4 ms·

235U may have an impressive energy density, but uranium ore contains very little natural uranium and natural uranium contains very little 235U. According to thi

• dane-pgp 5y ago
  To convert that into the (slightly more clumsy) units of my post above, 1400 MJ is about 390 kWh (which is a lot smaller than 24 million). Even taking the upper estimate of neodymium content then, 3.3 x 390 hours is only 54 days. I don't know how much ore needs to be dug up to extract 1 kg of neodymium, but one site boasts 7% rare earth content in the material it processes[0] so there might need to be a 14x scale factor to avoid comparing apples to ore ranges. 54 days x 14 is 2 years, which should be well under the average life time of a turbine, even before recycling is taken into account. We do have to also consider the capacity factor of wind turbines, though (not just their rated capacity), which "range from 0.26 to 0.52" according to a recent factsheet[1], so that might bump the estimate to 8 years. [0] https://mpmaterials.com/what-we-do/ https://mpmaterials.com/what-we-do/ [1] https://css.umich.edu/factsheets/wind-energy-factsheet https://css.umich.edu/factsheets/wind-energy-factsheet