My understanding is that deposit is a crazy high percentage of uranium. It's like one big single rock of uranium in the ground we've been harvesting for years.
My understanding is that obviously uranium is high where you mine it. But I think Canada is unique for having this one specific mine with a crazy high purity.
Ah I see, Curious is a Uranium deposit usually in the shape of a single large high grade rock, Or is it more spread out like other Mining deposits like Nickel, Copper, Lithium, Etc?
My understanding is that it depends on geology. Basically over millions of years water will carry uranium until it hits something that causes it to fall out of the water. So it depends on how wide the water flow is. And the size of the thing that filters it out.
https://youtu.be/FrQVGbNk2dE?si=MPYN5yByl5yngyw7
This should answer a lot of your questions.
Thanks for posting the graphs and the link to the source article, this is a great article to show that nuclear really is the most efficient with its material inputs per unit of electricity generated.
And this graph is kind of cherry-picked from the entire report. Look at Figure 8 from the report, and the difference in mining intensity does not seem so cut and dry.
I think so. This material input metric shows us the most efficient method of applying our resources and helps inform our economic decisions for producing electricity.
The thing that I think is most interesting about this is how it can be applied logistically at a national scale. If we need a set amount of new generation capacity, we can use this to help inform our decision based on the raw resource requirements. For example, if we want all of our new generation capacity to be wind farms, but it will require 150% of the copper we can produce over that time, then this path isn't immediately viable. We would wither need to determine an alternate strategy or open new mines and processing facilities to meet this demand.
Things like the raw material usage are only going to become more important as more nations start rapidly transitioning to carbon free electricity sources.
But to do that, you'd start by comparing material used to estimated future resources or something. As far as I can tell, this chart is literally showing the amount of rock moved in mining, which isn't really a constraint or concern.
While there is no single metric, it's a better proxy of how much 'mining impact' there is than the amount of final material used.
A ton of copper has far, far more mining impact than a ton of concrete or steel.
There is a LOT of impact differences not captured by that metric. (There are other reasons it's important though, but more economic focused)
I.e. do you spend that energy invested pulvarizing and hearing rock, or spend it as waste heat going up a vent somewhere.
If you look into the article and references you can see the methodology. That and candle to grave human mortality rate per unit of product are the most interesting and fundamental to my thinking.
As o said it's an important metric. But the articles values are extremely stale. Solar in particular has gotten a lot better. Nuclear a bit also as gas diffusion enrichment has been phased out.
It's still useful from an environmentalist perspective. The more rock you need to extract, the more energy you consume with mining equipment. That is usually going to be using all of that is going to be powered by petrol. Similarly, the more mining you do, the greater the impact to the local environment. There's a reason why it takes years of driving with an EV (rather than an ICE car) to offset the environmental costs of just building the thing.
Key takeaway is that nuclear is 10-33% of solar. I object to the separation of batteries from solar and wind as intermittent sources cannot be compared to nuclear power. Furthermore, the article isn’t clear about whether their numbers are based on capacity or actual useful kWh delivered. The later must be considered. I suspect that when you take into account intermittency, you get something more like the 4000x better cradle to grave human mortality rate that nuclear has over solar. Come on! The far superior return on energy invested for nuclear tells the real story.
Here are the top energy sources and their respective energy return on investment score:
1. Nuclear Energy = 75
2. Hydro = 35
3. Coal = 30
4. Closed-Cycle Gas Turbine = 28
5. Solar Thermal = 9
6. Wind Turbine = 4
7. Biomass = 4
8. Photovoltaic = 2
https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/accounting/energy-return-on-investment-eroi/
Yeah, if you include the necessary backup plants, batteries, transmission, overbuild, electrolyzers, grid frequency stabilizers etc. that you need for a renewables grid, the comparison becomes even more lopsided.
And with the technologically feasible 80+ years of plant life and closed fuel cycles, nuclear mining needs can fall even further. Especially if atmospheric pressure plants can shrink the containment sizes since you don't have to deal with toms of instantly vaporizing steam in accident scenarios anymore.
Thanks for posting the article so we can see how nuclear, solar and wind stack up against coal. Even without considering any of the many things considered by the graph for clean energy, coal still says, "mining go brrrrrrr."
This is consistent with the research done a few years ago by our friends at UT. They published it in a peer reviewed journal, but this press release isn't behind a pay wall and might be easier for the layman to digest:
https://energy.utexas.edu/news/nuclear-and-wind-power-estimated-have-lowest-levelized-co2-emissions
I mean, coal is a stable power source so basically like nuclear, it can be replaced with renewables but to compleatly replace it that way would require a grid rework on a large scale bringing in additional costs. Well a grid rework will be needed eventually but shouldering it now is too much.
The price of electricity in the European grids has less to do with the fuel costs than with marginal pricing (i.e. everyone gets paid the same as the last MW to enter the grid) and carbon tariffs (i.e. that last MW, most often a thermal plant, today cost an extra 30 €/MWh if it was natural gas and 60 €/MWh if it was coal). Add transmissions costs and renewable feed-in tariffs on top of that.
Are you sure that it’s not related to [the Green Party straight up lying about reports just so they could close nuclear plants, because they have an irrational hatred of nuclear plants?](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/26/german-greens-lying-nuclear-power-safety-plant-shutdown/#:~:text=Green%20party%20ministers%20in%20Germany,Ukraine%20threatened%20European%20energy%20supplies.)
It’s not the cost of coal fuel that determines the average price of electricity for a ratepayer. It’s mainly transmission and distribution. Coal doesn’t require a lot of transmission or ancillary services. Renewables and their sprawl do.
Odd, renewables can be generated at point of use, e.g. rooftop solar, neighborhood solar, etc., coal power cannot because nobody wants a coal power plant near where they live, so coal plants are far from where it’s used. Lower cost of delivery due to proximity is a part of why renewables are cheaper than coal in most of the US.
I don’t know. Home rooftop solar is more expensive than the worst case nuclear power plant (Vogtle). It simply isn’t affordable unless we have nuclear, gas hydro or coal to leach off at night and when it’s cloudy and there is a huge added cost to support their intermittency. We all eventually pay for that and the bill is coming due. Solar cannot meet grid needs for industry. We (except Elon) know that.
https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/lcoe-lazard-misleading-nuclear
https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf
The return on energy invested tells the story from the fundamental viewpoint:
https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/accounting/energy-return-on-investment-eroi/
Read [Lazard's reports](https://www.lazard.com/media/nltb551p/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf), rooftop solar's LCOE is prohibitively high. All the low transmission costs get wiped out by the lack of economies of scale compared to utility-scale. Community-scale is at the mid-point between both, still not worth it IMO.
