[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.