>>11064013>I love your innocence but being an environmental extremists who opposes mining and also fully supports nuclear that requires mining is just exquisitely contradictory.Uranium mining (and again Uranium is not the only option) historically requires far greater training for miners when you use human force which generally precludes it from being used for "slave labor" because the time and money to train them makes them too valuable to be disposable.
But really the major difference is that the cost of nuclear is not actually related to the fuel itself, but the superstructure around it and the many, many safeguards that are required to be built by law. Access is limited by governments, not economics. Uranium mining has also benefited from the same automation currently being used in coal to remove the involvement of humans anyway.
>b-b-but what about my solar panel slave labor minesIts because Uranium is so energy dense (millions of times more than coal) that you dramatically reduce the footprint of land you need to harvest energy and reduce the man hours many times over.
Silicon is nearly worthless as a material and is the primary component of each panel that is also billions of times less energy dense than Uranium. The market has been pushed by heavy government subsidies and almost all of these solar panel companies have basically subsidized the bad stuff to other poorer countries. They don't pollute any less but at least the governments in those countries can claim its "so clean"
But solar wouldn't have to push itself that hard if it wasn't trying (in vain) to replace the baseline load. It's compromising nearly all of its benefits (wind too but solar memers seem to be the only ones here) to compete with natural gas when it will always lose.
Sustainable, green, whatever the fuck you want to call it is renewables WITH nuclear. Anything else is turning on oil, coal, and especially natural gas plants that will kill millions of people every year
