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Greenland Repeals Radioactive Mining Ban
An anonymous reader writes
"According to the International Resource Journal, 'Greenland has voted to axe a long-enduring ban on mining for radioactive materials, reopening the market to uranium and rare earths mining. Yesterday's parliamentary vote passed the decision by a staggeringly close 15-14 votes. ... The ban has previously prevented the extraction of some major rare earth deposits, because they are connected to radioactive materials.' 95% of the world's rare-earth demand is currently supplied by China, but estimates indicate Greenland could produce enough to supply 25% of the demand. Greenland's Prime Minister said the decision was made because of financial reasons: 'We cannot live with unemployment and cost of living increases while our economy is at a standstill. It is therefore necessary that we eliminate zero tolerance towards uranium now.' Environmental groups, as you might expect, are not happy."
He means the kind that pollutes the environment the least. Your solar panels are dirty to create, ditto on battery technology. Coal is one of the worst polluters because they just throw everything into the atmosphere. There is no clean up costs yet everyone pays for it.
Nuclear is the most viable. Even with ever nuclear disaster that has ever occurred including testing and bombing, it has harmed less people than coal. You're literally burning millions of tons of crap into the atmosphere. Also coal is partially radioactive. Since it's so hard to correlate as a causation, it's hard to put a number on direct linkages to lung cancer, but i'm sure it doesn't help.
Wow, your going to go there, you picked about the worst cases you could. I could bother doing the same thing with coal and quickly show far worse pollution and death figures, but you can google that all by yourself. So let's take your worst case scenario and run with it (you have researched these things, right?). How many people were killed in these or all other nuclear related incidents? How much actual damage was done?
Now compare those numbers to your favorite form of green energy, how about windmills? Go on, google this and tell me how it compares. Why don't you compare pollution figures while your at it. Remember your windmills require the very rare earths that come from these types of mines.
Okay, now that you've bothered to do a bit of research scale your numbers of for world wide power and tell me what they would look like. You see, if strip mining is done in a place like Greenland they will bother with these pesky things called environment regulations. The Chinese don't do that and as a result they have cornered the market. You can't get rare earths from Unicorn farts and rainbows, you have to get them out of the ground. Better we do the mining, so that it can be done responsibly.
ON RARE EARTH ELEMENTS
A Rare Earth Element revival in the United States could help to bring industry and real manufacturing back to our shores. It goes right along with the promise of Thorium to satisfy all grid and process heat requirements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8
Here Stephen Boyd tells us what "rare earth elements" are, and why they are vital to modern technology: He is incredibly hyper and excited about them, as you should be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J16IpITWBQ8
While everyone is talking about China 'Western industry through its aggressive focus on manufacturing and 'low wages'... there is ANOTHER way China has become almost a 'sole source' of modern technology: it has negotiated exclusive manufacturing contracts based on its willingness to mine rare earths, yet not export them without a penalty ... this has caused production of electronics and magnet-oriented devices (think batteries, wind turbines) to be relocated to China. Meanwhile the United States, once the world's largest producer of these has mostly ceased -- in part because a slightly radioactive by-product, Thorium, presently has no market and is (unfairly IMO) lumped in with hazardous. More background and some ideas for using the Thorium here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MauEg9vqh9k
ON URANIUM
Love it or hate it, if you're in North America ~30% of your electricity comes from it. The worst uranium mining nightmares arose from a Cold War appetite for nuclear weapons and a government that abused its authority and brand of secrecy to sideline health and environmental consequences... not the smaller level of mining necessary to keep nuclear power reactors going.
Clearly some thinking needs to be changed.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Greenland is icy and Iceland is green.
(It's all the Vikings' fault -- those tricky bastards!)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I asked myself how much waste is generated to, say, run my house for 30 years. It turns out to be about a train car full of coal vs a bit more than a tablespoon of nuclear waste. The spent fuel production of the entire U.S. is about two tractor trailers full per year. (And that's without reprocessing.) The amount goes up if you include low-level waste like irradiated concrete and steel. But that's stuff you can bury for a couple hundred years and it'll be safe.
I did a similar calc for nuclear vs. wind. Yes a single wind turbine looks more attractive and is cheaper than a nuclear plant, and safer to maintain. But people fail to realize that to equal the power output of an AP1000 nuclear reactor (1154 MW * 0.9 capacity factor = 1036.8 MW average output), you'd need over 4700 MW worth of wind turbines (4700 MW * 0.22 capacity factor, which is the world average for 2011 = 1034). I was gonna re-do the calcs for all to see but while search for wind turbine tonnage I found a site where someone's already done it. The numbers led him to the same conclusion as me: For the same power output, nuclear is simply better than wind or solar - in terms of steel and concrete use, carbon emissions, cost, and safety.