Comment by ndr42
1 day ago
But many nuclear power plants in europe are running on russian uranium - so I don't get the argument that you are "hostage" to foreign oil just to become "hostage" of foreign uranium.
Something like wind and solar combined with batteries would be a more sovereign form of energy generation that is (as a bonus) more decentral and less prone to attacks.
Plenty of uranium available from Canada, Australia, and Namibia
FWIW Russia produces less than either Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan
Even in Spain we have Uranium, but the politicians made it illegal to mine it, lol (I wanna cry)
Why? Isn’t it in the national interest of a government to preferentially use foreign sources of uranium to preserve domestic sources?
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there is a strong environmental reason for this without even considering that there are plenty of alternatives to nuclear energy that do not require destroying the environment, because everything has consequences. destroying entire ecosystems puts many species at risk, mining requires huge amounts of water, money, and often involves legal slavery. plus, the extraction and processing process releases significant amounts of CO2 due to heavy machinery and refining. So thankfully, your country took a good decision
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canada has raw uranium. russia runs the centrifuges, im pretty sure on canadian uranium, too
has fossil fuels been profitable? or just had most of the costs externalized? same with solar and wind - the negatives have been written off as free, whereas the environmentalists from russia have pushed to make sure that nuclear has every possible cost counted against it
Canadian reactors don't use enriched uranium. Also many countries have centrifuges - Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, and of course all the nuclear armed states. Further, enrichment plants can be built anywhere.
Nuclear fuel is available from lots of countries, including Canada and Australia, plus deposits in Europe that aren't being minted because uranium is very cheap.
Plus you can stockpile it super easy.
Uranium is not rare. You can even extract it from sea water.
Russia's is just cheaper.
But it accounts for 5% of the cost of a produced MWh, so if it had to be generated otherwise, we'd know how to do it.
Refueling nuclear power plants only happens fairly rarely. You hold your customer hostage a lot less if you say “ha! Next time in 8 years time when you need to refuel, we won’t sell the goods to you!” as compared to literally turning off the gas tap.
Wrong uranium you can easily stock for 10years inadvance
Maybe don't keep it all in one spot, though.
You can easily store 10 years worth of uranium, unlike gas and oil.
Nuclear power plants refuel on yearly cycles.
That's plenty of time to source alternative uranium supplies presuming you haven't stockpiled.
Plus: Australia has an absolute ton of the stuff.
Many is how? Why are people spreading such bullshit? Only a subset of plants, mainly VVER are dependent on Russia, albeit that'll change too.
Russia is ore importer itself and Orano+Urenco have enough capacity to satisfy most of Europe, both expanding.
Decentralized is not guaranteed. You mostly deploy ren in productive areas, see northern offshore, or that most of Ukraine's ren were in the South. Guess what happened to that. France has a decentralized grid too- many plants scattered around the country, each with multiple units