Breeder reactors can create more fuel, but even without these, there is a substantial amount of uranium that this is a non-issue. By the same token, solar is also non-renewable since it requires real resources mined from the earth which are in finite supply and solar panels are not 100% recyclable (and especially not the batteries required to make solar reliable). In this sense, nothing is renewable -- even hydro will run out eventually when the earth cools and plate tectonics comes to an end.
Anyway, nuclear is never included in the "renewable" bucket, because the fuel has to be harvested and doesn't renew on a human timescale. Nuclear is green, because its net emissions are almost zero.
OTOH burning wood is renewable, but not green, and also not sustainable. So nothing inherently good about being renewable.
It's pointless to have a practical classification to then come with "technically..." and some weird and unpractical reason.
> Anyway, nuclear is never included in the "renewable" bucket, because the fuel has to be harvested and doesn't renew on a human timescale.
You can make the case that it does - if you count uranium in seawater. Theres enough dissolved there now to fuel all the reactors on earth for 60,000 years. Geological processes continually replenish the dissolved uranium.
Yes, and you can argue that coal and oil are currently being created... very slowly... from dead trees and what not. So renewable vs non-renewable doesn't make any sense anymore.
Lets make another name: "energy which source can get replenished in less than 100 years (a life time), as wood, or less, as solar, wind, waves, and can be practically harvested with current methods i.e. not fussion or matter dissolved in the sea". That's the whole phrase you should use from now on instead of "renewable".
Solar isn't something that can ever be replenished. There's a fixed quantity of fuel in the sun. Once it burns out, it's gone. That provides the input energy into the process for solar, wind and wood.
With breeder reactors the uranium in seawater would last us 15 million years at current nuclear power consumption levels. If that's not renewable...
I though it was already clear that we were talking human scale. And you still talk about 4,500 million years as non-renewable, but 15 million years (plus 100% magic ocean harvesting) as renewable. At no point anybody said "infinitely renewable", and you arguing it makes that a strawman argument.
Renewable is defined, like it or not, as a source that replenishes in a finite human scale (roughly, 50-100 years). Sun, waves, hydraulics and wind "replenish" everyday. Wood takes about 30 years. If you find yourself saying things like "15 millions years" or "60,000" years, it's not renewable.
> solar panels are not 100% recyclable (and especially not the batteries required to make solar reliable)
While I can believe that we don’t have a current recycling chain set up for these, I absolutely do not believe that they are genuinely non-recyclable.
We make both of these out of a variety of literal rocks, extracting trace elements and purifying them greatly in the process of manufacture. Even in the worst case, it’s easier to start from the end products than from rocks.
