As long as major countries like Germany are keeping their ban on nuclear power, climate change cannot be that urgent.
At this point it may very well be better to go for renewables for much more of the grid coverage (after they fix their damn grid connections) But those pushing the cost picture have been everything but honest over the past 2 decades. I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage and such and a nuclear cost based on one unfinished american plant.
- nuclear also needs gas plants to handle peaking demands
> I still remember repeatedly getting that Lazard LCOE report thrown at me by germans with absolutely fantasy numbers for storage
Which one was that? Lazard has always consistently overestimated the cost of solar and solar+storage.
Let's not pretend price is any concern of the people shutting down nuclear power. That's just not what it's about. Here is their page on the subject, and as you can clearly read: nuclear power "has no future".
https://www.gruene-bundestag.de/unsere-politik/was-unsere-po...
Second, Germany would not have to rebuild nuclear power, as the green party clearly shows. They only need to reopen existing plants.
It is STILL the case that reopening the existing plants would lower prices - a bit. But it would make a very large difference for German CO2 production because coal powerplants are doing baseload now and would be displaced by the nuclear plants. And if the Ukraine and Iran wars keep going it will lower prices a lot (or rather it would prevent another large price spike)
https://www.ewi.uni-koeln.de/de/aktuelles/gasverstromung-und...
> nuclear also needs gas plants to handle peaking demands
This is not a good argument given that the alternative was to switch to gas for most of the baseload, then lose the gas due to the war in Ukraine, to then switch to coal and LNG (LNG might technically be gas, but due to additional inefficiency it's worse than coal), and now losing all gas supplies (ie. from Qatar) and being forced to use even worse LNG supplies from the US.
Hell you'd think the greens would massively sponsor chemical research into LNG, since LNG efficiency is actually worse than what our bodies do to make fat. In other words: turning gas into liquid fuel (not LNG, actual liquid fuel) is possible to do with a catalyst at much higher efficiency than turning it into LNG. We don't know how, despite the fact that your body is probably doing it (to produce fatty acids) right now as you read this. You want to help climate change? Let's figure that one out, that would actually help CO2 output AND lower prices.
Nuclear is critical for long term generating power. Batteries and solar are good not able to maintain the same level of power quality and duration though are definitely incredibly important.
I can't stress this enough solar and battery dont work everywhere and they dont provide indefinite power quality. Nor does nuclear. They all need to be resourced where appropriate.
FWIW - there aren't a lot of grids that have the resource mix you described.
Well, economy is fossil fuels. In the world after fossil fuels, we may have to redefine what "economy" means.
Fortunately, “economy is fossil fuels” is nonsense, so it actually makes sense to try and address this problem.
Is it?
The economy is what we produce and consume. The economy grows when we produce and consume more, it shrinks when we produce and consume less. How do we produce stuff nowadays? With fossil fuels. There is not a single object around you that did not require fossil fuels at some point.
Economy "does well" when we have easy access to fossil fuels, it doesn't when we don't. We can observe the impact on countries where fossil fuels get harder to get. An example would be Europe, where fossil fuels have been harder and harder to get since 2007 (which corresponds to the global peak of conventional oil). Since then, Europe has been slowing down if you look at physical indicators (like which surface is built or what weight is transported by trucks). GDP is artificial, it's arbitrarily modified to "compensate" for inflation.
People in the US love to say that Europe is slowing down because of regulations and laziness and all the smart people moving to the US, but the truth is that it is slowing down because of fossil fuels.
To stop destroying the climate, we need to stop using fossil fuels, and therefore we need to redefine what we expect from "the economy", because without fossil fuels there is no way we keep producing and consuming more.
But that's not all! Even if there was a way (!), it would not resolve the problem of biodiversity loss. We are currently, measurably living in a mass extinction that is happening orders of magnitudes faster than the one of the dinosaurs. If we don't get food problems because of climate change, chances are that we will because of the mass extinction. Climate change is just one existential problem we are facing.
In Europe, we have lost 80% of insects in the last 20 years, and that has NOTHING to do with climate change. Just loss of habitat, which is a consequence of our economy growing (and humans doing what humans do, like tourism and parking lots and cutting trees and overfishing). Climate change will just make that worse, it's just starting.
