> In every other turbine?
You were presenting it as necessary. It's neither necessary nor particularly prevalent for onshore wind. Enercon use none, Vestas' smaller turbines use none. Other DFIG and EESG turbines use none. Smaller offshore turbines overlapwith onshore ones. The larger offshore turbines are experimenting with iron nitride which is better but unproven. Some designs (like the e126 and family) already use negligible copper. The rest of the industry is reducing it.
> Don't worry we're running out of the sand to make glass too, and it's also an environmental nightmare. [2]
That's the kind of sand you need in much larger quantities for the concrete in a nuclear reactor. It doesn't matter if glass sand is smooth so you can get it from a desert.
For Uranium leaching of low grade ore (the only kind available in a mass expansion scenario) you need 40-200kg of sulfuric acid mixed with >3000kg of ore per kg of Uranium https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
1kg of natural uranium produces about 1kW for 3-6 years.
1kg of PV including glass but not the frame produces about 5W net for 30-50 years.
The sulfuric acid quantity is larger in an ISL mine, and the crushed ore slurry quantity is orders of magnitude larger.
> It's not my sea mining, I was responding to your false statement that we're anywhere close to running out of uranium. There's plenty on shore for hundreds of years, and by then I'm sure we'll have a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem, either removing it from the sea, or moving to breeder reactors, or the thorium cycle. Put on your problem solving hat my friend.
It's your scifi scenario. There is only enough for the current fleet (about 2% of world primary energy) for 100 or so years. Expanding it enough to make a difference reduces this to a couple of decades. Sea mining for a burner reactor is a ridiculous proposition if you look at the actual numbers.
Breeder reactors don't exist. No power generating reactor has ever run on fissile fuel bred using an equal or smaller amount of fissile fuel. Even if a commercial design is made, most of the world will never be allowed to operate one, and it won't be developed on any timescale to make a difference.
The problem solving hat is on, and the solution doesn't involve nuclear. It can't solve more than a tiny fraction of the problem, and it can't even do that well or quickly. There's no reason to deal with the downsides.