[grawprog]

One thing I never really see brought into the nuclear energy equation that's fairly environmentally bad is uranium mining.

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/longstaff1/

>Uranium mining facilities produce tailings that generally are disposed of in near surface impoundments close to the mine. These tailings pose serious environmental and health risks in the form of Randon emission, windblown dust dispersal and leaching of contaminants including heavy metals and arsenic into the water.

https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-waste-uranium-mining...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201052/

Nuclear energy still requires fuel. The impacts and costs from mining operations and refining should be taken into account when comparing to other energy sources. They are part of it. Nuclear energy can't exist without it.

[2trill2spill]

Uranium mining seems hell of a lot better than Copper/Nickel mining[1]. Not only is the scale of copper and nickel needed for wind and solar vastly greater than the amount of Uranium needed, but Copper/nickel mines have all the same issues with leaching heavy metals and arsenic, just on a larger scale. And wind turbines use a lot of copper[2], so I'm fine with looking into the costs of nuclear energy through uranium mining if we also calculate the costs of mining from Wind, Solar and grid storage.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_mine_drainage

[2]: https://copperalliance.org.uk/knowledge-base/education/educa...

[grawprog]

I guess the amount of copper used in nuclear waste disposal

https://www.copper.org/publications/newsletters/innovations/...

And nuclear plants in general would also need to be factored in.

As well as the nickel used in corrosion proof alloys needed in nuclear facilities.

https://nickelinstitute.org/about-nickel/nickel-alloys-in-oi...

[bigfudge]

Who is actually doing this work? I have had an idea for a kind of 'public meta-analysis' site, where we could give simple headline figures for important questions like this based on consensus estimates. A bit like the Cochrane or Mental Elf, but for everything and producing a dataset of actual numbers to be used in arguments like this. It's so frustrating in comment threads like this that nobody actually has reasonable numbers for the fundamental assumptions of the arguments on either side.

[spiralx]

This paper has an overview of the various things that go into a nuclear power plant along with figures:

https://www.stormsmith.nl/Resources/m36materials20190927F.pd...

It's from the Nuclear Consulting Group who I've never heard of, so I couldn't say how accurate it is.

https://www.nuclearconsult.com/

This also has an overview of some of the materials used:

https://matmatch.com/blog/materials-in-nuclear-reactors/

[masklinn]

> One thing I never really see brought into the nuclear energy equation that's fairly environmentally bad is uranium mining.

If you are going to make that argument, then you need to make the same about the materials and fuels involved in other electricity generation methods as well, and things get complicated rather quickly e.g. offshore turbines use a fair amount of neodymium and dysprosium, thin-film solar panels need tellurium, cadmium, and indium, … and many of these rare earths or elements are either often contaminated with radioactive elements (which end up in tailings) or are produced as part of (and ecologically indistinguishable from) other mining operations e.g. tellurium from copper and cadmium from zinc.

[rich_sasha]

Is there an argument to be made about volumes? Eg let’s say it is 5x worse than mining coal, but you need 100x less of it, is it net less bad?

I clearly made up the numbers, just curious.

[grawprog]

I'm not sure how directly comparable they are. How do you compare radioactive and chemical contamination to the kind of contamination from coal mines?

Pollution isn't always a thing you can measure on a scale from bad to less bad. There's long term systemic effects from the countless contaminants released by industries around the world we barely have any idea about.

I realize economic models, and fairly frighteningly, increasingly ecological models require easy to work with numbers that can be compared and contrasted to analyse cost vs benefit, but the real world does not work that way.

[Swenrekcah]

Using this comment to remind people that coal plants do produce radioactive exhaust: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

[mike_d]

In an exhaustive study of attributable deaths per TWH of power generated, nuclear is safer than wind and solar. Even when you factor in scary words like "radioactive contamination," people falling off roofs installing solar panels is still more dangerous.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

[QuarterReptile]

Worth mentioning that Chernobyl is included in this data. If someone has a worse long-tail risk in mind, it would be interesting to hear.

The risk from contamination is certainly below coal, which generates far greater quantities of RAM, with constituents being basically consistent with nuclear plant waste.

[mlyle]

Hard to estimate long tail risks.

Chernobyl definitely didn't turn out as bad as it could have, but on the other hand hopefully we're in a bit better of a safety stance now across the industry than Chernobyl was in?

[bigfudge]

The real long tail risks from nuclear are the long term ones, which aren't factored in because we don't know what nuclear storage sites will be like in 100 or 1000 years. That's what many rational people object to about nuclear power — it involves a massive discounting of future risk, and we know people are really bad at over-discounting future risk in general.

[anfilt]

The energy density of uranium is so high that the amount you have to mine compared all the other metals that are mined for even renewables when building a power plant is tiny. Heck you can find rocks in the mountains of Montana and Colorado with so much natural uranium they have that greenish black color from so much natural uranium.

[vcdimension]

You don't need much enriched uranium, but you need to process a lot of dirt to get it. Natural uranium concentrations are around 0.1-0.2% (copper is around 0.6%), and you need 10 tonnes of natural uranium to produce 1 tonne of enriched uranium.

Furthermore, unlike copper, steel and other metals, uranium can't currently be recycled.

See my previous post