> yeah, for Lithium, main concern is water usage. > Seems like excessive water usage is better than radioactive pond for decades, or is it not?

See my other reply to you. Bad faith "research" doesn't make you correct.

> and as for the cobalt, there does not seems to be any environmental problems mining cobalt at all?

You know next to nothing about solar power if you think mining cobalt was the concern here. You're sitting here worried about radiation leaking into the environment, but not a very toxic and virtually un-cleanable substance used in every PV solar panel? Mining it is fine. When one of the hundreds of thousands of panels has a leak and kill off all living things in the surrounding area, or at least makes them unable to reproduce, induces neuropathy, makes you randomly lose your hearing and vision, spikes your cognitive decline, or any one of the other crazy side effects associated with cobalt poisoning, then you start to worry. Its literally more lethal than radiation poisoning, and most of the time more painful. Keeping in mind the studies here were originally conducted with the amount of cobalt used in hip implants. How much do you think this scales with those hundreds of thousands of solar panels, each containing some?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7842236/

> Yes, workers are treated poorly, but that has nothing to do with what type of mineral is mined. That’s more of an political issue, rather than destroying nature for centuries, which is clearly an environmental issue

I wasn't even talking about this, but its a good point to bring up. Workers being treated like shit is horrible. Destroying the environment is horrible. Cobalt will do that permanently.

Nuclear meltdowns however? Well I suggest you look into how life in what I'll call "The scary zone" of Chernobyl is doing. Hint: Creature for creature, plant for plant, they are all doing way better than their cousins outside of the region. Studies are ongoing to see if its just the absence of humans or if the radiation has any part to play in that. IMO its obviously the former, but its an interesting topic nonetheless.

Still I have to ask, given the link below (and assuming you will actually look into the issue with a genuine interest in being accurate rather than just playing politics cause its reddit), exactly what permanent damage has any nuclear power plant caused? I'll wait.

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife

Now can we stop with the bad faith arguments that are demonstrably incorrect? Renewables are more toxic and harmful to the environment by far. People just pretend they aren't because most of the harmful parts come in the manufacturing step of making these things. People ignore the rest, and we haven't had a big enough PV farm where just a few of the panels leeching cobalt into the environment has caused large amounts of human suffering.