So open pit uranium mines are that much better than ripping the tops off of mountains for coal?
Personally however, still support solar. Especially solar house tiles, they look good, pay for themselves after a few years and can be placed on every house.
We have uranium, yes, but if happenstance is our only criteria we should also be building nuclear weapons and burning lots of coal. Sadly we're doing the latter with great alacrity.
We also don't have a good place to store the waste. I don't think there's (m)any places on the planet that could be good places to store waste of this nature. It's probably telling that people often refer to nuclear waste needing to be stored or managed, rather than recycled, rendered safe, disposed of, etc.
We've got tons of space to store the waste. The country is right in the middle of a tectonic plate, so little worry about earthquakes, and large swathes of the country are uninhabited by anyone, even mythical 'lost tribes'. Even if nowhere else, we could store waste in the giant area cordoned off for nuclear testing in the '50s.
In my opinion, it's hard to find somewhere better suited for storing nuclear waste than 'somewhere in Australia'. Stable, first-world government, a fair few places where we can put it where even leaks wouldn't be a problem, skilled populace, etc etc.
In any case, it looks like they're discussing it: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-08/should-south-australia...
This makes sense only if your starting position is that creating nuclear waste makes sense.
> Stable, first-world government, a fair few places where we can put it where even leaks wouldn't be a problem, skilled populace, etc etc.
How long does nuclear (fission) waste need to be managed?
How long do you believe that AU has had a stable, first-world government?
> This makes sense only if your starting position is that creating nuclear waste makes sense.
The waste is being created, regardless of whether or not you think it makes sense. You can pretend that there's some fantasy world where there's no nuclear waste, but in the meantime here in the real world, there is such stuff and it needs to be managed.
> How long does nuclear (fission) waste need to be managed?
> How long do you believe that AU has had a stable, first-world government?
Federation was (to a rounding error) a century ago. Some would argue that it's been stable since then -- I'd argue it hasn't, but the boom/bust left/right vacillation so common in western ersatz democracies evidently is what counts as stable these days.
It's kind of besides the point, though, since it's a comparative exercise.
How long does nuclear fission waste need to be managed, and how does that compare to 'around a hundred years'?
You also make a less than compelling case that we have no choice but to have waste from nuclear fission -- we have plenty of options that don't involve nuclear fission.
Consider, for example, the fact that Australia has no nuclear fission plants generating electricity.
But just because we have access to relatively cheap Uranium doesn't mean we should be digging it up and processing it.
One of the reasons I rail against the suggestion that AU has a 'stable long term government' (ie. that could be said to be sufficiently grown up to handle fissile waste) is that right now that same government is very publicly committed to fossil fuels, despite the leader of same being on record only a few years ago asserting - loud and wide - that green energy should be our priority, and we should be moving away from fossil fuels. Append usual concerns about the various people involved in getting us to, and then maintaining, this unfortunate situation.
Oh, give me a goddamn break. You've got how much desert that's sparsely inhabited?
https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/how-extract-uranium-se...
Also, there's that "Not laying waste to huge areas and making them uninhabitable" thing.
Nukes would be fine for a species that was capable of acting intelligently and responsibly over long periods.
Humans are not (yet) that species.