We ALSO need nuclear to achieve the plan ending fossil fuels usage BUT nuclear do not means just build an NPP and mine uranium, it al means exaust disposal and also mean a spread and distributed energy grid as we need today, something we will probably be unable to maintain in a changing world.<p>Solar on contrary means "just" install some panels and batteries with relevant inverters and you have energy, at least a bit for a potentially inconstant time. p.v. + storage means quickness and small distributed scale, nuclear means slow and big. Here the issue:<p>- we need MUCH MORE nuclear, but it took some decades to build it<p>- we need to being able to adapt in a changing world where populations will move en masse and keep moving for a little while, with wars and so on<p>Long story short we might be late for nuclear, at least in the current state of available tech today (small reactors are a promise, but economically are a failure today) and we are too far from good enough energy storage for renewables.
Less mining on getting the uranium?<p>Or less mining on getting the uranium plus digging the nuclear waste into an intermediate storage, plus digging it from the indermediate storage that‘s been recently flooded, plus throwing it somewhere else, and so on, for the next 100k years?
Is the amount of mining to be done actually a serious concern of any real policymaker?<p>This seems like a nitty-gritty detail argument between, as the article describes them, “traditional” and “pragmatic” environmentalists. Does it matter who wins? Does either have the bribe money to challenge petrochemical companies?<p>As far as I’ve heard, the main obstacle to overcome for nuclear power is that the permitting process is too slow, because the public is irrationally frightened of the stuff. On one hand this is not a fair problem for nuclear power. On the other, unfortunately, the uninformed general public is making all the decisions, not people who care about % differences in quantities of rocks mined.
This looks like a straw man to me. I’ve never heard opponents of nuclear power claiming that mining uranium ore would lead to less mining than renewable energy sources.<p>The arguments usually brought up are the consequences of accidents, the lack of long term solutions to nuclear waste, it’s too slow to build (we need to reduce our carbon footprint now, not in 15 years), and that it is too expensive to compete with sun and wind.