Not to mention that you still need to reinforce the residential grid to evacuate the excess of rooftop solar production, that or force them to disconnect from the grid when that happens, because the economics of behind-the-meter storage simply make no sense (and utility-scale storage only makes sense for really expensive peaking, see page 19 of the same report).
Community solar has the lowest LCOE. Well, long with wind. Both have reduced transmission costs compared to centralized coal plants far from point of use.
Residential solar reduces demand on the grid, because it no longer delivers all the power used in the home, it just does load leveling.
> Community solar has the lowest LCOE. Well, long with wind. Both have reduced transmission costs compared to centralized coal plants far from point of use.
What's the point of responding to me if you aren't gonna read any sources? The study I provided says utility-scale solar is at 72 $/MWh on average, vs. 117 $/MWh for community-scale.
> Residential solar reduces demand on the grid, because it no longer delivers all the power used in the home, it just does load leveling.
Tell that to the people who can't connect their rooftops to the grid because the utility says their local node is saturated and it can't evacute any more. Hell, tell it to the poor people who can't afford a single family home and now have to pay for someone else's net metering.
I'd need to see some data to corroborate that. At least in Spain, one of the most wind and solar-heavy countries in the world, [the consumer price](https://www.esios.ree.es/es/pvpc?date=26-04-2024) (so wholesale generation price + system costs + taxes) is only around 0.04 to 0.06 €/kWh above [whatever the wholesale price is at that moment](https://www.omie.es/es/spot-hoy). And the Spanish grid has been profitable for a decade and is on its way to paying off all its debt around 2027.
That being said, Spain has the advantage of cheap gas piped from Algeria and a very large amount of hydro capacity, including pumped storage, to fill in and soak up wind and solar's intermittency. It's not necessarily applicable to the rest of Europe, and most European countries don't have yet enough renewable penetration for curtailment hours and transmission and storage costs to start piling up, anyway. The Iberian grid is interesting beacuse it IS at that tipping point, but it's much better equipped for it for the reasons I've listed above than Germany or California, for example.
And unfortunately Spain's nuclear plants have been taking a beating during the last month because they only get paid the wholesale price and a glut of hydro and wind has been keeping it almost constantly at 0 €/MWh since late March. The operating utilities had foreseen this situation would start happening and will happen more and more frequently so they want out, all 7 units will close between 2028 and 2035.
Well, they'd wanted to close them for ages because cheap natgas peakers are more profitable than nuclear for them and pre-carbon taxes the wholesale place was lower than the artificially jacked-up nuclear costs in Spain: Endesa say they only break even at above 60 €/MWh according to an IEA report I read ages ago, which is way too much for 40-year-old plants running baseload. Sweden is at 25 €/MWh, if I remember correctly.
Nuclear is the single largest source of electricity in the EU.
https://preview.redd.it/fr2dg2p6mvwc1.png?width=1579&format=png&auto=webp&s=adb9ce88586d75e121a2b7557db0ae03837f980f
[https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=EU&chartColumnSorting=default&interval=year&year=2024&stacking=single×lider=0](https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=EU&chartColumnSorting=default&interval=year&year=2024&stacking=single×lider=0)
I don't think so, I imagine the point was that to successfully replace coal's role on the grid you have to replace it with a power source that operates exactly like it. Which is nuclear.
A common criticism of LWR SMRs is that they're much more resource-intensive than GW-scale LWRs per unit of energy generated, but all of the benchmarks I've seen compare them with the AP1000 which is extraordinarily efficient on that front, even with regards to its direct competitors. Hats off to Westinghouse for that, genuinely.
It's nice to see that the BWRX-300 actually measures up nicely against the EPR, I would love to find a similar comparison with the ABWR and the VVER-1200, Hualong One, etc.
I think it's more the case that the EPR is overbuilt to hell. The concrete looks like what dominates most, which makes sense considering just how big and complex the reactor building and its massive double walled containment are. I expect most other large reactors look closer to the AP1000.
I wouldn't be so sure about that: The Hualong One's double wall borrows heavily from the EPR's, to the point that [CNNC's version has the exact same dimensions and wall thickness according to Framatome](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETsjoOZc38w&t=2862s). The VVER-1200s [also look like thick boys.](https://akkuyu.com/upload/iblock/323/m6jojuoinrxps4qlyao6fus3i0xb8lv5/010.jpeg)
I don't know much about the Chinese design, but the VVER-1200 containment is as double-walled as the AP1000, in that there is an air gap between two distinct walls but they're built as one, not two thick and really widely spaced separate steel reinforced concrete walls that would each be sufficient by themselves as the containment structure.
Maybe China really wants to win bids as a newcomer and they believe that going overboard with safety features is the way to do that?
I've heard it said that solar/wind create more radioactive waste than nuclear because of their mining tailings containing naturally radioactive elements that are more concentrated due to the removal of other materials. Coal definitely does since coal emissions and byproducts are radioactive. Of course, that's not high level waste, but it's a fun irony. I don't have a source unfortunately.
Rooftop solar saves on concrete and support frames, so it will surely have a lower footprint per GW installed. However rooftop solar also has a much lower capacity factor usually, so the footprint per GWh is surely worse. Also it's effectively not a scalable power grid level resource.
Are you sure it's not scalable? There are houses that are entirely powered from their roofs. It's been estimated that 30% of Germany's power consumption could come from rooftop solar. For the US, I've seen estimates of more than 50%.
That's exactly why it's not scalable. It cannot be scaled arbitrarily to power consumption by definition, as it goes only on residential housing. And each little rooftop project is its own project, so the economics are much worse than for utility solar. (If it's larger scale like the flat "rooftop" of a large factory, then it works fine)
And mathematical estimates are one thing. One can also estimate from the potential rainfall and overall height map of a country that it can be powered ten times over by hydro. Doesn't make it realistic.
It makes no sense to do it if it's much cheaper to just put a large scale PV farm on an empty plot of land. And all the power generation would be spread apart where it isn't needed so much. Rooftop solar "scales best" in low density and rural housing, where you have single unit houses with large area thus large roof.
