Some statistics on the climate and energy costs of concrete production.
Recently, when reporting on a proposal, particularly advanced in coal dependent Poland, on the conversion of coal power infrastructure into nuclear plants, a critic, looking for an excuse to make a rote (and ignorant) announcement that nothing involving nuclear energy could possibly work, declared containment buildings "too expensive."
Of course, the critic clearly knows very little about engineering, and in my opinion zero about science, less than zero about economics, and predictably does not raise the same point about the literally thousands of concrete platforms for wind turbines required to match the energy output of a single nuclear plant - not even counting the requirements for the redundant fossil fuel systems to address wind's unreliability, or the fact that nuclear plants are now designed to operate for a significant portion of a century, while wind turbines convert to landfill in about 20 years.
The attention of antinukes is very, very, very, very selective, which accounts for issues like climate change and a vast death toll from air pollution. They can't see the forests for the trees, which is not a problem, because very few of these people ever saw a forest they weren't ready to rip apart and industrialize for so called "renewable energy."
Concrete is a problem, but it can be addressed with climate change gas free high temperatures, of which there is only one form, nuclear energy.
I came across a paper this evening on a subject which gives some idea of the scale of the climate cost and energy cost of concrete manufacture, although the main topic of the paper was not especially directed at this point.
The paper is this one: Effect of Impurities on the Decarbonization of Calcium Carbonate Using Aqueous Sodium Hydroxide, Marco Simoni, Theodore Hanein, Chun Long Woo, John Provis, and Hajime Kinoshita ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2022 10 (36), 11913-11925.
The statistics on the climate and energy cost of concrete from the introduction to the paper:
The calcination of calcium carbonate usually involves two distinct emission sources: process- and fuel-derived CO2. The former arises from the calcination stoichiometry (0.44 kgCO2/kgCaCO3), (6) while the latter is linked to the combustion of the hydrocarbon fuels to attain the required pyro-processing temperatures (∼900 °C (2,7) for lime production and 1500 °C (5) for PC production). Although the fuels represent the largest portion of the overall economic operating costs for both lime and cement industries, (8) the process CO2 represents the biggest challenge for their sustainable production. The process CO2 accounts for the majority of the CO2 emissions from the limestone calcination step, and several solutions have been proposed...
The current rate of carbon dioxide release while we all wait for the "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come is on the order of 35 billion tons per year.
Good luck with generating temperatures of 1500 °C sustainably and reliably with wind turbines.