[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/