this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Personally, as it currently stands, no. But it could potentially be, given better waste treatment practices and far better regulation and consistently enforced safety requirements.
It's far greener than fossil fuels, when run carefully at least. But between the persistent issues with waste reclamation and harmful leakage, and the massive amount of damage that can be done when mistakes are made or safety is overlooked, I don't think it qualifies as "green".
So from a practical standpoint, I still think new resources are better spent developing infrastructure for solar, wind, geothermal, etc. But as we are phasing out other power sources, pretty much everything else should go before we start to decommission nuclear.
In addition to this, uranium mining and processing is done in places with low environmental regulation even if the countries that ultimately use it have their own deposits and processing facilities.
Has anywhere actually solved the issue of waste handling?
Uranium can and does get recycled from one facility to the next, however there comes a point when it can't be reused anymore to gain any meaningful amount of energy and it still has radioactivity and ultimately buried somewhere. Though arguably still better than fossil fuels, that's an obvious and major drawback to nuclear.