| > 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... |