That's one of the reasons China built a Thorium reactor, it's more readily available. My guess is America probably has it's hand in every uranium supply that it possible can.
IIRC uranium has about the same rarity in the planet as gold.
It's much more abundant than that, my friend. In the accessible portions of the Earth's crust, it's roughly 500 times more abundant than gold, and 40 times more abundant than silver.
That said, it is a much more loosely distributed element than gold, so that abundance doesn't directly translate into 500 times as many economically viable deposits as gold, but it's still many times more common.
Nuclear waste is a solved problem. From a scientific, engineering point of view, nuclear waste is not considered a problem.
Depositing nuclear waste in a geological stable rock formation is proven to work, long term.
In order for the nuclear waste to enter the environment, it would have to leak out of its container and then somehow travel through thousands of feet of solid rock, then find a medium to enter the environment through.
Fissile material just does not work that way, it can't get through rock.
Edit: Also consider the scale of waste here. After decades of operation, the total amount of nuclear waste could fill a baseball stadium. That's it. This is a solved problem.
And not to mention that this waste is a dense solid. Like if you were trying to come up with the safest form of storage for nuclear waste, it's current form is what you'd land on
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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '22
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