There are significant problems around rolling out that much capacity quickly enough, and I also don't think nuclear should have been shut down that hastily, but I don't think "only nuclear can cover long-term energy needs" is true in any way.
There are significant problems around rolling out that much capacity quickly enough, and I also don't think nuclear should have been shut down that hastily, but I don't think "only nuclear can cover long-term energy needs" is true in any way.
1 TWh on the scale of a country is very little - a 1 GW nuclear plant operating continuously would generate over 8 TWh a year.
Nevertheless the back of the napkin math of land requirements for solar check out, so it was probably just a typo and OP meant to say PWh.
Unsurprisingly the use cases where energy consumption is going down lead on electrification (because it's a cost advantage), so it may seem like electrification reduces energy consumption.
But if you really want to leave fossil fuels behind, the electric consumption will go up, up and beyond.
* It's also debatable how much electricity use will actually go up. Logic says this must happen, but logic is not science. We have millions of EVs now in the EU and electricity production is less than it was 20 years ago. Efficiency is a source of energy. If you look at the US for example, it uses almost twice as much electricity per capita than Germany, and I would say they both get the same high level if living. If you look at it that way, Americans can cut their use almost in half and live the same standard of living. This can power a lot of EVs and heat pumps without adding a single GW of new capacity.
But yes, if all it took was 5% of landmass (which also doesn’t get permanently unusable nor polluted), I’d say that would be a pretty good deal, yeah. This is significantly less than what’s used for livestock farming, to put it into perspective.
Realistically, I don’t think we’ll solve storage fast enough to be able to afford zero nuclear power in Europe.
(1) https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/energie/erneuerbar...