Climate Energy Politics

Solar and wind power require more resources than nuclear power

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The original article can be read as “Schlumpfs graphic 128” in the online Nebelspalter of 14 October 2024.

Of the low-carbon technologies of wind, solar and nuclear power, nuclear power has by far the best resource footprint. This means that nuclear power plants require fewer materials, fewer critical minerals and produce less mining waste than solar and wind power plants. This is the conclusion of a study by the American think tank “Breakthrough Institute”, which was published in April of this year (see here).

What is important:

– Measured in terms of electricity output, the material requirements of a nuclear power plant are lower than those of solar and, above all, wind power plants – even though the latter have caught up.
– In the case of critical minerals, nuclear power plants only need 8 to 22 percent of what solar and wind power plants require.
– The mining footprint of a nuclear power plant per unit of electricity is 30 percent of a solar farm and 23 percent of an onshore wind farm.

The title “Updated Mining Footprint and Raw Material Needs for Clean Energy” (see here) indicates the two main points addressed in the study: One is about the material requirements needed to generate clean electricity, and the other is about the rock from mining that is needed to extract these materials.

In nuclear energy, these material flows are being investigated for three different reactors: For the AP1000 from Westinghouse (see here), the EPR from AREVA (see here) and the BWRX-300 from Hitachi (see here). The AP1000 always comes out on top. These three nuclear reactors are compared with a solar farm (solar PV farm), a wind farm on land (onshore) and a wind farm at sea (offshore). I will not discuss offshore wind farms here because they are not relevant for Switzerland.

Comparison of the material intensity of low-carbon energy sources

The study first asks about the material requirements for clean electricity. The following graphic shows the quantities of which materials have to be used by the various energy producers in order to produce one gigawatt hour of electricity. In other words: What is the material intensity per gigawatt hour for the individual electricity producers?

Materialintensität Saubereenergien
Source: Breakthrough Institute

The graph shows material consumption in 27 material categories: From bottom to top, these are “iron in steel” (dark blue), “sum of concrete” (orange) through to zinc and uranium (gray). All values are given in kilograms per gigawatt hour of electricity. The dotted lines for the nuclear power plants indicate the value that could be achieved with a workload of 92 percent and a service life of 80 years.

Wind turbines need seven times more material than nuclear power plants

It is interesting to note that both nuclear power plants and onshore wind turbines consist of around 98 percent iron and concrete, albeit with a significantly higher proportion of iron in the case of wind turbines. In absolute terms, however, the wind turbines require five to eleven times more material than a nuclear power plant, at a good 7000 kilograms.

The material composition of a solar system is different: Although it also consists of 61 percent concrete and mainly iron, it also has other weighty proportions with 19 percent PV cover glass (light green) and 10 percent aluminum (light blue). However, with a total weight of 1809 kilograms, a solar farm still requires 1.3 to 2.9 times more material than a nuclear power plant.

Material requirements for solar power have fallen sharply

However, the material requirement for solar power shown here differs greatly from that published in the “Quadrennial Technology Review” of the US Department of Energy in 2015, which has been cited in many places to date – I also used it in my book “Atomkraft – Das Tabu” (see here). With the new figures shown from the study discussed here, however, the material requirements of solar compared to nuclear fall massively from 18 times more to twice more.

Nuclear power plants need far fewer critical minerals

The report specifically examines the use of critical minerals, i.e. those substances that could become scarce. The next graph shows the respective kilogram share of these critical minerals per gigawatt hour of electricity generated for the same energy producers:

Kritischemineralien
Source: Breakthrough Institute

The graph shows that solar farms require the most critical minerals: Aluminum alone accounts for 75 percent of the total requirement of 239 kilograms. Larger amounts of zinc, manganese, nickel and magnesium are also required. The total requirement for onshore wind of 123 kilograms consists mainly of aluminum, nickel, manganese and chromium. The proportion of nuclear power plants compared to solar and wind fluctuates between eight percent (AP1000 to solar) and 22 percent (EPR to wind).

The mining footprint is crucial

However, because all materials quantified to date must first be extracted from the raw materials used in mining, a study of the resource requirements of energy sources must necessarily present a balance sheet of such a mining footprint. The next graph shows this mining intensity per gigawatt hour of electricity in kilograms of rock:

Fig7 Bergbau
Source: Breakthrough Institute

Only this graph, which also includes all mining waste, shows the actual environmental impact of the energy sources examined. In comparison to the pure material requirements in Figure 1, the ratios have shifted considerably in some cases. For example, the proportion of uranium in nuclear power plants (gray above) has now risen to 29 percent, whereas uranium accounted for only 0.2 percent in Figure 1. This means that uranium mining and subsequent enrichment generate a lot of waste.

Nuclear power plants require three to six times less resources than wind and solar

In general, this graph shows that the proportion of iron and concrete, which were dominant in the pure material analysis in graph 1, decreases significantly in the mining footprint, while the proportions of copper (gray) and nickel (light blue) increase sharply. Copper, for example, is becoming the dominant consumption element in solar systems: at 23,100 kilograms, it accounts for a good half of the mining footprint of solar.

With a mining footprint of 10,000 to 13,600 kilograms for nuclear power plants and 45,300 kilograms for solar and 59,500 kilograms for wind power plants, this overall environmental footprint shows that nuclear power plants consume between three and six times fewer resources per unit of electricity generated than the new renewables.

Conclusion: Even with the latest figures from this new study, nuclear power plants perform significantly better than solar farms and onshore wind farms in terms of both material and overall resource requirements. And this is without taking into account the fact that non-controllable green electricity without grid adjustment, storage and backup is actually not comparable with nuclear power.

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