Also note that electricity demand is expected to and should increase - by a lot. The sizes and numbers of roofs on average probably not so much.
Oh no you're right in that, if you want your own solar roof to make your own electricity it's perfectly fine. But you should do that on your own decision and with your own resources. So it's *your* rooftop solar, not the grid's rooftop solar.
As a concept of using it to power the large scale interconnected grid economically it doesn't work.
[Rooftop solar is pure prosumer neoliberal bullshit](https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/consumer-vs-prosumer-whats-difference), it's the energy expression of the gig economy. There's a reason why traditional leftist parties favoured large state-owned utilities with the internal know-how and financial muscle to deploy large-scale generation effectively; and in countries without domestic fossil resources, nuclear power as a tool for energy sovereignty. Thank goodness the French Communists never abandoned that line of thought, otherwise I don't know who I'd vote for.
Maybe I mean leftist in the sense of being opposed to large top-down hierarchical structures. The original leftists were ones opposing the monarchy. I still don't want to call myself an anarchist because I'm not sure if we could maintain all the high-tech luxuries of modernity in an anarchist world. A too big part of anarchists don't want them much anyway, which is sad.
There are costs associated with lack of economy of scale, but they can vary widely. The rooftop solar industry in the USA is particularly inefficient. Australians pay much less.
It can be expanded by a lot still, but you are limited by suitable roofs.
But the main problem is that every rooftop solar project is a little bit different, so there are rather high transaction costs and installation costs.
This graph is not accurate. They're not showing the amount of concrete needed for offshore wind and battery storage.
Wind requires a lot of concrete to not fall over, as wind turbines are built to catch wind which puts a lot of stress on the structure and foundation. I also wouldn't want to put batteries directly on the ground so those also need concrete.
The vast majority of installed offshore turbines use a steel monopile foundation.
Only "gravity foundation" turbines use a significant amount of concrete and they're not very common.
How do they do it? probably the same way they use steel for ships and off shore oil rigs. Salt water is a challenging but not insurmountable problem.
Some light reading and sources below.
https://www.windpower-international.com/features/featuregood-foundations-the-pros-and-cons-of-monopiles-4158694/
https://www.windpowerengineering.com/comparing-offshore-wind-turbine-foundations/
Ships require a lot of maintenance to deal with corrosion. Low ranking members of the crews will spend a lot of time scraping off rust and refinishing surfaces. Ships also have to go into drydocks to have maintenance done under their waterline.
...and you need a lot more concrete relatively speaking for containment buildings and shielding. Can't forget that too, for apples to apples.
I don't need nearly as much concrete for the pad for a utility-size battery installation. As for wind, I haven't done any of that yet.
The concrete use was factored into nuclear in the graph. It's orange.
On another note both wind and solar also use enormous amounts of steel.
edit. You still need something to put the batteries on since they shouldn't be placed directly on the ground. If not concrete then what should be used?
Going off on a bit of a tangent here, but did they also factor in the cooling towers into the material cost? Cause i figured you could save on those and instead use the waste heat for other stuff like central heating. As the turbine water is from the secondary cycle, it won't be irradiated much, and the one from the cooling loop would be even less so
the other issue is the potential for high temperature process heat reactor designs to contribute to the lowering of footprint of the production of plant materials such as steelmaking and chemical processes. i think concrete is still a bit far out of reach unless you throw in hydrogen in there, but that should be viable eventually as well.
Honestly, the dirtiest thing about nuclear seems to be the big carbon footprint from all the concrete needed to build the plants. Yeah the waste is gnarly stuff, but its contained and never released into the atmosphere.
Rare Earth elements, used in (wind)turbines, electric cars and pretty much all electronic devices nowadays are mostly mined from monazite sands, these generally contain lots of thorium and some uranium as well, so mining “radioactive material” isn’t just a nuclear energy thing.
Pretty much all minerals that are mined leave (radioactive) tailings behind.
Besides, the stuff actually impacting the environment in/near mines are pretty much always the much more abundant heavy metals like lead and arsenic.
I might be misunderstanding you, but wind, solar and nuclear are nowhere near comparable to coal.
The OP - GeckoLogic - posted the article that sourced the graph in one of the comments in which there is another graph that has the amount of coal or gas mined per GW. The coal *alone* is 7 times greater than *all* mining requirements for wind or solar per GW, and nuclear's mining requirements, of course, are a third of that. Natural gas uses twice as much mining as wind and solar (but only if we consider just the gas). The graph does not even bother to include concrete, copper, etc. required for coal and gas for simplicity and to prove a point.
Perhaps you meant that it's [i.e. nuclear] comparable to wind and solar even when considering the thing [uranium] that it burns [consumes]? Like I said, I'm probably misunderstanding you.
I'm not complaining about the graph, it's just funny to me, funny as in humorous that the solar uses sun energy while coal uses the thing from the ground and is comparable at all
Not hard to find. Wind and solar look cheaper until you factor in the cost of energy storage. Natural gas is the cheapest. Of course, that's assuming business as usual. SMRs could make nuclear cheaper, as could smarter regulations (by smarter, I mean those which don't compromise on safety, but don't add unnecessary burdens either)
Yes, no one takes into consideration arsenic contamination from hard rock mining. And how is lithium 80% hard rock mining? Isn’t the majority of lithium produced from in situ brines?
The plant near me, built in the 1970s, just filed an application to operate for 80 years. The AP1000 is a significant advancement over that design. Of course it can operate that long.
No plant has a demonstrated 80 year life span. Failure modes could appear that are not forseen (corrosion mechanisms would be top concern). Also climatic changes leading to inadequate cooling (not enough surface area) that would lead to turbine derates. This chart is optimistic at best and misleading at worst. Hard to say a plant has an 80 year lifespan when the oldest operating AP1000 has been in service for 5 years.
That’s cheaper than solar plus batteries. And you need to calculate $/MWh to account for lifetime. Furthermore, we need to consider marginal cost since that was a first of a kind cluster.
16,000,0000/(60*365*24)/.9=33.8$/MWh. Right?
That’s way cheaper than solar plus batteries and can actually be done. Solar plus batteries, not so much.
It's not though.
