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It's important not just to look at current electricity usage but total energy needs. To truly decarbonise you need to stop burning gas for heating, stop burning fuel for transportation (or convert to Hydrogen) and so on. So the existence of countries that can supply their current electricity needs via renewables doesn't immediately imply that for a zero carbon future renewables is all that is needed.

David MacKay covers this in his excellent book: https://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_103.shtml

As for political will I feel we should first start with the numbers and works out what adds up. If people don't want nuclear but nuclear is the only path to zero carbon then we'll need to choose one or the other.

Right now we can make great progress by ignoring nuclear because there's lots of things to be done. So go all in on renewables and ditch nuclear is a politically easy choice. Does great things for the stats and many people don't like nuclear. Will it take us all the way though?

>As for political will I feel we should first start with the numbers and works out what adds up. If people don't want nuclear but nuclear is the only path to zero carbon then we'll need to choose one or the other.

I've not seen any figures which don't add up except ones which make some rather outrageous assumptions (e.g. no demand side management, no overproduction, intermittency stats based upon smaller, shittier turbines, etc.).

David Mackay's book is good but it's rather outdated - the figures are from 2006/2007 and renewables have plummeted so far in price since then that it rather changes the picture of what's achievable.

>So go all in on renewables and ditch nuclear is a politically easy choice.

I don't believe that's necessarily true. The nuclear lobby has spent a lot of money trying to make their choice politically easier.

The nascent renewables lobby, by contrast, doesnt' spend nearly as much on lobbying.

Renewables are happening very quickly and have put several countries on a path to a zero carbon energy economy. Some of these countries are ahead of their own schedules. Most of these plans are based on current efficiencies and costs for renewables and do not take into account improvements that are coming. That makes these plans overly conservative.

IMHO clean energy will take us a lot further than just our current base line needs because of these improvements. For example, right now people are reluctant to install air conditioning because of the cost of energy and concerns about global warming. Cheap, plentiful, clean energy changes that. If house owners can generate all the energy they need for a one time cost of installing batteries and solar, this concern goes away.

Hydrogen will be popular for things like heavy industry, shipping and other places where delivering large amounts of electricity cheaply is needed and batteries won't be good enough. These use cases are far fewer than most hydrogen fans hope/expect and IMHO excludes most forms of four wheel traffic on the road I don't see a business case for installing massive solar infrastructure when EV ranges are hitting 400+ miles already with rapidly improving recharge rates.

Most of that hydrogen will be generated using excess wind or solar and the business case for that will be that that energy is so cheap that the relative inefficiencies don't matter. It will have to compete with other synthetic fuels because at that point fossil fuels will be no longer be cost competitive with that either. Why buy barrels of oil at 50-100$ each when you can just convert kwh + water + air into carbohydrates?

Nuclear is on a slow but steady way out. At this point there are only a handful of countries investing in nuclear and quite a few have non technical reasons for this (i.e. military ones). R&d progress has been glacial and cost is an order of magnitudes from being competitive in the current market already. In most places that still have nuclear, it's one of the most expensive options in the market and there are a lot of nuclear plants at risk of shutting down early because of it.

IMHO fusion might still happen in half a century or so. By then most countries will have shut down all remaining coal, gas, and nuclear plants. At that point it will have to be super cheap to be off interest.

> Finland even built a new one recently.

They are still in the process of building it, and it is set to become the second most expensive building built in modern times. [0]

[0] https://metropolitan.fi/entry/olkiluoto-ol3-second-most-expe...

So, do you care about the environment or not?

It should be reduce carbon no matter the dollar cost, right?

It's utterly delusional to think that low density generation such as solar or wind can meet the growing energy needs without covering vast areas.

And electric vehicles will just increase the need.

> It should be reduce carbon no matter the dollar cost, right?

The point is that nuclear is expensive. You get more energy per dollar by building renewables.

That's only true at low penetration of renewables. When you approach 100% clean energy, even current new nuclear actually looks just as cheap or cheaper as the combination of curtailment (i.e. over-building nameplate capacity and throwing away much of the energy), storage, and transmission you need to produce reliable power with wind and solar alone.

(and for the same reason, we should be looking at expanding hydro and geothermal)

So while I definitely think we should build solar and wind, it's ridiculous to just dismiss nuclear out of hand for cost reasons if the goal is 100% clean energy (unless you have, say, massive amounts of hydro power).

Given the climate emergency, it's silly to pit one clean energy project against another when in fact we need all we can get. Particularly in the case of variable renewables, as they benefit tremendously from being in a source-diverse power grid.

I think increased interconnects are the way to go, but don't mind adding nuclear capacity. It's worth noting though, that Norway is quite an exception in their hydro capacity, as there is so much height differences in their terrain. Increasing hydro capacity is also pretty hard these days due to enormous environmental cost and the fact that most of the viable sites are already built.

> "I think increased interconnects are the way to go..."

What do you mean by this?

Power sharing across national borders was how I interpreted it. Common in Europe.

Yes. So there's smaller difference in wind power generation total output when you sum across larger area. The same is true for solar generation to some extent, but of course it's dark in the night across the whole Europe.

And then there are countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, where hydro will never be enough, solar and wind will require ridiculous levels of storage and even nuclear is difficult to justify.

Being a net exporter of electricity does not imply that a country does not need nuclear.

Yes, some tiny European countries can rely on hydro or geothermal for baseline generation. Most countries can’t, and even if they’re a net exporter, they’re heavily dependent on fossil fuels (or nuclear) for filling in gaps.

Battery technology is nowhere near sufficient for the need, things like pumped storage are space intensive, and exotic stuff like hydrogen and molten sodium and whatnot are decades off. Something has to fill the gap. Nuclear is a good choice.

Nuclear is not a good choice because it would take decades to even agree that they need to be build and then decades more to actually build them. That makes it a pretty horrible option to fill any gaps. We can fix most of the issues you mention during that timespan. Honestly, it just requires applying economies of scale to what we have right now to drop the cost and make it even more cheaper than it already is.

I expect more nuclear to be shut down than being delivered during that time. It's not a growth market.

20-30 years from now, several countries are planning to be 100% on renewables and most of those are not planning to build any new nuclear plants. Most of the remaining countries will be making similar plans in the next ten years.