In the just can't catch a break department, Cameco, a uranium producer, announced it was laying off 85 employees in Wyoming and Nebraska due to depressed uranium prices. Prices fell in 2011 due to the Fukushima Daiichi incident in which it was damaged due to a 9.0 scale earthquake in Japan.
Stuff like this shows the weird things that nuclear power, which is incredibly safe, has to contend with. There aren't any forms of electrical power generation that do not resort in injuries and deaths. Not to pick on coal, but it's certainly the case that there are a lot more coal mining and coal power plant injuries in a year than there are such incidents from nuclear power plants and Uranium mining.
And uranium offers a means of generating power that's actually really green compared to generating methods that rely on fossil fuels.
No matter, the weird sort of view that people have of such things has condemned nuclear generation to a seemingly increasingly marginal role. Just like hydroelectric power, it addresses most of the complaint that people have with other forms of electrical generation, but the opponents of nuclear power can't see past the radioactive glow that haunted the imagination since the Cold War.
So, while it has nothing at all to do with what's plaguing coal, a price decline, like for petroleum oil, is causing layoffs in an industry that once showed great promise in the 1960 and 70s for Wyoming.
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