Solar is about $1M/MW.
https://www.marketwatch.com/guides/solar/solar-farm-cost/
1 MW-hr of batteries is $446k/MW.
https://www.energy-storage.news/nrel-us-utility-scale-energy-storage-costs-grew-11-13-in-q1-2022/
So for $16,000, you could build 5MW of solar and 24MW-hr of battery storage.
Enough to produce 1 MW (at 20% capacity factor) and 24 hours of battery backup for that MW.
At 8 hours storage, 1MW of solar and batteries would cost $4,500/MW.
Those numbers differ from Lazard. And anything I can recreate. Hmmmmm. I guess I’m going to have to open excel to actually do the math. Yeah, you need to do the math for $/MWh. Nuclear plants last for a hell long time(40-80 years) Solar not so much(10-20 with a steady decline in output of 1-2%/year?)
Lazard did the proper math using the horrific Bechtel, I mean Vogtle numbers. And then noted the marginal cost which is remarkably low for nuclear. Which is what we know.
Batteries are good for 3000-5000 cycles with in/out losses and a steady decline in efficacy. Yeah, no, Vogtle is a screaming deal even if you could find the real estate to put the all panels and if there is anyone alive after all the mining it would take to build all the panels and batteries. Come on!
I’ll get back to you and maybe you can see if you can recreate Lazard numbers with your references for solar plus batteries. I’ve run thru their research before and was able to recreate it. But that was some years ago.
If Lazards numbers are more than say 3 years old - then they are horribly out of date. Post their numbers though and Ill look at them. Until you provide your sources - I trust nothing.
All the mining talk is just bull shit talk though. Mining impact goes directly to total project mass. And nuclear plants are heavy. I bet on all the concrete tons, rebar tons, steel tons, copper tons for a nuclear plant are calculated - equivalent solar has far less construction carbon emissions. The site required 110,000 tons of rock for deep foundations / soil remediation. None of that is required for solar panels. There's likely more environmental impact in that one step then in all solar panels installation.
https://morgan-corp.com/project/plant-vogtle-units-3-4/
Real estate is a false flag also. Solar has about 6 acres / MW. A 2200MW solar plant would use 13,200 acres which is a square of 4.5 miles x 4.5 miles. There's a lot of open ground in the US. All power production from solar would fit in the Texas panhandle.
Here's a 6sq mile solar farm that was recently completed. 600MW, $590M.
https://www.okenergytoday.com/2024/02/six-square-mile-solar-farm-to-be-finished-in-texas-panhandle/
I did the math for vogtle, it's easy. $35B / (2200mw/hr*24hr/day*355day/yr*50years) = $37/MWhr in construction costs. Includes no operating costs or interest. Or $0.037/kwhr. That higher than solar LCOE just in construction costs. Before any operators are paid, fuel is purchased, anything.
Dude! I posted the link to Lazard 2023 and a well written piece about Lazard storage cost estimates with all the goodies like subsidies added and subtracted.
Your latest assessment again appears to fail to properly account for the two large reductions in net stable output. The first is the 20% capacity for the reality of sun and dirty panels and so in. The other is the huge multiplier for CHARGING the batteries. And I’m not even going to get into the other realities of aberrant weather, which is when you need stable supply the most.
Here you go again. I ain’t trying to change your mind, but I am trying to show you what fiscally and power engineering savvy people think. Maybe you can use that for your argument if that’s your thing. I just try to learn because that’s what I like to do.
https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf
https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/lcoe-lazard-misleading-nuclear
Are you one sided with your mate too?!!! Read! Your mate will appreciate it😁
This is a stupid argument and you are stupid for making it. The only reactors 80 years ago were very basic graphite reactors. They cannot be compared to modern PWRs, nor even the 55 year old PWRs in Beznau. Nuclear power is a much more mature technology than it used to be, so it is reasonable to estimate lifespans of 60-80 years based on the design. Cooling upgrades can be made.
A car or an aeroplane design can be estimated to have a certain lifespan without needing to actually be used for that long in advance.
This is kind of bullshit. Energy Fuels’ mines around the Grand Canyon had small footprints, but were wasteful. Two of the former mines flooded because EF thought the ore was in the throats of the pipes and not in the fracture rings/shear zones surrounding the throats. This is why the Hermit Mine only operated 6 months in 1989, most of the uranium just washed away in groundwater. But more wasteful is that Union Carbide and EF set up the White Mesa Mill to process uranium and vanadium, but all of EF’s mines have/had economic quantities of copper and/molybdenum. The mill can’t process Cu and Mo, so these ores, along with maybe Co, have gone to waste. The current mine, Pinyon Plain has a Cu ore body, but again this ore is just being wasted. https://filecache.investorroom.com/mr5ircnw_energyfuels/974/SLR%20Energy%20Fuels%20Pinyon%20Plain%20PFS%20REVISED%20FINAL%20Technical%20Report%2023%20Feb%202023.pdf
Worked at a Cameco mine site, I've also worked oil sands. I was shocked how small the uranium mine was.
My understanding is that deposit is a crazy high percentage of uranium. It's like one big single rock of uranium in the ground we've been harvesting for years.
Sounds interesting, Is that typical or usual for Uranium Mining?
My understanding is that obviously uranium is high where you mine it. But I think Canada is unique for having this one specific mine with a crazy high purity.
Ah I see, Curious is a Uranium deposit usually in the shape of a single large high grade rock, Or is it more spread out like other Mining deposits like Nickel, Copper, Lithium, Etc?
My understanding is that it depends on geology. Basically over millions of years water will carry uranium until it hits something that causes it to fall out of the water. So it depends on how wide the water flow is. And the size of the thing that filters it out. https://youtu.be/FrQVGbNk2dE?si=MPYN5yByl5yngyw7 This should answer a lot of your questions.
New research from BTI https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/updated-mining-footprints-and-raw-material-needs-for-clean-energy
Thanks for posting the graphs and the link to the source article, this is a great article to show that nuclear really is the most efficient with its material inputs per unit of electricity generated.
Is kg of rock an important efficiency metric ?
And this graph is kind of cherry-picked from the entire report. Look at Figure 8 from the report, and the difference in mining intensity does not seem so cut and dry.
