It's somewhat disingenuous to use "primary energy" stats in this discussion. IIUC it includes stuff like gasoline used for transportation and natural gas used for heating and cooking. In France they produce 70-80% of their electricity from nuclear plants. Installing more renewables will not solve migration to EV and heat pumps, it's a whole another discussion barely relevant here.

I don't know if I'd use proportion of national energy use when a reactor offers a fixed output while each nation's consumption (and area for alternative renewables) can drastically differ.

In 2019, the 93 nuclear reactors in the US produced 809.41 terawatt-hours of electricity[0]. Each reactor, as an average, produced about 8.7 terawatt-hours of electricity per year. Using a list with the power consumption per country[1], it seems like everything beneath rank roughly 100[2] would have their entire power needs met by a single reactor performing at the avg return of a US reactor (assuming peaks can be met as well).

To me, that seems promising and exciting. Smaller (by landmass) countries may not have the same ability to deploy renewables across wide swaths of land. A nuclear power plant can offset some of the necessity for land to scale energy use in a green-powered world without relying on importing energy.

I'm not sure that this is a good enough argument on its own to develop nuclear, especially given some of the lifetime costs, but I think it's a reasonable concern to want domestic power stability.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

[2] Ranking is not representing total energy consumption per year, it seems, since sometimes the energy consumption goes up as rank decreases. Roughly though, everything in the bottom half of countries is within the reaches of at most 1 reactor.

Edit: Edited for formatting on sources

> In the US and Japan the fraction of primary energy supplied by nuclear power is almost negligible (8% [1] and 3% [2]). Even the famously large French nuclear industry only manages 39% [3].

See the province of Ontario where 50-70% of power is from nuclear generation ("Supply" tab):

* https://www.ieso.ca/power-data

A steady 10,000 MW. Hydro tends to supply another 3000 MW for baseload. As wind fluctuates, gas turbines can brought online as needed.

We could use another 3000MW of nuclear capacity IMHO.

(I live 50km from one of the nuke plants.)

I mean, wouldn't it be an order of magnitude in the US? Going from 8% to 80% is a matter of resource allocation, not technology breakthrough.

it's good or bad?