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And where does the uranium come from…? Nobody cares about the enviornmental and health issues in Niger etc.

reacweb 10y ago
The exploitation of uranium reduces the amount of radioactive materials in Niger (tongue in cheek).
ageofwant 10y ago
Recovered from tailing of existing precious metal mines. An its a differential measurement, not absolute, compare it against the damage being done by coal and oil mining.
- deleted 10y ago
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paulmd 10y ago
Where does the lithium or neodymium come from? Those have to be mined too. > The Chinese Society of Rare Earths estimated that the refinement of one ton of rare earth metals results in 75 cubic meters of acidic wastewater and one ton of radioactive residue. The 1998 leak of hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive wastewater into a nearby lake was a contributing factor to Molycorp’s shutdown in 2002. http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/09/19/rare-earth-metals-will-we-have-enough/ http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/09/19/rare-earth-metals-wi... And with those materials (and especially with coal) we're talking about entirely different scales of material. A couple dozen tonnes of uranium will run a reactor for a year. You need millions of tonnes of coal to produce an equivalent amount of power. As for where, the interesting thing about uranium is that it's pretty much everywhere. Nobody really prospects for it because it's not commercially valuable. Let's say you go prospecting, and you find a big deposit, then you spend a bunch of money starting up a mining operation. Who's going to buy mass quantities of your uranium? What do you do with it? Beyond nuclear activity and a few things that need super-dense weights for balance, nobody uses it for anything. Why would you even bother prospecting for it? Canada actually has larger feasibly-recoverable uranium reserves than Niger does. Russia has more than Canada. Australia has more than four times as much as Niger. The US has about half as much. And because it's not really something people go looking for, it's quite likely that there are other large deposits that nobody has found yet. http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-largest-uranium-reserves-in-the-world.html http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-largest-uranium-reser... This also has some interesting implications for the cost of nuclear fuel. Fuel costs are essentially rounding errors in the total cost of operating a nuclear power plant (14% including refining). This means that you can withstand massive flunctuations in fuel costs with very little impact on energy prices. There's actually a huge amount of uranium diluted in seawater. It currently costs twice as much to extract it as it does for terrestrial deposits, but that's a massive quantity if we needed it. About 4 billion tons total (vs 1.7 million tons of known deposits in Australia). And as you extract it, it'll leach from deep-sea rocks which contain about 100 trillion tons total. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/#73ed390a46e2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-se...

The exploitation of uranium reduces the amount of radioactive materials in Niger (tongue in cheek).

Recovered from tailing of existing precious metal mines. An its a differential measurement, not absolute, compare it against the damage being done by coal and oil mining.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

paulmd 10y ago

Where does the lithium or neodymium come from? Those have to be mined too. > The Chinese Society of Rare Earths estimated that the refinement of one ton of rare earth metals results in 75 cubic meters of acidic wastewater and one ton of radioactive residue. The 1998 leak of hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive wastewater into a nearby lake was a contributing factor to Molycorp’s shutdown in 2002. http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/09/19/rare-earth-metals-will-we-have-enough/ http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/09/19/rare-earth-metals-wi... And with those materials (and especially with coal) we're talking about entirely different scales of material. A couple dozen tonnes of uranium will run a reactor for a year. You need millions of tonnes of coal to produce an equivalent amount of power. As for where, the interesting thing about uranium is that it's pretty much everywhere. Nobody really prospects for it because it's not commercially valuable. Let's say you go prospecting, and you find a big deposit, then you spend a bunch of money starting up a mining operation. Who's going to buy mass quantities of your uranium? What do you do with it? Beyond nuclear activity and a few things that need super-dense weights for balance, nobody uses it for anything. Why would you even bother prospecting for it? Canada actually has larger feasibly-recoverable uranium reserves than Niger does. Russia has more than Canada. Australia has more than four times as much as Niger. The US has about half as much. And because it's not really something people go looking for, it's quite likely that there are other large deposits that nobody has found yet. http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-largest-uranium-reserves-in-the-world.html http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-largest-uranium-reser... This also has some interesting implications for the cost of nuclear fuel. Fuel costs are essentially rounding errors in the total cost of operating a nuclear power plant (14% including refining). This means that you can withstand massive flunctuations in fuel costs with very little impact on energy prices. There's actually a huge amount of uranium diluted in seawater. It currently costs twice as much to extract it as it does for terrestrial deposits, but that's a massive quantity if we needed it. About 4 billion tons total (vs 1.7 million tons of known deposits in Australia). And as you extract it, it'll leach from deep-sea rocks which contain about 100 trillion tons total. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/#73ed390a46e2 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-se...