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Comment by drnick1 | Hacker News Reader

This isn't right, in fact one of the main reasons for building nuclear power plants is independence from politically unstable places like Russia and the Mideast.

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From where does uranium come?

There are some better mines in different areas of course, but it is available across most of the planet. Processing it is way harder than finding a source of it, but that is also a solved problem, you just gotta put in the capital to build it.

Making an already uncompetitive energy source even more expensive.

But it also secures your energy needs independent from anybody else and still scales. Solar lasts a long time, but not nearly as many countries have the minerals for building more panels and batteries as they do uranium refinement.

What? Solar panels last virtually forever. The oft-quoted 25 years is for a 30% efficiency loss, they actually last way longer.

Any country that can figure out uranium processing can figure out solar panel production, and they are made entirely from common materials with advanced processing steps. Silicon is literally the most abundant element on the planet; other main ingredients include glass, aluminium (or any other support material) and copper (or any ither conductive material). The most obscure material you'd need is some kind of dopant, of which you have several alternative choices if you don't have access to the best ones for some reason. Solar cells are literally sheets of treated silicon sandwiched between conductors - they're not like microchips.

I'm not sure about batteries though.

As example Canada and Australia

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