[Hammershaft]

When you compare the energy densities & land required there is nothing at all enormous about a nuclear plant. It is by far the most space efficient energy source we have (especially once you factor in the upstream footprint of mining & shipping ops)

[vcdimension]

That depends on how you measure land use; are you counting the amount of space that becomes otherwise unusable, i.e. the relatively small area occupied by the towers, or the entire area of the fields in which the wind turbines are placed? (which can still be used for other things like agriculture).

Personally I think wind turbines look quite majestic, and I like to see them when I go for a drive in the countryside.

This isn't directly related to the original question of living next to a nuclear power plant vs a wind farm, but as you mentioned, nuclear power stations require large mining operations to supply them with uranium (you have to mine a lot of land for a small amount of uranium), whereas wind turbines do not. And finally, wind turbines can be erected in the sea where they don't displace any land at all.

[lazide]

You don’t need to mine much land to get very large amounts of uranium - they tend to be underground mines, and produce a truly staggering amount of energy by mass mined. Tailings can be problematic - but even the largest uranium mines have had tiny tailings piles compared to even small wind farm footprints.

[2trill2spill]

What are you talking about? Wind turbines use substantial sums of copper and that requires mining on a scale much larger than uranium mining.[1]

[1]: https://copperalliance.org.uk/knowledge-base/education/educa...

[vcdimension]

That link doesn't mention anything about the amount of land required to mine the copper needed for wind turbines.

It must be far less than is needed for mining the uranium needed to generate the same power. Think about it; the copper required for the wind turbines is a fixed one-off cost that lasts the lifetime of the turbine, and can be recycled. Nuclear reactors need a continual supply of uranium (about 27 tonnes per year for a 1GWe reactor: http://bit.ly/3voR0II).

Furthermore copper concentrations are typically around 100 times higher than uranium concentrations, which means you need far more uranium ore than copper ore to produce the same weight of metal. Copper has been extracted with relative ease for thousands of years.

And then of course, there's all the metals and concrete that are needed to build the nuclear power station.

[2trill2spill]

> It must be far less than is needed for mining the uranium needed to generate the same power. Think about it; the copper required for the wind turbines is a fixed one-off cost that lasts the lifetime of the turbine, and can be recycled. Nuclear reactors need a continual supply of uranium (about 27 tonnes per year for a 1GWe reactor: http://bit.ly/3voR0II).

A single wind turbine can contain 3.6 tons of copper[1], so using your source for uranium used by a nuclear power plant in one year. Just seven and a half wind turbines use as much copper as a nuclear power plant uses uranium in one year.

If you replaced the ~100GW of nuclear power capacity in the United States you would need about 360,000 tons of copper. It would take the current US nuclear fleet ~133 years to use the equivalent amount of uranium. The above also assumes that wind turbines runs at 100% capacity which we all know they won't. So your going to need an additional 2 - 4 times more turbines and copper to replace the current US nuclear fleet.

> Furthermore copper concentrations are typically around 100 times higher than uranium concentrations, which means you need far more uranium ore than copper ore to produce the same weight of metal. Copper has been extracted with relative ease for thousands of years.

Also copper concentrations in typical copper ore is not 100 time greater than uranium concentrations. Copper concentrations are about 0.6%[2] and uranium is 0.1% - 0.2%[3].

[1]: https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1281864/soaring-cop...

[2]: https://www.geo.arizona.edu/sites/www.geo.arizona.edu/files/...

[3]: https://www.ippnw.org/pdf/uranium-factsheet3.pdf

[vcdimension]

> Also copper concentrations in typical copper ore is not 100 time greater than uranium concentrations. Copper concentrations are about 0.6%[2] and uranium is 0.1% - 0.2%

Sorry, your right, 100x is too high, that was a rough guess. It should be more like 30-60 times higher when compared with enriched uranium (which is what a nuclear power plant uses); it takes 10 tonnes of natural uranium to produce 1 tonne of enriched uranium [1].

So 100GWe of nuclear power capacity uses around 100x25 = 2500 tonnes of enriched uranium per year. The same amount of digging would likely produce between 2500x30-2500x60 = 75,000-150,000 tonnes of copper, lets take the middle value: 112,500

So in 3.2 (360,000/112,500) years the 100GWe of nuclear power capacity has produced the same amount of digging required to produce 360,000 tonnes of copper. Multiply that by 3 to take account of wind turbine inefficiencies and that takes it to 9.6 years.

Current wind turbines last around 20 years, so even if we assume they only use newly mined copper (not recycled), and we ignore all the metals and other materials used to build the nuclear power stations, then the nuclear power stations are still going to require about twice as much earth dug up for mining.

[1] https://www.nuclear-power.net/nuclear-power-plant/nuclear-fu...