> It will literally require global economic collapse, mass death and starvation and a civilisational reset.
This is a certainty if we don't do anything. Now the more we do, the more we preserve. It will still be bad, make no mistake. But there is no such thing as "it's too late to act". The less we do, the worse it gets.
This is sort of like saying the economy is air or the economy is sand. (What is closer to correct is the economy is, within approximation, energy.)
> the truth is that it is slowing down because of fossil fuels
American emissions per capita have been falling alongside rising GDP/capita. Europe’s malaises are broader than this.
> This is a certainty if we don't do anything
If action requires literally replacing and restarting the global economy, there is no hope. Might as well party. If, on the other hand, it’s a rewiring, it’s rational to do.
I thought we learned our lesson around hyperbolic environmental doomerism, but apparently not.
GDP is artificial. Did you ever check how they correct for inflation? GDP is worth nothing for science, it's just there for economists to do... whatever they do.
> If action requires literally replacing and restarting the global economy, there is no hope. Might as well party.
I don't know how you read that from what I say. I say, "if we don't do anything, we're completely screwed. The more we do, the better it gets". But yeah, if we keep doing what we are doing, we're doomed, that's certain.
…all economic metrics are artificial. Society is artificial.
How are you defining an economy? Or is your original statement (“economy is fossil fuels”) just a tautology?
> don't know how you read that from what I say
There is no political system on the planet that can enact and survive economic collapse. If that’s what’s required, this is a fool’s errand.
Fortunately, again, you’re wrong. It’s not required, though I’m sure we’ll keep seeing governments who try the silly route replaced. The best we can do in the meantime is politically sideline folks who believe this stuff.
I said it above. The economy is what we produce and consume. Because the metrics economists use (like GDP) make no sense does not mean that the economy does not exist.
There are physical metrics to measure how the economy is doing (that I mentioned above). For instance, you can look at how many tons of stuff are being moved by trucks. If many trucks move a lot of stuff, then it means that stuff is being produced and consumed.
Another one you can measure is the surface that is being constructed. When humans in a country build houses and buildings, it is a sign that "the economy" is growing.
And it is difficult to cheat with those "physical" metrics. Whereas cheating GDP is absolutely trivial. Do you know how they correct for inflation? There is no way to "measure" inflation, it's a guesstimate. But depending on how you guesstimate it, you increase or decrease the GDP.
What we see in Europe since 2007 (the peak of fossil fuels for Europe) is that trucks are moving less and less stuff, and the surface built by humans in Europe is slowing down. Those physical estimators show that Europe is slowing down, completely correlated to fossil fuels. GDP is growing, sure... but again GDP is "manipulated" (consciously or not, that's not the point) by the numbers we put in the "inflation" box.
Gross tonnage is a good input into "what we produce and consume." It's incomplete, however. Grossly. It excludes all services, for example. It's why we abandoned it as a measure after like the early industrial revolution.
(A better one is electricity production, which you can estimate remotely from fuel levels and thermals. It’s also woefully incomplete—the nutters trying to forecast based solely on it are influencers, not fund managers or policymakers, for good reason.)
> Do you know how they correct for inflation?
Yes.
> There is no way to "measure" inflation
This is nonsense. It must be estimated. But so must e.g. "the surface that is being constructed" depending on how one defines surface construction.
There are various measures of inflation of various utility. Some are used to deflate GDP.
Mankiw's Principles of Economics might be a good start if you're serious about your questions. Because by your metrics, decarbonistion is a folly—the measures are probably made up anyway!
Not sure if you're consciously being manipulative or not.
Sure, you are more eloquent than I am. But do you understand my point about estimating inflation being a lot more random than other metrics? Making me say that "any kind of metrics is always folly" is just manipulative, I'm sure you understand that it is not what I mean.
> It excludes all services, for example. It's why we abandoned it as a measure after like the early industrial revolution.
Which I'm sure is important for economists doing economy stuff. But I am convinced that there is value in seeing that after 2007, indicators like gross tonnage have been slowing down, and that is correlated with the evolution of fossil fuels.
We cannot eat services, or use them to heat our apartments, can we? Services are a luxury for when everything below works. The risk with the end of fossil fuels is that it will disrupt everything on top of which services are built. I don't think GDP is bringing much in those discussions.
