it’s just not something you can extract easily in countries that care about their citizens so it’ll always come from a shitty place
First two countries for known reserves are Australia and Canada, together they hold around 40% of all the uranium reserves of the planet. Uranium could also be extracted from seawater, obviously at a much higher price.
It’s just that it’s easier to extract it where exploitation rights for land is cheap. But that’s unfortunately also true for many materials we need for renewables
Yeah but even though we’re using the cheapest Uranium possible atomic power is STILL much more expensive than renewables - I wonder how insane the prices would be if you only took Uranium from good sources.
Also those costs almost never include the cost of securing the waste for thousands of years since you can’t just leave the waste laying around out of fear of dirty bombs.
Sure it looks decent in a vacuum but with all the factors playing into it from Uranium being a limited resource that costs a lot to the waste-management it’s just much more expensive than just spending the money you’d need to buy one plant on renewables and energy-storages that are also ready to go a lot faster…
the price of atomic energy is like 10% coupled to the price of uranium. the equipment, the salaries, the security measures, all those things are so much more expensive compared to the fuel.
people rarely grasp what 4 magnitudes of energy density increase mean.
yeah but how much more is Uranium if it’s mined in Canada compared to the one from Niger or Russia?
sure it’s not the main cost-driver but it’s not irrelevant either.
Also: an installed solar-panel is very cheap in maintenance - and most of the running costs of are heavily influenced by inflation, too It just doesn’t make sense to push for building more atomic reactors - keeping the ones already there running IS making sense but building new ones that may start producing energy in 10 years AND are massively expensive is just not a reasonable investment
