RE:RE:RE:Pro-uranium minister kicked out of the Slovak government!chintzy: I'm not quite sure what exactly you mean by "subsistence level of economic development" but your picture of Slovakia as a country whose only chance for a better future consists in uranium mining is completely wrong! There are plenty of other and better ways and opportunities for future (e.g. most likely you don't know that Slovakia is one of the largest per-capita car makers in Europe). Another important thing for future is tourism ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18PftZp3wOo , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adYZpRLMpC0 ) - something that mining activities would inevitably ruin! Also, you should take into account how small Slovakia is in comparison with Canada - whereas in Canada one can imagine that ruining the environment via mining in some uninhabited or sparsely inhabited areas might not be considered such a big issue, in Slovakia it would be a huge problem!
And as to the "energy security" - mining uranium in Slovakia wouldn't improve the energy situation in the least! Neither raw uranium nor uranium yellowcake (U3O8), which are products of uranium mines, can be directly used as fuel for nuclear power plants - further enrichment and processing is needed to get nuclear fuel from U3O8, the price for the enrichment being several times higher than the price of the U3O8 comodity. Slovakia has no capacities of its own for producing nuclear fuel and never will have (the big players wouldn't allow us to build those - see what fuss the U.S. & Co. are making with Iran regarding uranium enrichment). So if Russian gas was cut off for a winter or two, that would create a problem but the problem would be completely unrelated to uranium mining...
Uranium mining in Slovakia wouldn't benefit anybody - apart from greedy EUU and FTE owners/shareholders who hope to get some money out of it no matter what consequences the mining would have on the local people and their environment!