Given that China is building out more coal plants than all other countries combined, I think that’s telling about the efficacy of renewables to achieve net 0. T

Given that China is building out more coal plants than all other countries combined, I think that’s telling about the efficacy of renewables to achieve net 0. They’re targeting 2030 for peak CO2 emissions because they’re trying to cheaply electrify as much of their population as possible as quickly as possible because the CO2 reduction efforts that will dominate 2050-2100 will impose significant economic growth challenges & China wants to make sure they’re in a more stable position to compete with the West. Yes, China is building a huge amount of solar capacity, but AFAICT it’s all about absorbing peak growth as they add more consumers of electricity. Baseline growth remains a huge problem and China is solving that with a mix of nuclear and fossil fuels. I fully expect China will continue to ramp up nuclear as they get better at it. And EVs are a huge iceberg problem for the electric grid as they currently don’t run off the grid and represents a massive amount of energy consumption that will be added to the grid. On top of that they consume a huge amount of battery production which means there’s not that much left over for grid scale batteries. We also have no existence proof of economical grid scale batteries at any meaningful scale. You also have to overbuild your solar by quite a bit so that you can charge the battery up when the sun is shining to time-shift that excess capacity into the night. Solar is fine and it’s not a knock against it, but there’s simply no trajectory to reach net 0 CO2 emissions and you will end up with a hybrid grid. 18% nuclear would represent a huge CO2 reduction because all that capacity would otherwise be fossil fuels (because the alternative is not building batteries because that tech doesn’t exist yet). MSRs are a neat party trick but honestly I think China’s approach of SMRs is a far safer bet in terms of being a massive cost reduction, safer, and use waaay less water & are far less of a research project. My hunch is that they’re also standardizing their nuclear plant designs to keep costs in check. Keep in mind that France is 90% fossil fuel free in their grid even though nuclear only represents ~60% of energy produced. I haven’t read anywhere that fission failed due to economics - it has always been price competitive with fossil fuels. It’s the regulatory burdens & concerns about safety (some valid, most not) that strangled its growth. Do you have any links suggesting nuclear construction is uneconomical?