Foreign Uranium

There's been a lot of talk about nuclear power lately and I got to thinking about where the Uranium for these plants would come from. After all, we'd not be much better off if we had the same problem with foreign Uranium as we do with foreign oil.

According to the World Nuclear Association, half of the world's Uranium production is from just three countries, Australia, Canada and Kazakhstan. The remainder comes from 15 or so countries including the United States which only produces about 5 percent of world production. Currently we import a whopping 95 percent of our Uranium.

According to the CIA Fact Book the USA imports 58 percent of its petroleum.

I guess what I'm wondering, if we go nuclear, are we going to be dangerously dependent on foreign mines?

And we still haven't figured out what to do with the thousands of tons of nuclear waste these plants would produce.

Radioactive Waste-where do we store it?

Was reading in SciAm about the benefits of nuclear power. There seems to be little doubt we need to come up with a number of alternate energy sources to lesson the havoc about to be wreaked on our small planet by global warming.

Although I agree that nuclear power plants have a much better safety record than they used to have, we still have a problem as to what to do with megatons of radioactive waste from these uranium burners. Some of the waste must be stored for thousands of years. Linguists are trying to come up with some kind of signage to warn future humans of the danger of these dumps thousands of years from now when language may be very different from today's.

Another problem is the plutonium produced in burning U235. You need to keep it out of the hands of wingnuts who might want to build a bomb.