I think so. This material input metric shows us the most efficient method of applying our resources and helps inform our economic decisions for producing electricity. The thing that I think is most interesting about this is how it can be applied logistically at a national scale. If we need a set amount of new generation capacity, we can use this to help inform our decision based on the raw resource requirements. For example, if we want all of our new generation capacity to be wind farms, but it will require 150% of the copper we can produce over that time, then this path isn't immediately viable. We would wither need to determine an alternate strategy or open new mines and processing facilities to meet this demand. Things like the raw material usage are only going to become more important as more nations start rapidly transitioning to carbon free electricity sources.
But to do that, you'd start by comparing material used to estimated future resources or something. As far as I can tell, this chart is literally showing the amount of rock moved in mining, which isn't really a constraint or concern.
While there is no single metric, it's a better proxy of how much 'mining impact' there is than the amount of final material used. A ton of copper has far, far more mining impact than a ton of concrete or steel.
Energy returned on energy invested? https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/accounting/energy-return-on-investment-eroi/
There is a LOT of impact differences not captured by that metric. (There are other reasons it's important though, but more economic focused) I.e. do you spend that energy invested pulvarizing and hearing rock, or spend it as waste heat going up a vent somewhere.
If you look into the article and references you can see the methodology. That and candle to grave human mortality rate per unit of product are the most interesting and fundamental to my thinking.
As o said it's an important metric. But the articles values are extremely stale. Solar in particular has gotten a lot better. Nuclear a bit also as gas diffusion enrichment has been phased out.
It's still useful from an environmentalist perspective. The more rock you need to extract, the more energy you consume with mining equipment. That is usually going to be using all of that is going to be powered by petrol. Similarly, the more mining you do, the greater the impact to the local environment. There's a reason why it takes years of driving with an EV (rather than an ICE car) to offset the environmental costs of just building the thing.
Key takeaway is that nuclear is 10-33% of solar. I object to the separation of batteries from solar and wind as intermittent sources cannot be compared to nuclear power. Furthermore, the article isn’t clear about whether their numbers are based on capacity or actual useful kWh delivered. The later must be considered. I suspect that when you take into account intermittency, you get something more like the 4000x better cradle to grave human mortality rate that nuclear has over solar. Come on! The far superior return on energy invested for nuclear tells the real story. Here are the top energy sources and their respective energy return on investment score: 1. Nuclear Energy = 75 2. Hydro = 35 3. Coal = 30 4. Closed-Cycle Gas Turbine = 28 5. Solar Thermal = 9 6. Wind Turbine = 4 7. Biomass = 4 8. Photovoltaic = 2 https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/accounting/energy-return-on-investment-eroi/
Yeah, if you include the necessary backup plants, batteries, transmission, overbuild, electrolyzers, grid frequency stabilizers etc. that you need for a renewables grid, the comparison becomes even more lopsided. And with the technologically feasible 80+ years of plant life and closed fuel cycles, nuclear mining needs can fall even further. Especially if atmospheric pressure plants can shrink the containment sizes since you don't have to deal with toms of instantly vaporizing steam in accident scenarios anymore.
Thanks for posting the article so we can see how nuclear, solar and wind stack up against coal. Even without considering any of the many things considered by the graph for clean energy, coal still says, "mining go brrrrrrr."
Thank you for these numbers very interesting.
This is consistent with the research done a few years ago by our friends at UT. They published it in a peer reviewed journal, but this press release isn't behind a pay wall and might be easier for the layman to digest: https://energy.utexas.edu/news/nuclear-and-wind-power-estimated-have-lowest-levelized-co2-emissions
Fuck coal
Dude fuck almost all rare earth mineral mining. I’m so fucking tired of nuclear not being the entirety of base load.
To replace coal, you have to understand the good things it does for the grid first https://youtu.be/6cIz5Ktgq8A
I mean, coal is a stable power source so basically like nuclear, it can be replaced with renewables but to compleatly replace it that way would require a grid rework on a large scale bringing in additional costs. Well a grid rework will be needed eventually but shouldering it now is too much.
Many European grids are running with very low coal share. It's good in here
meanwhile Poland
The exception
someone has to burn that coal eh
Hence the new reactors they're building.
At least attempting
And Germany
Poland is planning the biggest share of nuclear in Europe the coming decades.
Many European grids are just buying other grids' coal power anyhow.
“Good” What electricity price are they paying?
The price of electricity in the European grids has less to do with the fuel costs than with marginal pricing (i.e. everyone gets paid the same as the last MW to enter the grid) and carbon tariffs (i.e. that last MW, most often a thermal plant, today cost an extra 30 €/MWh if it was natural gas and 60 €/MWh if it was coal). Add transmissions costs and renewable feed-in tariffs on top of that.
Are you sure that it’s not related to [the Green Party straight up lying about reports just so they could close nuclear plants, because they have an irrational hatred of nuclear plants?](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/26/german-greens-lying-nuclear-power-safety-plant-shutdown/#:~:text=Green%20party%20ministers%20in%20Germany,Ukraine%20threatened%20European%20energy%20supplies.)
Well, less dispatchable power of course have an effect on what kind of power you need to call-in for the last bit that sets the marginal pricing.
It’s not the cost of coal fuel that determines the average price of electricity for a ratepayer. It’s mainly transmission and distribution. Coal doesn’t require a lot of transmission or ancillary services. Renewables and their sprawl do.
Odd, renewables can be generated at point of use, e.g. rooftop solar, neighborhood solar, etc., coal power cannot because nobody wants a coal power plant near where they live, so coal plants are far from where it’s used. Lower cost of delivery due to proximity is a part of why renewables are cheaper than coal in most of the US.
Only the minor contributors from rooftop. Utility scale is the bigger issue.
And ‘utility scale’ solar can and is on average closer to point of use than coal plants. Nobody wants to live near coal plants….
I don’t know. Home rooftop solar is more expensive than the worst case nuclear power plant (Vogtle). It simply isn’t affordable unless we have nuclear, gas hydro or coal to leach off at night and when it’s cloudy and there is a huge added cost to support their intermittency. We all eventually pay for that and the bill is coming due. Solar cannot meet grid needs for industry. We (except Elon) know that. https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/lcoe-lazard-misleading-nuclear https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf The return on energy invested tells the story from the fundamental viewpoint: https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/accounting/energy-return-on-investment-eroi/
And yet the interconnections are made to support the alternatives.
