like gold and copper, nuclear fuel is also mined. the nuclear industry produces large volumes of finely pulverised long lived low-level radioactive wastes in the form of uranium tailings. Unlike arsenic and cynaide, the hazard posed by uranium is not onyl checmical, but also radioactive. Whereas these chemical pollutants can be neutralised by the right chemical reaction, the radioactive hazard of uranium mining wastes cannot be neutralised, only contained.
And yet, the tailings for uranium are much less in volume than the tailings (and eventual processed waste products) from the fuels that would replace it, like coal and oil.
Uranium itself is only weakly radioactive anyways (the kind of uranium you mine has a half life measured in billions of years). You'd be at more danger from radiation from walking out of the mine into the UV-filled sunlight, or from smoking cigarettes (which contain radioactive Po-210) than from working under the earth in a uranium mine (though you would admittedly want to wear a face mask).
In fact Congressional staffers receive more exposure to radiation than U.S. naval nuclear plant operators, because the nice granite-based buildings they work in contain pitchblende impurities (containing uranium), and yet those Congressional staffers are allowed to work in those buildings.
Yes, thanks for pointing that out. Uranium tailings are one of the biggest environmental issues with nuclear power, and one of the ones I never hear anyone mention.
The radioactive waste produced by the plants is more of a political issue than a technical one, as is the switch to far safer, more maintainable, non-proliferating reactor designs.
The statement that nowadays reactor engines can be designed that are "far safer" always riles me up a little bit because, of course, a few decades ago the OLD designs were already sold to the general public with the promise that they were "perfectly" safe. And if you had the temerity to question this, you were of course a Luddite.
Even the old Western designs are/were safe within the parameters of their design. Many are running even today because it has proven politically impossible to replace them.
The one major exception is Fukushima Dai-Ichi (which used one of the oldest BWR designs), and even Fukushima Dai-Ichi has not killed anyone from radiation directly.
But just to contrast, the nearby set of operating reactors at Fukushima Dai-Ni (which also used an old BWR design with a minor containment upgrade) both managed to safely achieve cold shutdown even despite getting hit by the exact same tsunami that hit their sister site just a few kilometers up the coast.
Obviously you should always question the safety of a new technology instead of blindly trusting it. The modern reliance on computers and the magic of the Internet seems to come to mind for me as an example of where blind trust leads to problems. But questioning nuclear just because it's nuclear may well have made one a Luddite. The basics of nuclear engineering are not actually as difficult to understand as it's portrayed to be, but people object to the technology without even the slightest attempt to understand it, which may well make one a Luddite as well.
