written 20 July, 2025
published 27 July, 2025
Nuclear energy is promoted as renewable and clean. It is neither.
Renewable can only apply to energy forms where the power is already present, waiting to be collected, not to energy sources consuming finite material. Renewable energy is present in solar (from the Sun), wind (from atmospheric solar heating), hydro (from stored rain resulting from wind), and geothermal (from Earth core heat). These forms of power are constantly renewed and will outlast humanity. Nuclear energy consumes uranium, which is finite, not renewable.
While it is true that a functioning nuclear reactor does not add any additional carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, to describe it as clean is a very narrow, deliberately misleading, use of the word.
Uranium is contained in many rocks, but is uselessly small quantities. Even economically viable ore contains only 0.05-0.1 percent uranium. Therefore, for every pound of uranium, 1,000-2,000 pounds of tailings are produced, usually piled near the processing site. The tailings contain some traces of uranium, a toxic metal as well as radioactive, which contaminates mine workers, local ground water, and areas downwind. Mining is powered by diesel fuel, adding atmospheric carbon dioxide. The market rate for uranium is about $70 a pound.
Uranium is primarily two isotopes, which are the same element with 92 protons, but with different numbers of neutrons in the nucleus. 99 percent is U-238 (with 146 neutrons) which is relatively stable and 0.7 percent is U-235 (1.3 percent lighter with only 143 neutrons) which is radioactive. In the US, reactor fuel uranium has to enriched to about 5 percent U-235.
This is done by first converting uranium into a gaseous compound, then spinning it at high speed in a tubular centrifuge. This flings the heavier isotopes toward the outer edge, and the slightly lighter isotopes are pulled from the center, to be processed in the next centrifuge, repeated in a series with as many as 1000 steps. This is very energy and time intensive. Nine pounds of uranium depleted of U-235 is produced for each pound of enriched reactor fuel, which now costs over $7,000.
The US currently has 92 working reactors, mostly sized at 1,100 megawatts, which each hold about 100 tons of enriched uranium. The byproducts of the fission process slowly degrade the economic functioning of the reactor fuel, which must then be replaced when only 5 percent of the fissionable U-235 has been consumed. In practice, a quarter of the fuel rods, 25 tons, are replaced each year. This is called spent fuel, even though 95 percent of the enriched uranium is still intact. The rods are extremely radioactive, lethal to life for hundreds of thousands of years. Even though it has been 70 years since the first reactor went online, there is still no domestic radioactive waste disposal site. It is stored in casks onsite at the reactors, like mentally unstable people who keep their urine and feces in jars in their bedroom.
This so called clean power source annually produces 50,000 pounds of the most long-lasting toxic material even seen on the planet, which required 500,000 pounds of uranium ore before enrichment, leaving at least 500,000,000 pounds of toxic tailings scattered around the countryside. This is the yearly impact of only one reactor, and the US has 92. Just to boil water.
Unfortunately, that is not the whole story. The annual fuel use for each reactor also produces 450,000 pounds of depleted uranium (DU), a very expensive byproduct of the nuclear fuel cycle. Corporation have incentive is to find a return on this investment. Uranium is very dense, one of the heaviest elements in the periodic table. The Pentagon buys DU to use as armor piercing bullets, which can punch through steel, especially useful against tanks.
Upon impact, the uranium is vaporized, quickly recondensing as very fine, long lived, toxic particles, which spreads with the wind. Where DU has been used, such as Bosnia and Iraq, large areas were contaminated, and little effort was been made to clean them up. Equipment, soldiers, and civilians have been contaminated. In the body, uranium metal gravitates toward bones and gonads. Contaminated service members have passed this on to their spouses.
Only a corporate booster, with no compassion or awareness of the whole system, would consider nuclear a clean source of energy. But as one of the most expensive, heavily subsidized, centralized energy forms, it makes money, keeping shareholders happy.
