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It's Settled, More Nuclear Energy Means Less Mining

The Breakthrough Institute is an environmental research center based in Berkeley, California. Our research focuses on identifying and promoting technological solutions to environmental and human development challenges in three areas: energy, conservation, and food and farming.

A graphic produced by the Japanese environmental think tank Climate Integrate groups nuclear power and mining under an unequal fossil-fuel system while enshrining wind and solar within an “equal” and “nature positive” future society, somehow blissfully separated from mineral production. Nor are calls from degrowth, ecosocialist, or traditional environmentalists to limit extraction through unrealistic and convoluted social measures logically reconcilable with their continued rejection of nuclear power’s potential to alleviate the mining impacts of the clean energy transition. The last 10% of an ultimately subjective 100% renewable grid aspiration not only comes withhigh and nonlinearcost increases from the additional solar, wind, and storage resources to cover all needs at all times and in all weather, but also necessitates greater land and mining footprints.

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