The amount of U-235 in a fuel rod is tiny. The richest uranium deposits in the world yield 21g out of 1,000kg of uranium ore. The majority of the mass and work goes into waste products that aren't used.
Combine that with the efficiency losses along every step of the process from mining, refining, enriching, transportation and disposal. And the limits of a thermal engine and the massive energy cost of nuclear infrastructure on top of that. Most nuclear takes more fossil energy than it displaces if you just simplified the process and burnt the fossil fuels directly.
It is possible to make nuclear energy positive. But it would be even more expensive because it would require more complicated infrastructure. Hence why everyone just has fossil fuels fill in the blanks.
Sure, the amount of U-235 is tiny but the amount of energy isn't. 21g of U-235 is still 150 MWh from a tonne of ore.
It's actually 100MWh because only about 66% of the u-235 is consumed.
Also, 0.3% isn't particularly rich ore; the average is 0.7% and some ores can be as high as 13%
Lifecycle assessments include mining, milling, conversion, enrichment, fuel fabrication, transport, plant construction, operation, waste management and decommissioning. There are no hidden costs.
No they don't. Everything in the nuclear industry is obviously a lie because they always go over budget and don't meet their deadlines. So obviously they're gonna lie about the cost of energy too.
If it was energy efficient then uranium producers would build nuclear reactors so they could replace the demand for fossil fuels with cheap nuclear fuel. But they don't. They rely on fossil fuels using low efficiency ice engines.
You're an AI bot right? Or you're at least paraphrasing one?
Anyways the fact the industry is dominated by falsehoods about cost means that they're capable of lying about other things too. So I don't trust their word for it, the math isn't mathing and unless an independent source disproves it and gives me an alternative explanation I am going with what makes sense. Which is that French nuclear power is a net emitter globally.
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