3 ms·

Nuclear is plateauing, and renewables are booming: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/renewable-nuclear-direct-substitution https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/r

• JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  Blocks of links aren't an argument. > Nuclear is plateauing, and renewables are booming Nobody said otherwise. I literally said "we're deploying solar and wind as quickly as we can because they're the cheapest sources of power." You're arguing against a straw man. Renewables are booming. So is gas [1]. Your analysis fails on two counts. One, it ignores the substitution effect [2]. If we're talking about grid stability, et cetera, this is fine. If we're looking at emissions, it's not. Two, you're lumping together fossil fuels. That masks the fact that we've added about as much natural gas capacity as solar. The growth rates are different. But so are the base levels. I'll say it again: we're building renewables as fast as we can. We can't build them substantially faster. That means there is never a choice between renewables and something else; it's always renewables by default. Where there is a choice, therefore, it must be between the other options. The convenient lie the gas industry has sold the nuclear nervous is that it's a competition between solar and wind and fossil fuels. It's not. We're investing trillions of dollars in gas infrastructure with 20 to 40-year investment theses despite renewables booming because power demand is booming too, and the difference has to be made up somehow. That gas infrastructure's thesis only works if we exclude nuclear energy. (It also precludes us reaching our 2030 and 2050 emissions commitments, but nobody seems to care about those anyway.) We're building gas instead of nuclear in the West for the same reason China and India are building coal plants: it's cheaper than nuclear. Nobody is acting on emissions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_energy#/media/File:Global_primary_energy_consumption_by_source_1900_-_2021.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_energy#/media/File:Glo... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method
  • pfdietz 2y ago
    And also for the same reason China installed 180x more PV than nuclear (on a rated power basis) in 2023: PV is cheaper than nuclear. China also installed more than 4x PV than coal on a rated power basis in 2023. I don't know the capacity factor of their coal -- I hear it's operated at fairly low capacity factor -- so PV installs could well exceed coal installs (especially net coal installs) on a levelized basis there.
    • natmaka 2y ago
      Carbon intensity of electricity generation in China: 2011: 752g eqCO2 (production: 4712 TWh) 2023: 582g eqCO2 (production: 9459 TWh) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity?tab=chart&time=2011..latest&country=~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation?tab=chart&country=~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation?ta...
  • natmaka 2y ago
    You wrote "bottlenecks", I showed that we deploy more and more. The reader can decide. You first criticize me for merely providing data, then for my "analysis". Go figure. Your points (substitution effect and methane) are pertinent, but my answer wasn't about this but about the fact that there is no sign of abatement of renewables' growth. > We can't build them substantially faster One more: nothing, especially historical data, sustains this. We burn less and less fossil fuel thanks to renewables, which more and more replace it, and there is no clear indicator of this trend to change. This is too slow, granted, however there is no magic wand and demanding an immediate perfect solution is playing upon the nirvana fallacy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy ). > We're building gas instead of nuclear ... because since the 2000's: - industrial renewables appeared and are (very quickly) more and more adequate. I other words to replace fossil fuels nuclear isn't the only contender anymore. Thanks to renewables: no risk of any major accident propagating very dangerous long-term stuff difficult to recover, no hot waste, no dependency towards any provider of fuel (such as uranium), no weapons proliferation risk, quick and easy deployment, no decommission-related nightmare (see the ongoing case in the U.K.)... No wonder renewables are booming. - all nuclear-building projects are more-or-less resounding failures