Im not really sure why you decided to bring up your career in an unrelated field. Honestly, if I was arguing for perpetual growth on a finite planet, I wouldn’t tell anyone I was a scientist, let alone demand someone “take the L” for having to explain to you that our energy consumption can’t grow perpetually.

I never argued for perpetual growth on earth. I think you’ve completely missed what I am talking about. I only started arguing with you because it became obvious you had no idea what you were talking about with regards to renewables and nuclear.

If you had started off by explaining that degrowth to you just meant not expanding infinitely on earth then most of this argument wouldn’t have even happened. I don’t support infinite growth on one planet either. I support expanding out into the solar system and even further away in the long term, but even that obviously has it’s limits somewhere.

To me it sounded like you were saying we can’t move to renewables without shrinking the economy massively and tanking standards of living.

Looking back at this argument I can see it’s one of those where neither party actually understands the others position, and is actually just arguing against what they think the other person believes.

I mean, you could Google “uranium shortage” and find what you need very quickly. Again, I’m not spending my evening teaching you and providing you with sources that you’re unable to refute in any way, despite your best efforts. I’m sure you’ve convinced yourself that anyone who doesn’t do that for you must be wrong but thats just not how the world works.

Yeah there will eventually be a shortage of U-235. I fully admit that. There isn’t and won’t be a shortage of either Th-232 or U-238 for over 100 years at least. By then we will probably have found something else. That’s just thinking about nuclear fission as well. To me nuclear fission is about filling in the gaps that renewables can’t cover until we work out energy storage, nuclear fusion, neutrinovoltaics, or something entirely new. Nuclear fission is one of the best power sources we have today, but I don’t expect that to always be the case.

Nuclear fusion uses completely different fuels (no uranium, plutonium, or thorium) that have their own sourcing considerations. Getting fuel sources for fusion might legitimately be a problem, but we don’t know that yet as we haven’t picked which kinds of fusion fuel we are going to use yet. Current experiments involve things like tritium which have to be made artificially from other isotopes like deuterium using particle accelerators or nuclear reactors. This is used at the moment because it’s the easiest to do fusion with. There are other options though, and eventually we might work out how to do fusion with ordinary hydrogen (protium/H1). Since hydrogen (specifically protium/H1) is the most abundant material or isotope in the Universe and is found in everyday water that’s obviously the best option if we can build a reactor to use it.

I’ve already told you how there isn’t enough of the materials we need to make sufficient numbers of solar panels or wind turbines, let alone figure out a way to store the energy for when we need it later.

Why use solar panels? You can use concentrated solar power that doesn’t rely on photovoltaics. You instead use mirrors to heat up water or salt, that then drives a turbine or a thermochemical reaction. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power

Also what materials are we running out of for solar panels? From what I have seen there are multiple ways to make solar panels using different materials, some more efficient than others. Most of them seem to be made from a mixture of silicon, glass, and metal. All of which are fairly abundant material, and at least some of which can be recycled.

Wind turbines are essentially glorified windmills with an electric generator hooked up. They can be made from any number of materials. Thus includes wood for the part that catches the wind. Likewise the generator portion can be made from any number of metals so long as they can be turned into wires. Steel and aluminum aren’t as good as copper for sure, but they still work in a pinch. There are already multiple designs in use throughout the world and at different scales. They are built the way they are now because it gives the best return on investment. That’s just how capitalism works, for better or for worse. It’s not hard to imagine a world where we use something else because we ran out of the cheapest available material and it’s cheaper to use something different than to recycle it.

You also conveniently forget that recycling is a thing. In physics matter and energy is conserved. You can convert matter into energy and back again too. Even when you burn something like a fossil fuel it doesn’t just disappear, it becomes things like carbon dioxide or water as I am sure you know. With enough time and energy you can turn that carbon dioxide back into coal or diesel or whatever is you started with, or into something else entirely. The only things you can truly run out of is lack of entropy. Entropy can only increase, so matter in a low entropy state is always at a premium.

I’ve already told you how there isn’t enough of the materials we need to make sufficient numbers of solar panels or wind turbines, let alone figure out a way to store the energy for when we need it later.

Storage is indeed a problem I will give you that. Part of the solution to this is new technologies like sodium ion batteries that are gaining traction at the moment. Some of it will come from closing down factories when power is low, and starting them back up when there is a surplus.

Degrowth isn’t even a complete solution either. While I strongly disagree that the economy can grow to infinity like some economists believe, I also don’t think it can shrink forever too. There needs to be give and take. I believe the economy should grow and shrink in accordance with people’s needs and the available resources. To me the extreme pro growth and degrowth movements are both extremists.

uranium shortage

Fyi I had a quick look and all I can see is sources saying we need to build more uranium mines by 2030 to meet demand. Nothing about the earth running out.