>>14285261>>14285245Or, bypass uranium and use Thorium instead. While thorium has its own set of challenges, its vastly more abundant, doesn't rely on an enemy of state, and in terms of energy density, is just as good if not better while giving you a fail safe in that the fuel goes inert instead of leading to a runaway effect in case of coolant loss. Plus, you can make breeder reactors with it to burn off nuclear waste produced by uranium reactors.
Alex's argument is shit overall, but only makes sense if the goal is to enrich uranium in quantities to power reactors AND make nukes. You don't need fucking uranium to generate nuclear power. Finally, and this is the most important criteria, the production and efficiency of Uranium is just pure garbage. You have to mine hundreds of thousands of tons of it to produce hundreds of tons of actual useful Uranium. The cost to generation yield curve of that is literally fucking wack.
https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.htmlhttps://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/thorium.aspxDealing with the intermediate challenges of Thorium is a better option than dealing with the latent challenges of Uranium, in that in the event of a hostile take over, the enemy can use that site against you.
The one colossal fuckup of the Cold War is that the US shelved Thorium reactor designs in favor of Uranium designs because it produced plutonium byproducts which were useful for creation of nuclear weapons. That insanity reached a point where both US and Russia both had over 12k nukes each, and nobody said "why the fuck do we need enough nukes to irradiate every square inch of this planet?" and stop producing more. Plus, by shelving Thorium designs, the US in turn deprived itself of miniaturizing reactors, and is part of the reason why nuclear power has such a massive stigma. If it takes like 20 billion to build a reactor, 15-20 years to build the site, nobody wants to pay taxes for that shit. NOBODY.
