Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

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If they're thinking about increasing enrichment capacity that likely means they have locked-in future mining output in Niger by some means or other. Here's some background on that:

https://resourceworld.com/france-aims-to-retain-leadership-i...

Incidentally, France's record in Niger is about as blatant a case of colonial exploitation as anyone can imagine. Uranium resources have been extracted for many years with zero if any benefit to the local population, which remains among the poorest on the planet, and arguably the toxic waste makes the net equation pretty negative:

https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/health-in-africa/extract...

Another fun fact: All the electricty used to power the uranium mines comes from burning coal (about 260,000 tons per year, and sources seem to indicate about 80% of that goes to power uranium mining activities). Uranium mining is among the most toxic-waste-generating forms of mining, releasing radioactive dust and radon gas. So, anyone claiming France's nuclear power is entirely clean carbon-friendly energy might want to tack those coal emissions (and the power needed for enrichment) onto their estimate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_Niger

Classical numbers for gCO2/kWh do take into account uranium extraction, and yet despite relying heavily on coal as you point out, nuclear (6-12 gCO2/kWh [1]) still remains one of the most competitive power sources [0].

I agree with the rest though.

[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5..., page 539 [1] https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/energy/car...

It is not exactly increasing enrichment capacity, it seems it's more complicated than than. From https://twitter.com/TristanKamin/status/1579828412474351616, "UTS" is basically a tradeoff between enriching at the same level more uranium VS enriching to a higher level the same amount of uranium.

About your "fun fact": I don't claim that everything is perfect, but except from going back to the stone age, nuclear is by any measure the least worst option.

The exploitation, radon, and toxic sludge in the drinking water is one of many sufficient reasons to not go with nuclear (providing copper, niobium and silver mining for PV and wind is less bad which I understand it to be about an order of magnitude better with current tech), but it's important to keep perspective when talking about GHG and criticise based on things that are true.

Using your numbers and 3000t of uranium per year at 3.5% burnup you get about 2g of CO2 per exported kWh of Uranium. This is well into 'completely fine' territory and depending on enrichment is cosistent with nuclear lobby claims about being lower emissions than wind.

Lower yield uranium mines are worse, and this is a concern if nuclear energy is increased.

Plus they're probably doing it out of necessity rather than a commitment, Macron's governments have been rather eager to hand out customers to Total by negotiating rebates with the company, a major oil producer at the detriment of other producers rather as creating a tax of giga profits (profits that are purely out of market fluctuations) as has been done in other countries. They've chosen not to come back on closing some nuclear plants while putting a smoke screen about small scale reactors. Nuclear industry needs stability to develop, those are big long term investments. The last French governments have not provided that stability at all, it's a real shame.

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