Also, the raw material is expected to be quite rare relatively soon.
To be fair, this wouldn’t be nearly as true if we had persisted with our original plan which was to reprocess the spent fuel, more than 90% of which is still usable material. Once we found a couple huge deposits of Uranium, it became much cheaper to simply mine more of it and dispose of the spent fuel, so the recycling plans were scrapped. Sure, we can technically still pull the spent fuel back out again and recycle it, but we spent many years building reactors without building an equal capacity of reprocessing facilities (which are almost as hard to build safely as reactors), so that ship has more or less sailed.
Definitely. Also, one could get the impression that profit is not always helpful for sustainable use of resources. Better not open a thread on forestry, agriculture or … whatever really …
To be fair, this wouldn’t be nearly as true if we had persisted with our original plan which was to reprocess the spent fuel, more than 90% of which is still usable material. Once we found a couple huge deposits of Uranium, it became much cheaper to simply mine more of it and dispose of the spent fuel, so the recycling plans were scrapped. Sure, we can technically still pull the spent fuel back out again and recycle it, but we spent many years building reactors without building an equal capacity of reprocessing facilities (which are almost as hard to build safely as reactors), so that ship has more or less sailed.
Definitely. Also, one could get the impression that profit is not always helpful for sustainable use of resources. Better not open a thread on forestry, agriculture or … whatever really …