"New nuclear capacity of 3.3 gigawatts (GW) in 2017 was outweighed by lost capacity of 4.6 GW. Over the past 20 years, there has been modest growth (12.6%, 44 GW) in global nuclear power capacity if reactors currently in long-term outage are included. However, including those reactors ... in the count of ‘operable’ or ‘operational’ or ‘operating’ reactors is, as former WNA executive Steve Kidd states, 'misleading' and 'clearly ridiculous'."
- #JimGreen, 2018
https://energypost.eu/nuclear-power-in-crisis-welcome-to-the-era-of-nuclear-decommissioning/
"Renewables (24.5% of global generation) generate more than twice as much electricity as nuclear power (<10.5%) and the gap is growing rapidly. The International Energy Agency predicts renewable energy capacity growth of 43% (920 GW) from 2017 to 2022. Overall, the share of renewables in power generation will reach 30% in 2022 according to the IEA. By then, nuclear’s share will be around 10% and renewables will be out-generating nuclear by a factor of three."
"Lobbyists engaged each other in heated arguments over possible solutions to nuclear power’s crisis ‒ in a nutshell, some favour industry consolidation while others think innovation is essential, all of them think that taxpayer subsidies need to be massively increased, and none of them are interested in the tedious work of building public support by strengthening nuclear safety and regulatory standards, strengthening the safeguards system, etc."
It's not "nuclear power" that is the crisis today - it's the climate change. And if you have a country shutting down zero-emission energy source, saying it will replace it by a 3x more CO2 intensive source (solar) and then replaces it with one that is 30x more intensive (fossil gas) then I say this makes the crisis worse.
@kravietz Most of your talking points were covered by the author of the piece I linked in the OP. Whose point is that even if nuclear plants were a safe, cost-effective and eco-friendly energy source (and they're none of these), there isn't enough being built to replace current plants, let alone displace fossil fueled plants. So even if we embarked on a massive project of nuclear construction (funded by ?), it wouldn't come onstream soon enough to make any difference to climate change.
Most of your talking points are based on the "for nuclear pick the oldest tech and worst-case scenarios, for RE pick the latest & best-case" fallacy.
This "hey we love nuclear but we just won't make it in time" is a perfect example.
Mmost nuclear plants are built in or under 5 years. This is the data. The two projects that anti-nuclear activists uses as flagship examples of delays - HPC and Flamanville - were delayed specifically by anti-nuclear activists by all means possible.
@kravietz
> delayed specifically by anti-nuclear activists by all means possible.
So? Large-scale renewable plants get delayed by NIMBYism too. Getting through planning permission processes is just part of building stuff (especially big stuff that can explode) in democratic countries. China doesn't have to deal with that, but can still get large-scale renewables onstream *much* faster than nuclear plants.
Opponents of nuclear power are using extremely biased, manipulated arguments based on ancient technologies and raising risks which they happily ignore for renewables (like uranium mining vs rare earth metals mining).
I witnessed a few "public debates" on nuclear energy - as people are trying to actually talk, Greenpeace activists just shout to prevent any debate from happening.
In France you had Green activist actually shooting from RPG at a nuclear reactor to prove it's dangerous.
This is because everyone who had anything to do with science left Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth long time ago in protest against their fanatic policy against nuclear and genetic engineering. James Lovelock, Stewart Brand and many others were prominent environmentalists who parted from these organisations as they pushed away from science towards fanaticism and black-and-white PR.
