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Some key insights from the article:
Basically, what they did was to look at how much batteries would be needed in a given area to provide constant power supply at least 97% of the time, and the calculate the costs of that solar+battery setup compared to coal and nuclear.
This is still more polluting to mine than going nuclear, even accounting for nuclear waste.
Do you have a source for that claim? Genuine question.
My intuition is that the types of impact are widely different, so hard to reduce to a single number that can be compared.
https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf
I'm using table 1.
PV panels alone produce 43g/kWh, batteries 33.
Nuclear (light-water or pressurized) are at 12.
We're talking complete life cycle analyses.
To tack onto that: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
When you account for land use in the entire life cycle from mining resources to disposal at end of life cycle, nuclear uses a quarter of the land of rooftop cadmium panels and a tenth of silicon panels.
Offshore wind is the only thing that gets close and even that has ecological and commercial concerns.
If you're pro-stable and sustainable ecological systems, nuclear based power grid is a no brainer.
Even for offshore wind, you gotta add the necessary battery capacity for a reliable power grid...
Yet breeder plants would be even more sustainable in theory, yet if anyone tries to research them right now and doesn't already have nuclear bombs they may fall into the same situation Iran just did.
Less fuel use, Less waste. Requires more technological testing/improvements long term, but everyone is worried about people weaponizing higher enrichment uranium from an outside perspective.. I could be wrong
yeah at a certain point it becomes a trade-off between "no geopolitical dependence on uranium" and "no geopolitical dependence on something that is currently produced in china, but could be produced anywhere if we tried hard enough"