Most wind turbine blades are fiberglass, which isn't really recyclable.
A nuclear power plant is compact compared to the energy produced, and has an exceptionally long lifetime in comparison to current "renewables".
The components of a solar panel are individually recyclable, but that doesn't mean that anyone has really figured out how to recycle the actual finished panels in any kind of significant energy/resource saving way.
Similarly, the amount of fuel needed to be mined for nuclear energy is trivial, especially if one allows reprocessing.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110722031413/http://www.nuclea...
At 2500kg/m^3 of concrete, and excluding the rebar, that's roughly 4.5W/kg of material. For Sizewell B, than's 0.9W/kg.
Meanwhile, a 300W solar panel weighs ~40 pounds, and even if it has massive mounting structures that weigh twice as much as the panel itself, that's 5-10W/kg.
A nuclear powerplant has a lifetime of 40-60 years. Solar panels have warranties of 25 years, but often operate a decade or more longer. Nuclear does not have an "exceptionally long lifetime" in comparison.
That doesn't mean we have to still build them. Technology marches on - we have improved designs. Micro-reactors solve a lot of issues - including transmission loss/electrical grid fragility/diversification of generation.
I'd be ecstatic if someone figures out how to change the ROI on nuclear, but I'm no longer optimistic about it. Just saying the words "small modular reactors" isn't a solution.
Someone's forgetting capacity factor-- 10 to 30%.
I also don't think looking at mass-- and primarily concrete-- is the best way to measure resource usage.
> A nuclear powerplant has a lifetime of 40-60 years. Solar panels have warranties of 25 years, but often operate a decade or more longer. Nuclear does not have an "exceptionally long lifetime" in comparison.
A nuclear powerplant might have a design lifetime of 40 years, but we're finding that there is little issue with operating them to 80 years and beyond with maintenance and retrofit programs.
Which puts solar and nuclear on completely the same scale...
If you don't think mass is a good way to compare, and you're concerned about resources, please suggest the metric that will somehow make nuclear look good. Because that concrete is not very recyclable. So the 95% recyclability of solar panels is making them look a looooot better than nuclear once we move beyond mass to something more nuanced.
PV capacity factor is typically 16%-28% [1], which adjusting the W/kg, gives us:
Solar PV: 0.8W/kg - 2.8W/kg, capacity factor adjusted (with supporting infrastructure weighing 2x the panels, a total spitball)
Nuclear: 0.8W/kg - 4.5W/kg, capacity factor adjusted, two different modern reactor designs, concrete only.
With this ratio, higher numbers mean better power densities, and the ranges completely overlap between nuclear and solar PV. Nuclear isn't achieving orders of magnitude better power density over solar.
No one claimed an order of magnitude better. Nuclear looks somewhat more sustainable than renewable, and it can do some things renewables can't.
We should be doing both.
How can one even imagine a space-faring civilization powered by wind mills?
GP was complaining about the fact nuclear would be a better overall option because of sustainability issues that renewables have. I believe GP was being disingenuous and says so in bad faith. The fact is that we as a species have a terrible track record in unsustainable behavior. Renewables are not exempt from this. We can (and should) do better (including subsidizing e-waste recycling; putting tariffs on—or taxing—new aluminum that underbids recycled; etc.).
Not doing renewables because of this unsustainable track record is just plain silly, and arguing for such is probably done in bad faith, especially if nuclear is not held to the same standards.
I don’t understand why you say that. If a wind mill blade is made out of aluminium, it can be recycled as aluminium after it has been decommissioned. It being used in a high tech device doesn’t change that fact. Same if solar cells are primarily made out of glass and silicon, both could be recycled into anything else that requires glass or silicon.
I also don’t understand how you are so willing to give existing challenges of nuclear a break because “regulation and cost” are preventing it from being realized, but you are not willing to give recycling solar cells and wind mill parts the same break. Arguably the only hindrance to recycling high tech devises is economic and the economy of recycling could just as easily—and arguably more easily—be regulated and subsidized such that recycling high tech devises becomes a viable option.
But I feel like we are dancing around the issues here. There are plenty of things we are doing wrong as inhabitants of the planet, inefficient land use is one of these. In many cases we would only need to initiate trivial changes which would result in us keeping our standard of living while stopping doing sustained damage to the ecosystem. I honestly think that renewable energy infrastructure is one of these things. We could (and should) do it in a more sustainable way. Abandoning it in favor of nuclear because we cannot do it 100% sustainable is just silly (especially since neither can we do nuclear 100% sustainable).
EDIT: I honestly don’t know anything about solar cell technology (it being made out of glass and silicon is a guess). So I opened Wikipedia and found this[1].
> Most parts of a solar module can be recycled including up to 95% of certain semiconductor materials or the glass as well as large amounts of ferrous and non-ferrous metals.
EDIT 2: As children have clarified wind mill blades are mostly made out of fiberglass and not recyclable. This doesn’t though void my point as there is a lot we could do to make our impact more sustainable, including making wind turbines out of recyclable materials or finding ways to reuse fiberglass blades in new wind mills, etc. Most parts of a nuclear power plant aren’t easy to recycle either, so in either case complaining about the sustainability of wind turbines but not nuclear power plant is disingenuous.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panel#Recycling