If you're going to consider those for uranium you also need to consider them for coal.
The energy density of uranium makes it a non-issue. A 1GW reactor fissions about 1 ton of enriched uranium per year. You need about 10x as much raw material, so we're talking about 10 tons of uranium per year.
If you can't reprocess, then you lose about 95% of the fissionable material in the uranium. So you use up 20 tons of material per year, and you need to mine about 200 tons.
In comparison, a 1GW coal plant uses about 3 million tons of coal per year. And be real, coal isn't particularly clean to mine either. You need to wash it, and that water ends up just as polluted with heavy metals as the fly ash. Not to mention the human toll - black lung disease still killed about 25k people in the year 2013, and incidence rates (in the active miner population) have actually been rising since the 1990s.
It's the difference between a small-scale mining operation and large-scale strip mining.
The energy density of uranium makes it a non-issue. A 1GW reactor fissions about 1 ton of enriched uranium per year. You need about 10x as much raw material, so we're talking about 10 tons of uranium per year.
If you can't reprocess, then you lose about 95% of the fissionable material in the uranium. So you use up 20 tons of material per year, and you need to mine about 200 tons.
In comparison, a 1GW coal plant uses about 3 million tons of coal per year. And be real, coal isn't particularly clean to mine either. You need to wash it, and that water ends up just as polluted with heavy metals as the fly ash. Not to mention the human toll - black lung disease still killed about 25k people in the year 2013, and incidence rates (in the active miner population) have actually been rising since the 1990s.
It's the difference between a small-scale mining operation and large-scale strip mining.