As I was skipping rapidly over the mining news and the now-standard genuflections to the “net-zero” energy transition in various sections of the magazine written by people who should know better, I paused on this page (below) for the irony. I wonder if I keep reading this rag long enough if Azerbaijan will be featured on the upper left of a future page and a Canadian company’s dam will be on the lower right?
Did not the guilty company on the upper left have engineers, consultants, stamped designs, provincial approvals, quality control and company culture of excellence?
To all our prolific and vocal mining analysts, pundits and investment bankers who are waking up to the folly of wind and solar, and talking up nuclear as the efficient, low-cost, and stable alternative, do you still think the engineers are going to make those nuclear plants safe from natural disasters and more certainly human error? When we can’t even demonstrate as an industry and a society that we can build a tailings dam?
How’s the nuclear track record so far? Chernobyl (1986) killed thousands. According to the IAEA five million people live in areas of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia that are contaminated with radionuclides. Ok, the Soviets were on the ropes. How about Fukushima? They had to move 150,000 people out of there in 2011 within a 20 km radius and the thing is still a boiling cauldron nearly 15 years later. Now we have the Ukra-nazis shelling the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. If that goes, Chernobyl may be surpassed. And a plant disaster couldn’t happen in the United States where utility companies are profit-oriented investor-owned enterprises. And where Bill Gates is involved. And where the Department of Energy (an oxymoron if there ever was one) is still cleaning up the Hanford reactor site in Washington State of plutonium and contaminated groundwater after 30 years in its scenic location next to the Columbia River. Only half the clean-up is done according to the optimistic article posted by the Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business (https://www.tricitiesbusinessnews.com/articles/2054-hanford-site-cleanup-story-unfolding). I think the iconic Condorito says it all:
