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Comment by Kukumber | Hacker News Reader

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Uranium doesn’t sound like a real problem. Demand will open up supplies. It’s like looking at the largest software companies in the 80s. That leader board changed regularly because the field was exploding. As it got big enough, those largest tech companies aren’t going to see as much shuffling due to inertia.

Same here. There’s not enough uranium demand to look at current production and extrapolate on anything. Uranium is abundantly available and more demand = higher prices = more sites becoming available. There’s also more esoteric things like extracting uranium from ocean water but even that’s not necessary. So no, the west is not screwed on uranium supplies.

I do agree about the brain drain though. That’s criminal levels of negligence by politicians.

What are you on about, the west has abundant supply of Uranium from Australia.

IMO it's more just that politicians are old, climate change is a young persons concern and that's all there is too it.

the uranium needs to be enriched to be used as fuel

"In the United States, there is only one uranium conversion facility — it’s in Metropolis, Illinois — and it has been on standby since November 2017. Its reopening is “pending market improvement and customer support,” according to a power point presentation from the partnership between General Atomics and Honeywell that operates the plant, ConverDyn. It won’t be able to return to operability until 2023, when it could convert 7,000 tons of uranium per year. To ramp up to 15,000 tons per year, it will take the one plant longer than 2023.

Therefore, Dabbar and Bowen said it would be prudent for the United States to wean off Russian refinement capacity “a period of years not months.”"

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/23/russia-dominates-global-nucl...

they should have prepared 20 years ago, western countries are busy changing politics every 4-5 years, and their market is busy trying to make profit out of nothing instead of investing in core infrastructures and civilizational projects like energy independence

Have some 'Freedom Rods'.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/US-BWR-to-receiv...

The west does have uranium if it wants, all it needs to to is kick the "green" politico's off the stage who keep it from being mined. The same goes for rare earth minerals, especially now that a large deposit has been found in Sweden - which has caused the usual reaction from "greens" who immediately started howling about destruction of nature and native lands. The same "greens" who insist on electrification of all infrastructure which requires just those rare earth minerals, the same "greens" who closed down the nuclear power plants which reduced the amount of reliably available electricity.

Given how those "greens" seem to make the west more dependent on China maybe they should be called "reds" instead.

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