Environment & Energy

...making magnets for useless wind turbines, world energy production at 700 Exajoules per year, humanity could run on the uranium and thorium already mined for centuries.

I've done this calculation many times.

An antinuke "renewable energy will save us" type complaining about mining anything is like a MAGAT complaining about corruption.

A kilogram of plutonium fully fissioned, excluding neutrinos, has an energy density of about 80 trillion Joules. A kg of coal, about which our antinukes and "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes couldn't care less, depending on grade, about 25 million Joules. It follows that a kg of plutonium is the equivalent of more than 3,000 tons of coal.

This suggests that to cover all of the world's energy demand at about 700 Exajoules, higher than the WEO figures for 2024, around 650 EJ, less than 9000 tons of plutonium would need to be fissioned each year, less in improved exergy recovery exploiting waste heat through process intensification.

If we take the weight of a wind turbine tower, ignoring the coal coked to make the steel, as 200 tons, for a MW+ scale turbine the amount of plutonium required is about the weight of around 50 wind turbine towers.

Transmuted into plutonium, the depleted uranium at Fernald Ohio is enough, in theory, to meet world energy demand for about a thousand years.

I often note that the ocean contains about 4.5 billion tons of uranium, continuously cycled from the mantle by rivers, although our happy antinukes have stoppered most of the world's major rivers with dams.

There are thousands of papers, I have oodles of them in my files, on the recovery of this oceanic uranium, if it were needed, albeit at a higher cost than mined uranium.

Uranium is inexhaustible. Dysprosium is not.

It is the extraordinary energy density of nuclear fuels that makes them environmentally superior to fossil fuels, about which again antinukes couldn't care less, as well as all the so called "renewable energy" junk that antinukes peddle to attack nuclear energy.

The above, of course does not apply to our existing nuclear fleet, which is largely based on 20th century technology, since antinukes have successfully vandalized the intellectual and manufacturing nuclear infrastructure in the Western world, although China has made huge strides in building such an infrastructure.

However all of the above is feasible, if not immediately accessible.

It is technically feasible to live in a world with very low requirements for mining, but mining interests have won the day by selling a snake oil like scheme to keep the fossil fuel industry in place, with wind and solar lipstick on the pig, where it is choking us to death, this by selling the absurd idea that mining millions of tons of metals for so called "renewable energy" is "green."

It isn't.

Have a nice day.