• Flying SquidM
    link
    English
    -52 months ago

    I’m not sure “it’s no more a local environmental catastrophe and healthcare nightmare than other forms of mining” is exactly a good argument to do it. And as I showed in another link, we have 90 more years of uranium to power the reactors we currently have, so we better hope we come up with some new way to power reactors quickly considering how long it takes to build one plant with the current technology we can come up with.

    • AwesomeLowlander
      link
      fedilink
      English
      42 months ago

      You did not show any such thing in your other link, rather the exact opposite.

      By your logic about environmental impact, we should then stop ALL mining and processing activities because they caused pollution a century ago. That’s obviously not realistic, practical, nor even helpful. It should be based on the technology and environmental impact of today.

      • Flying SquidM
        link
        English
        -32 months ago

        Are you claiming uranium mining no longer causes environmental and health problems on a local level? That’s quite a claim.

        It’s also not true.

        https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3653646/

        https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201047/

        https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412020320626

        https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201052/

        I admit, I am only smart enough to understand the abstracts of the papers and I did not read every link in its entirety, but this does not sound like a solved issue by any means.

        I just went to the conclusion of this long paper, which essentially says “we just don’t know enough to assess how bad it could be, but it could be bad,” and I think the final sentence is especially prescient:

        Our engineered solutions may well become the contaminated sites of the future.

        https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1228_web.pdf

        Now, if your argument is that it is necessary to cause damage to the local environment and cause a lot of early, painful deaths, I would again say that is not a good argument.

        • AwesomeLowlander
          link
          fedilink
          English
          52 months ago

          I did not make any claim. As I said in my first comment, I have no idea what the environmental impact of uranium mining is. My point in the previous comment is merely that using an example from the 1950s is useless as we can find similar environmental disasters for any mineral we were mining in that era.

          • Flying SquidM
            link
            English
            -32 months ago

            Okay, well now you have a lot more evidence that mining uranium is a really bad idea. Do you agree?

            • AwesomeLowlander
              link
              fedilink
              English
              22 months ago

              Will get back to you once I’ve had a chance to read through them, but I have no reason to think you’re mistaken.