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Comment by ink_13 | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of uranium available from Canada, Australia, and Namibia

FWIW Russia produces less than either Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

Even in Spain we have Uranium, but the politicians made it illegal to mine it, lol (I wanna cry)

Why? Isn’t it in the national interest of a government to preferentially use foreign sources of uranium to preserve domestic sources?

It should be in the national interest. But every nation is determined to let Russia have the last resources in 30 years by boycotting Russian oil and gas.

As we hear downthread though, we'll have warp drives by then.

there is a strong environmental reason for this without even considering that there are plenty of alternatives to nuclear energy that do not require destroying the environment, because everything has consequences. destroying entire ecosystems puts many species at risk, mining requires huge amounts of water, money, and often involves legal slavery. plus, the extraction and processing process releases significant amounts of CO2 due to heavy machinery and refining. So thankfully, your country took a good decision

Mining isn't a great argument against nuclear. Uranium fuel has an incredibly high energy density so a relatively small amount of high grade ore can be converted into a large amount of electricity so even when compared to the one time input from mining required to produce all of the components that go into making a PV installation it can still perform favourably. Uranium mining is also transitioning away from open pit mines to using in-situ recovery where a liquid solution is injected into a uranium ore formation to dissolve the uranium before recovering the solution, about 55% of current uranium production uses this method already.

Mining uranium in Spain would destroy environment and involve legal slavery?

Slavery is obviously not an issue in a country like Spain, but any kind of mining operation here seems to be heavily opposed by the people that live around the potential sites, for environmental reasons.

The only alternatives to nuclear are coal and LNG

Or starting with solar more 20 years ago.

Again bullshit. Nuclear requires least mining vs any alternative https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-...

And in situ mining is one of the best environmentally

canada has raw uranium. russia runs the centrifuges, im pretty sure on canadian uranium, too

has fossil fuels been profitable? or just had most of the costs externalized? same with solar and wind - the negatives have been written off as free, whereas the environmentalists from russia have pushed to make sure that nuclear has every possible cost counted against it

Canadian reactors don't use enriched uranium. Also many countries have centrifuges - Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, and of course all the nuclear armed states. Further, enrichment plants can be built anywhere.

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