedly depleted Wattenberg field in Colorado from 2011 to 2014.

Fracking in Germany: in use since the 1960s

Incidentally, hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is a technology that has been in use since 1947. Originally, it served mainly to reactivate old or poorly producing conventional wells. Several million fracking operations have been carried out in the USA since then. In Germany, too, there have been around 300 fracking operations in conventional reservoirs since the 1960s, without anyone taking offence.

After German politicians banned commercial unconventional fracking in 2017 and made conventional fracking significantly more difficult, domestic gas production collapsed. While Germany was still able to cover around 12 to 15% of its gas demand from its own sources in 2010, today it is only about 4 to 6%.

Metals: what the falling cut-off grade for gold shows

The cut-off grade, the limit at which mining is worthwhile, has fallen sharply for gold over the last 100 years: from 10 to 20 grams of gold per tonne of rock to often less than 1 g/t today, and in large open-pit mines sometimes 0.3 to 0.8 g/t. The reasons are the introduction and improvement of cyanide leaching, more efficient crushing and grinding, heap leaching and bulk mining (massive open pits with huge excavators and mills).

Higher gold prices and falling costs per tonne at large volumes make lower grades profitable. That is why global gold production has risen or remained stable despite falling average grades: more and more rock is being processed.

Falling cut-off grade: not linearly but exponentially more resources

What matters is what generally happens when the cut-off grade falls, for example from 10 g/t to 1 g/t: there is then not just linearly (ten times) more material or new deposits, but exponentially more!

A linear decrease in grade goes hand in hand with an exponential increase in cumulative tonnage (known in economic geology as Lasky’s rule). In practice, the rule of thumb is: if you halve the cut-off grade, the ore tonnage typically multiplies by a factor of 4 to 8 (the contained metal by a factor of 2 to 4), depending on the type of deposit. A fall from 10 g/t to 1 g/t is a reduction by a factor of 10. This corresponds to several halvings and therefore leads to far more than a tenfold increase in available tonnage – often in the order of tens to hundreds of times more material, depending on the specific system.

Copper: rising production despite falling ore grades

Despite falling grades, global copper production has risen sharply, because ever larger volumes of low-grade ores became economic – precisely through the exponential tonnage effect plus technology and economies of scale. The statistical logic is the same as for gold: lower cut-offs make exponentially more material available, not just proportionally more.

This is also necessary, because the world economy grows by 3% a year on average, and so does copper demand. I am active in copper exploration myself, in Argentina.

→ More about Argentina Metals and copper exploration in Argentina

Commodity prices: what the long-term trend shows

If we really were running out of resources, they would have to become ever more expensive. In fact, this is not the case.

Over the last 100 years, all major industrial metals (copper, aluminium, iron and steel, zinc, lead, nickel, etc.) show strong cyclical fluctuations, but no lasting rise in real prices over the long term. Adjusted for inflation, many prices are at a similar or even lower level than 100 years ago.

Between 1980 and 2018, the world population grew by around 71%, while the time prices of 50 basic commodities (energy, food, metals, etc.) fell by around 72%. The time price is the working time needed to afford a good. For the same working time, you therefore got about 3.5 times as much (Simon Abundance Index by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley).

There is therefore no real reason for anti-humanist forecasts of renunciation and doom, other than the wish to gain political power.

Resources are nevertheless an exciting and quite lucrative subject. I am involved through Aumontis Holding.

→ More about Aumontis Holding