"Where nuclear fails, and where improvement is desperately needed, is ability to deliver on budget and within schedule."
Something that see nobody discussing and that I gave almost no thought to myself is the embedded carbon cost of the mining and enrichment of Uranium itself.
Never mind the building of the plant, etc., but the actual carbon expended to achieve a workable fissionable fuel.
This process was brought to my attention in the long, detailed chapter on Uranium enrichment in _No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies_ by William Vollmann.[1]
It's really quite amazing how many steps are involved and how expensive those steps are in terms of embedded carbon cost. In the absence of fully non-fossil-fuel power sources to do that mining and enrichment it is difficult to see how that process makes any sense absent the massive economic and military subsidies we have in place for gasoline/diesel.
Something that see nobody discussing and that I gave almost no thought to myself is the embedded carbon cost of the mining and enrichment of Uranium itself.
Never mind the building of the plant, etc., but the actual carbon expended to achieve a workable fissionable fuel.
This process was brought to my attention in the long, detailed chapter on Uranium enrichment in _No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies_ by William Vollmann.[1]
It's really quite amazing how many steps are involved and how expensive those steps are in terms of embedded carbon cost. In the absence of fully non-fossil-fuel power sources to do that mining and enrichment it is difficult to see how that process makes any sense absent the massive economic and military subsidies we have in place for gasoline/diesel.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_T._Vollmann