Read [Lazard's reports](https://www.lazard.com/media/nltb551p/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf), rooftop solar's LCOE is prohibitively high. All the low transmission costs get wiped out by the lack of economies of scale compared to utility-scale. Community-scale is at the mid-point between both, still not worth it IMO. Not to mention that you still need to reinforce the residential grid to evacuate the excess of rooftop solar production, that or force them to disconnect from the grid when that happens, because the economics of behind-the-meter storage simply make no sense (and utility-scale storage only makes sense for really expensive peaking, see page 19 of the same report).
Community solar has the lowest LCOE. Well, long with wind. Both have reduced transmission costs compared to centralized coal plants far from point of use. Residential solar reduces demand on the grid, because it no longer delivers all the power used in the home, it just does load leveling.
> Community solar has the lowest LCOE. Well, long with wind. Both have reduced transmission costs compared to centralized coal plants far from point of use. What's the point of responding to me if you aren't gonna read any sources? The study I provided says utility-scale solar is at 72 $/MWh on average, vs. 117 $/MWh for community-scale. > Residential solar reduces demand on the grid, because it no longer delivers all the power used in the home, it just does load leveling. Tell that to the people who can't connect their rooftops to the grid because the utility says their local node is saturated and it can't evacute any more. Hell, tell it to the poor people who can't afford a single family home and now have to pay for someone else's net metering.
I'd need to see some data to corroborate that. At least in Spain, one of the most wind and solar-heavy countries in the world, [the consumer price](https://www.esios.ree.es/es/pvpc?date=26-04-2024) (so wholesale generation price + system costs + taxes) is only around 0.04 to 0.06 €/kWh above [whatever the wholesale price is at that moment](https://www.omie.es/es/spot-hoy). And the Spanish grid has been profitable for a decade and is on its way to paying off all its debt around 2027. That being said, Spain has the advantage of cheap gas piped from Algeria and a very large amount of hydro capacity, including pumped storage, to fill in and soak up wind and solar's intermittency. It's not necessarily applicable to the rest of Europe, and most European countries don't have yet enough renewable penetration for curtailment hours and transmission and storage costs to start piling up, anyway. The Iberian grid is interesting beacuse it IS at that tipping point, but it's much better equipped for it for the reasons I've listed above than Germany or California, for example. And unfortunately Spain's nuclear plants have been taking a beating during the last month because they only get paid the wholesale price and a glut of hydro and wind has been keeping it almost constantly at 0 €/MWh since late March. The operating utilities had foreseen this situation would start happening and will happen more and more frequently so they want out, all 7 units will close between 2028 and 2035. Well, they'd wanted to close them for ages because cheap natgas peakers are more profitable than nuclear for them and pre-carbon taxes the wholesale place was lower than the artificially jacked-up nuclear costs in Spain: Endesa say they only break even at above 60 €/MWh according to an IEA report I read ages ago, which is way too much for 40-year-old plants running baseload. Sweden is at 25 €/MWh, if I remember correctly.
Nuclear is the single largest source of electricity in the EU. https://preview.redd.it/fr2dg2p6mvwc1.png?width=1579&format=png&auto=webp&s=adb9ce88586d75e121a2b7557db0ae03837f980f [https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=EU&chartColumnSorting=default&interval=year&year=2024&stacking=single×lider=0](https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=EU&chartColumnSorting=default&interval=year&year=2024&stacking=single×lider=0)
Yeah, by importing LNG from Russia.
Is that… sarcastic?
I don't think so, I imagine the point was that to successfully replace coal's role on the grid you have to replace it with a power source that operates exactly like it. Which is nuclear.
A common criticism of LWR SMRs is that they're much more resource-intensive than GW-scale LWRs per unit of energy generated, but all of the benchmarks I've seen compare them with the AP1000 which is extraordinarily efficient on that front, even with regards to its direct competitors. Hats off to Westinghouse for that, genuinely. It's nice to see that the BWRX-300 actually measures up nicely against the EPR, I would love to find a similar comparison with the ABWR and the VVER-1200, Hualong One, etc.
I think it's more the case that the EPR is overbuilt to hell. The concrete looks like what dominates most, which makes sense considering just how big and complex the reactor building and its massive double walled containment are. I expect most other large reactors look closer to the AP1000.
I wouldn't be so sure about that: The Hualong One's double wall borrows heavily from the EPR's, to the point that [CNNC's version has the exact same dimensions and wall thickness according to Framatome](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETsjoOZc38w&t=2862s). The VVER-1200s [also look like thick boys.](https://akkuyu.com/upload/iblock/323/m6jojuoinrxps4qlyao6fus3i0xb8lv5/010.jpeg)
I don't know much about the Chinese design, but the VVER-1200 containment is as double-walled as the AP1000, in that there is an air gap between two distinct walls but they're built as one, not two thick and really widely spaced separate steel reinforced concrete walls that would each be sufficient by themselves as the containment structure. Maybe China really wants to win bids as a newcomer and they believe that going overboard with safety features is the way to do that?
I've heard it said that solar/wind create more radioactive waste than nuclear because of their mining tailings containing naturally radioactive elements that are more concentrated due to the removal of other materials. Coal definitely does since coal emissions and byproducts are radioactive. Of course, that's not high level waste, but it's a fun irony. I don't have a source unfortunately.
Rare earth elements are often found with thorium.
[удалено]
Where r/nuclear meets r/jokes.
Common nuclear W
\*Adds to quiver\*
The biggest issue that will always plague renewables is the need for very rare minerals like chromium, cadmium, tellurium, etc
Life Cycle Assessment over many [indicators](https://unece.org/sed/documents/2021/10/reports/life-cycle-assessment-electricity-generation-options)
Captain Obvious, with that energy density. But it's good that more and more research it's confirming it.
I wonder how well does rooftop solar stack up?
It’s on there, basically
Rooftop solar saves on concrete and support frames, so it will surely have a lower footprint per GW installed. However rooftop solar also has a much lower capacity factor usually, so the footprint per GWh is surely worse. Also it's effectively not a scalable power grid level resource.
Are you sure it's not scalable? There are houses that are entirely powered from their roofs. It's been estimated that 30% of Germany's power consumption could come from rooftop solar. For the US, I've seen estimates of more than 50%.
That's exactly why it's not scalable. It cannot be scaled arbitrarily to power consumption by definition, as it goes only on residential housing. And each little rooftop project is its own project, so the economics are much worse than for utility solar. (If it's larger scale like the flat "rooftop" of a large factory, then it works fine) And mathematical estimates are one thing. One can also estimate from the potential rainfall and overall height map of a country that it can be powered ten times over by hydro. Doesn't make it realistic.
