Comment by bhickey

9 hours ago

That's only because that chart isn't bookkeeping nuclear as renewable, which is misleading at best.

Why would you classify nuclear as renewable? You can say it's clean energy but it's not renewable.

  • We've probably increased the amount of fissile material on earth. It's pretty renewable at that rate.

    • If you're talking about uranium enrichment, that's like saying we increased the amount of gasoline on earth (by refining crude oil). Natural uranium is ~99% non-fissile, and ~1% fissile, and we're only removing part of the non-fissile isotope to obtain 5% concentration of the fissile isotope. Uranium still needs to be mined, spent fuel can be partially recycled, but you need some new natural uranium input in the end. That said, non-renewability of uranium is a non-issue IMO, compared to the huge amounts of other non-renewable resources we're extracting.

  • The definition of renewable is a bit silly, wind and solar come from the sun's nuclear fusion.