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French presidential hopeful Melenchon pledges minimum wage rise, retirement at 60
(www.straitstimes.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2026
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I'm not trying to argue the broader point, but as to uranium...there's a lot of uranium out there.
First of all, you only go hunting for uranium when you need more. There's probably quite a bit more than is in known reserves. But let's even set that aside.
There is a lot of uranium dissolved in seawater. We don't currently extract it from seawater, because it's cheaper to mine it. But we could. And the estimates I've seen are that if we did so, we could probably get the cost to about twice that of mining it. That's an increase, but it's not a big deal, because the fuel cost isn't very significant when it comes to nuclear power.
And there are tens of thousand years of uranium, at current electricity use levels, in seawater. As you extract it, the cost of extraction in the (now more dilute) seawater is going to rise, but I can't imagine that it'd be any higher than a linear increase at most. So once we've extracted half of it, our costs maybe at most double. That's a long ways down the road.
With nuclear power, the constraint isn't really availability of uranium. It's the cost of constructing the plant (which, because nuclear plants last a long time, depends a lot on the finance cost, what interest rates a lender would currently demand to lend to someone at the moment).
The known reserves will be gone in ~50 years (at the current rate of usage, which is only 4.3% of the worlds primary energy consumption, if we replace the 75% fossil fuels with nuclear then "poof its gone" ). There will be more but it will get increasingly more difficult to extract it. Extracting Uranium from seawater is still in its laboratory phase and its far from clear it can be done economically. The long term disposal of nuclear waste is still largely unsolved.
We should only retire at 60 after we figured it all out, shouldn't we?
But wait, do retirees use up more natural resources than working 60 year-olds or less? Working people need all the resources retirees need plus resources needed to perform work. They'd get paid more than a pension too which means they'd get to consume more on top of their work-related consumption. And their work would transform more natural resources into commodities. โ ๏ธ
You are right that they use less resources and cause less damage if they don't work, at least as long as our economical system does not internalize external costs and does not discourage using non-regenerating resources. From that point of view it's probably better they do nothing worse than being retired. In a better system they would do something beneficial.
I just wanted to oppose the notion that they unlocked the "prosperity" achievement (i.e. we now have prosperity forever thanks to them) through hard work and have deserved to retire at 60.
The excess income is often used to keep getting to said job or spent on raising the next generation. Any reminder typically goes into a retirement savings, if your in the upper middle class anyway.
Retirees often own their homes instead of paying mortgages or rent as well.