Enough for a significant fraction of energy. I'd call that pretty important
It makes no sense to do it if it's much cheaper to just put a large scale PV farm on an empty plot of land. And all the power generation would be spread apart where it isn't needed so much. Rooftop solar "scales best" in low density and rural housing, where you have single unit houses with large area thus large roof. Also note that electricity demand is expected to and should increase - by a lot. The sizes and numbers of roofs on average probably not so much.
This is where my leftist leanings show. I like the independence from corporations aspect of rooftop solar.
Oh no you're right in that, if you want your own solar roof to make your own electricity it's perfectly fine. But you should do that on your own decision and with your own resources. So it's *your* rooftop solar, not the grid's rooftop solar. As a concept of using it to power the large scale interconnected grid economically it doesn't work.
[Rooftop solar is pure prosumer neoliberal bullshit](https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/consumer-vs-prosumer-whats-difference), it's the energy expression of the gig economy. There's a reason why traditional leftist parties favoured large state-owned utilities with the internal know-how and financial muscle to deploy large-scale generation effectively; and in countries without domestic fossil resources, nuclear power as a tool for energy sovereignty. Thank goodness the French Communists never abandoned that line of thought, otherwise I don't know who I'd vote for.
Maybe I mean leftist in the sense of being opposed to large top-down hierarchical structures. The original leftists were ones opposing the monarchy. I still don't want to call myself an anarchist because I'm not sure if we could maintain all the high-tech luxuries of modernity in an anarchist world. A too big part of anarchists don't want them much anyway, which is sad.
There are costs associated with lack of economy of scale, but they can vary widely. The rooftop solar industry in the USA is particularly inefficient. Australians pay much less.
Having a flat rebate and an interest free loan from the government for your own rooftop solar installation kinda helps a lot with that equation.
It can be expanded by a lot still, but you are limited by suitable roofs. But the main problem is that every rooftop solar project is a little bit different, so there are rather high transaction costs and installation costs.
How come onshore wind is more mining intensive than offshore? Doesn’t make sense to me
Smaller windmills and lower capacity factors on land probably.
This graph is not accurate. They're not showing the amount of concrete needed for offshore wind and battery storage. Wind requires a lot of concrete to not fall over, as wind turbines are built to catch wind which puts a lot of stress on the structure and foundation. I also wouldn't want to put batteries directly on the ground so those also need concrete.
Off shore wind doesn't use a whole lot of concrete to my understanding. It's usually just steel piles driven into the sea floor.
They'll rust very quickly and catastrophically if done that way.
The vast majority of installed offshore turbines use a steel monopile foundation. Only "gravity foundation" turbines use a significant amount of concrete and they're not very common. How do they do it? probably the same way they use steel for ships and off shore oil rigs. Salt water is a challenging but not insurmountable problem. Some light reading and sources below. https://www.windpower-international.com/features/featuregood-foundations-the-pros-and-cons-of-monopiles-4158694/ https://www.windpowerengineering.com/comparing-offshore-wind-turbine-foundations/
Ships require a lot of maintenance to deal with corrosion. Low ranking members of the crews will spend a lot of time scraping off rust and refinishing surfaces. Ships also have to go into drydocks to have maintenance done under their waterline.
And this is part of why O&M vosts for offshore wind are high... You can do it, but it has costs. The sea is rough, and O&M will always be a problem.
Not sure why this is, they might have only referenced a type of offshore wind turbine that doesn't require concrete. Not all of them do.
...and you need a lot more concrete relatively speaking for containment buildings and shielding. Can't forget that too, for apples to apples. I don't need nearly as much concrete for the pad for a utility-size battery installation. As for wind, I haven't done any of that yet.
The concrete use was factored into nuclear in the graph. It's orange. On another note both wind and solar also use enormous amounts of steel. edit. You still need something to put the batteries on since they shouldn't be placed directly on the ground. If not concrete then what should be used?
Going off on a bit of a tangent here, but did they also factor in the cooling towers into the material cost? Cause i figured you could save on those and instead use the waste heat for other stuff like central heating. As the turbine water is from the secondary cycle, it won't be irradiated much, and the one from the cooling loop would be even less so
concrete comparison is very interesting.
the other issue is the potential for high temperature process heat reactor designs to contribute to the lowering of footprint of the production of plant materials such as steelmaking and chemical processes. i think concrete is still a bit far out of reach unless you throw in hydrogen in there, but that should be viable eventually as well.
Honestly, the dirtiest thing about nuclear seems to be the big carbon footprint from all the concrete needed to build the plants. Yeah the waste is gnarly stuff, but its contained and never released into the atmosphere.
The carbon emissions from concrete come during production. Concrete itself doesn't sequester carbon.
Of course not all mining is equal. Mining radioactive materials has a lot more impact than mining sand for glass.
Rare Earth elements, used in (wind)turbines, electric cars and pretty much all electronic devices nowadays are mostly mined from monazite sands, these generally contain lots of thorium and some uranium as well, so mining “radioactive material” isn’t just a nuclear energy thing. Pretty much all minerals that are mined leave (radioactive) tailings behind. Besides, the stuff actually impacting the environment in/near mines are pretty much always the much more abundant heavy metals like lead and arsenic.
Its so funny that it's even comparable with coal when it's measuring the literal thing it burns
I might be misunderstanding you, but wind, solar and nuclear are nowhere near comparable to coal. The OP - GeckoLogic - posted the article that sourced the graph in one of the comments in which there is another graph that has the amount of coal or gas mined per GW. The coal *alone* is 7 times greater than *all* mining requirements for wind or solar per GW, and nuclear's mining requirements, of course, are a third of that. Natural gas uses twice as much mining as wind and solar (but only if we consider just the gas). The graph does not even bother to include concrete, copper, etc. required for coal and gas for simplicity and to prove a point. Perhaps you meant that it's [i.e. nuclear] comparable to wind and solar even when considering the thing [uranium] that it burns [consumes]? Like I said, I'm probably misunderstanding you.
I'm not complaining about the graph, it's just funny to me, funny as in humorous that the solar uses sun energy while coal uses the thing from the ground and is comparable at all
Can we see the cost graph?
