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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   37124 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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I'm very faintly anti-nuclear because we need to import uranium from pretty far away and it makes us dependent on exporters, but I freely grant that this may be the least of many evils and actually looking at the numbers may convert me.

The search for uranium ore intensified during the Cold War. In East Germany an extensive uranium mining industry was established. Uranium was mined from 1947 to 1990 from mines in Saxony and Thuringia by the SDAG Wismut. It was mostly used by the Soviet Union to build nuclear fission weapons, also as fuel for nuclear power plants. In West Germany more limited mining took place at Ellweiler, Rheinland-Pfalz (1959–1964), and Menzenschwand, Baden-Württemberg (1961–1991).[29]

All uranium mines were closed after German reunification for environmental reasons. Some areas were heavily contaminated and clean-up is still not finished. Total production in East Germany was 230,400 t of uranium, making it the third largest producer in history behind the US and Canada. Minor production still takes place at the Königstein mine southeast of Dresden from cleaning of mine water. This production has been 38 t of uranium in 2007.[30]

Edit: And as the other person said, if nuclear fuel can't be produced domestically, only a small amount needs to be imported due to its immense energy density. I recall a comment, probably on Reddit, from someone who lived close to both a coal powerplant and a nuclear powerplant. He noted how trainloads of coal were arriving constantly, while the nuclear plant only received minimal traffic.

It's probably worth noting that that 38 t U was probably not from active mining. The link in the wiki is dead, but the current Red Book has a note for the recent entries were from mine water treatment and "In 2018, conversion work of the water treatment facility at the Königstein mine halted uranium production." None of the reserves in Western Europe are viable at current prices. In practice any Uranium used in Western Europe would probably be imported.

I think all the processing facilities in Germany have also been shut down, so processed ore would have to be imported from France, which itself sources Uranium from Canada, Gabon, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Namibia and Niger. I think the French nuclear industry has an explicit goal of diversifying the locations it sources from.

None of the reserves in Western Europe are viable at current prices. In practice any Uranium used in Western Europe would probably be imported.

Of course you’d want to buy cheapest product you can get, but that is orthogonal to the concern /u/Southkraut raised, which is whether this would make you dependent on foreign sources of uranium. If you could mine your own uranium, at even twice the cost, you are not really depend on imports, and the final energy price will not even go up all that much.

The issue isn’t the logistics of shipping it. The issue is that it makes you vulnerable to blockades, embargos, trade disputes, and the “international community”.

Germany isn’t vulnerable to any of that, though.

Germany has lost every war it ever fought as a direct result of being shut out of resource access through those methods, and the French lost their fair share of wars to this too (Napoleon).

I think it's fair to call that a strategic weakness.

They don't have natural gas, they don't have oil, they don't have good coal so they have trouble making steel, they don't have alloying elements so the metal (including steel) they are able to make is not the best quality. They have no large mountains for hydroelectric generation so their only indigenous source of electricity is coal. Food production is not their strong suit either (hence the need for Haber-Bosch, and really, why its inventors were German in the first place). Sure, they might have a highly educated and motivated society, but without any material/materiel to work with they're at the mercy of those who do.

This is also why the EU is a massive deal for Germany, because a politically-united Europe (under German economic control) means a Germany less constrained by American-English and/or French resistance to pursue its own policy goals. The "Fourth Reich" snark is not entirely untrue.

Not right this second, but if the geopolitical situation shifts things could get quite uncomfortable. They aren't in a strategic location like the UK or the USA, and they don't have strong economic ties to resource-rich former colonies like France.

Neat. I did not know about German uranium mining until now.

Based on user name you are German? Eyeballing a map, Western Europe might be the most Uranium scarce populated region. I'm not sure Western Europe has an energy option that doesn't require importing materials, or finished products requiring rare materials. The main advantage of of uranium would be relatively high energy density making up for some of the more logistically challenging freight issues. In North America, Canada has substantial reserves. The most complete reference for Uranium resources is the "Red Book", but you need to be a bit careful in interpreting the entries.

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