I meant to say I am sure a 1,600 acre strip mine would NOT produce 110 MW continuously for a century. I did a rough estimate here which bears that out. The strip mine will last 10 to 30 years at best.
After the strip mine is closed down it will be a toxic wasteland, whereas after the CPS is closed down it will be exactly the same as it was before. Uranium mines are no better. It is a myth the fission power plants are compact. That is only true if you fail to account for 99% of the space the fission system as a whole takes up. The fission plant itself is compact, but the rest of the system takes up lots of space. When it explodes from hydrogen the way the Fukushima plants did, it suddenly takes up the land that 90,000 people lived on, a significant fraction of all the land in Japan. To say that coal or fission takes up little space compared to solar or wind is a lot like saying that cars take up little space. Your car, sitting in your driveway takes up only a little space. The roads needed to make your car into a useful transportation system take up more land area than the entire state of Georgia. - Jed
