Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal—and why it won’t go back

jeffw@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 228 points –
Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal—and why it won’t go back
arstechnica.com
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This safety comes at a cost, literally. It's fucking insanely expensive to keep it safe. Yet it can and has failed. Also, fissile material needs to come from somewhere. Guess where that is? Also, how much of it is still available? Nah, fuck nuclear power.

Yup. A significant amount of the fissile material in Europe used to come out of Russia. France, who is commonly held up as the arch-defender of nuclear power, is now fighting basically colonial wars in Africa for this stuff. There's a finite amount of it, it's costly to extract, costly to refine, costly to transport. Even before you've generated a single kilowatt of power, you've already done a lot of damage to the environment just for the fuel.

Gee whiz, I wonder what's worse for the environment open pit strip mining entire mountains for coal or a few smaller mines targeting uranium deposits. As for thorium, we don't even need to mine it. It's fucking everywhere.