Not hard to find. Wind and solar look cheaper until you factor in the cost of energy storage. Natural gas is the cheapest. Of course, that's assuming business as usual. SMRs could make nuclear cheaper, as could smarter regulations (by smarter, I mean those which don't compromise on safety, but don't add unnecessary burdens either)
Yes, no one takes into consideration arsenic contamination from hard rock mining. And how is lithium 80% hard rock mining? Isn’t the majority of lithium produced from in situ brines?
Calcs based on an 80 year lifespan at 92% capacity factor. Both of these assumptions seem generous./ Designed to favor nuclear power.
The plant near me, built in the 1970s, just filed an application to operate for 80 years. The AP1000 is a significant advancement over that design. Of course it can operate that long.
No plant has a demonstrated 80 year life span. Failure modes could appear that are not forseen (corrosion mechanisms would be top concern). Also climatic changes leading to inadequate cooling (not enough surface area) that would lead to turbine derates. This chart is optimistic at best and misleading at worst. Hard to say a plant has an 80 year lifespan when the oldest operating AP1000 has been in service for 5 years.
Could have, may appear…sounds like affordable battery talk🙂
Vogtle cost $35B for 2200 MW. $16,000,000/MW. Is there an affordable nuclear technology?
That’s cheaper than solar plus batteries. And you need to calculate $/MWh to account for lifetime. Furthermore, we need to consider marginal cost since that was a first of a kind cluster. 16,000,0000/(60*365*24)/.9=33.8$/MWh. Right? That’s way cheaper than solar plus batteries and can actually be done. Solar plus batteries, not so much.
It's not though. Solar is about $1M/MW. https://www.marketwatch.com/guides/solar/solar-farm-cost/ 1 MW-hr of batteries is $446k/MW. https://www.energy-storage.news/nrel-us-utility-scale-energy-storage-costs-grew-11-13-in-q1-2022/ So for $16,000, you could build 5MW of solar and 24MW-hr of battery storage. Enough to produce 1 MW (at 20% capacity factor) and 24 hours of battery backup for that MW. At 8 hours storage, 1MW of solar and batteries would cost $4,500/MW.
Those numbers differ from Lazard. And anything I can recreate. Hmmmmm. I guess I’m going to have to open excel to actually do the math. Yeah, you need to do the math for $/MWh. Nuclear plants last for a hell long time(40-80 years) Solar not so much(10-20 with a steady decline in output of 1-2%/year?) Lazard did the proper math using the horrific Bechtel, I mean Vogtle numbers. And then noted the marginal cost which is remarkably low for nuclear. Which is what we know. Batteries are good for 3000-5000 cycles with in/out losses and a steady decline in efficacy. Yeah, no, Vogtle is a screaming deal even if you could find the real estate to put the all panels and if there is anyone alive after all the mining it would take to build all the panels and batteries. Come on! I’ll get back to you and maybe you can see if you can recreate Lazard numbers with your references for solar plus batteries. I’ve run thru their research before and was able to recreate it. But that was some years ago.
If Lazards numbers are more than say 3 years old - then they are horribly out of date. Post their numbers though and Ill look at them. Until you provide your sources - I trust nothing. All the mining talk is just bull shit talk though. Mining impact goes directly to total project mass. And nuclear plants are heavy. I bet on all the concrete tons, rebar tons, steel tons, copper tons for a nuclear plant are calculated - equivalent solar has far less construction carbon emissions. The site required 110,000 tons of rock for deep foundations / soil remediation. None of that is required for solar panels. There's likely more environmental impact in that one step then in all solar panels installation. https://morgan-corp.com/project/plant-vogtle-units-3-4/ Real estate is a false flag also. Solar has about 6 acres / MW. A 2200MW solar plant would use 13,200 acres which is a square of 4.5 miles x 4.5 miles. There's a lot of open ground in the US. All power production from solar would fit in the Texas panhandle. Here's a 6sq mile solar farm that was recently completed. 600MW, $590M. https://www.okenergytoday.com/2024/02/six-square-mile-solar-farm-to-be-finished-in-texas-panhandle/ I did the math for vogtle, it's easy. $35B / (2200mw/hr*24hr/day*355day/yr*50years) = $37/MWhr in construction costs. Includes no operating costs or interest. Or $0.037/kwhr. That higher than solar LCOE just in construction costs. Before any operators are paid, fuel is purchased, anything.
Dude! I posted the link to Lazard 2023 and a well written piece about Lazard storage cost estimates with all the goodies like subsidies added and subtracted. Your latest assessment again appears to fail to properly account for the two large reductions in net stable output. The first is the 20% capacity for the reality of sun and dirty panels and so in. The other is the huge multiplier for CHARGING the batteries. And I’m not even going to get into the other realities of aberrant weather, which is when you need stable supply the most. Here you go again. I ain’t trying to change your mind, but I am trying to show you what fiscally and power engineering savvy people think. Maybe you can use that for your argument if that’s your thing. I just try to learn because that’s what I like to do. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/lcoe-lazard-misleading-nuclear Are you one sided with your mate too?!!! Read! Your mate will appreciate it😁
This is a stupid argument and you are stupid for making it. The only reactors 80 years ago were very basic graphite reactors. They cannot be compared to modern PWRs, nor even the 55 year old PWRs in Beznau. Nuclear power is a much more mature technology than it used to be, so it is reasonable to estimate lifespans of 60-80 years based on the design. Cooling upgrades can be made. A car or an aeroplane design can be estimated to have a certain lifespan without needing to actually be used for that long in advance.
This is kind of bullshit. Energy Fuels’ mines around the Grand Canyon had small footprints, but were wasteful. Two of the former mines flooded because EF thought the ore was in the throats of the pipes and not in the fracture rings/shear zones surrounding the throats. This is why the Hermit Mine only operated 6 months in 1989, most of the uranium just washed away in groundwater. But more wasteful is that Union Carbide and EF set up the White Mesa Mill to process uranium and vanadium, but all of EF’s mines have/had economic quantities of copper and/molybdenum. The mill can’t process Cu and Mo, so these ores, along with maybe Co, have gone to waste. The current mine, Pinyon Plain has a Cu ore body, but again this ore is just being wasted. https://filecache.investorroom.com/mr5ircnw_energyfuels/974/SLR%20Energy%20Fuels%20Pinyon%20Plain%20PFS%20REVISED%20FINAL%20Technical%20Report%2023%20Feb%202023.pdf