Yes. I’d argue inflation metrics are about as easy to fuck with as any emissions math I’ve seen. That doesn’t make either fundamentally wrong. But if one is irredeemably wrong, so is the other.
(In any case, you can deflate your own GDP. Nominal GDP contains zero deflation. There is no similar easy fix for emissions calculations, which I read with much wider error bars than any OECD inflation print.)
> Which I'm sure is important for economists doing economy stuff
Not the billions of people employed in services?
> indicators like gross tonnage have been slowing down, and that is correlated with the evolution of fossil fuels
Global gross tonnage is growing [1]. On the sea, your correlation works because that fleet runs on fossil fuels. If you were trying to measure Chinese economic activity using fossil-fuel metrics, on the other hand, you’d fail.
(Again, your instinct isn’t wrong. Energy is, more or less, the economy. That’s why we can decarbonise without lowering living standards. We can keep energy constant or even growing while reducing fossil-fuel use.)
In Europe?
Has there been, in history, the same kind of economy we have today without fossil fuels? No. That's a first reason.
Are there practical replacements for every use case of fossil fuels? Most definitely not! I don't know where you get that. For those replacements we know, it has never been done at scale, so we don't know if it's possible or not. And for those we don't know... well we don't know. Just have a look at what petrochemicals are used for. And how do you make fertilisers without fossil fuels, at today's scale?
Of course it works if you take the part that is convenient to your argument. What about globalised economies?
I mean, before fossil fuels, the world ran on renewables. But that's not at all a proof that we can easily go back to renewables: it was a different world then.
But it is not binary: the less we do, the worse it will get. It's not about whether we "succeed" or not, it's about how bad we let it become.
Fair enough, but it's still incredibly helpful as a source of no-carbon electricity.
Use its power down when in need of electricity. Bring water up hill when too much electricity is available.
Right before the last rush to build nuclear, Europe went through an energy crisis where they did also use reverse hydro. In recent time there has been discussion to modernize and reuse those old installations, but the issue is costs. Buying energy to sell it later, while maintaining and operating the hydro power plants and pumps are not cheap (not to mention building out transmission). Even at current fossil fuel prices, natural gas and oil is cheaper and thus reverse hydro is not economical viable.
Besides, not every country can effectively utilize hydroelectric power.
Germany, like other countries, should be investing in a mix of power sources. You probably want your backbone to be nuclear and then renewables where it makes sense with a goal (at least in western countries) of also eliminating reliance on China for renewables/batteries.
Dogmatism about renewables is self-defeating.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333873233_Hidden_ca...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/12/elephant-in-the-ro...
Nuclear is great for base load, not great for peaks
Our current situation is we are building tons of renewables and storage but still burning tons of fossil fuels because they cannot replace the base load very effectively. Nuclear replaces the carbon part of the equation
Providing base load is a privilege you get to enjoy if your marginal cost is lower than anyone elses (and you want/can keep running basically all of the time).
Renewables ruin former baseload providers (like nuclear plants) because those plants are basically no longer making money whenever the sun shines (so the economics for nuclear plants got much worse).
The "if you can keep running all of the time" is actually the more important factor of base load than just price.
I guess if you want to look at it through purely a price point thing, does the solar price effectively go to infinity when there are clouds out or it's night time?
Maybe base load is the wrong term for it, I don't know. All I'm saying is that solar and wind aren't generating all of the time, and building out the storage capacity to completely cover our existing needs seems kind of unfathomable.
Looking at the platforms of political parties who oppose nuclear in a nearby country like Sweden, all of them highlight how thermal power plants are necessary to support further expansion of renewable energy, and those thermal power plants burn some form of fossil fuels. This include the Swedish green party.
What EU need is a ban on fossil fuels in the energy grid. Without that natural gas there is no need to buy gas from current war zones and their participants, and it would significantly decrease emissions. As long as people who oppose nuclear also agree to stop using thermal power plants, same as with the ban on ICE cars that will come into action in a few years, then the discussion of nuclear vs renewables + battery will be a fair one with everyone playing by the same rules.
Naturally in the south part of EU there is little reason to use nuclear plants. Energy demand correlates with solar production, and the need for seasonal storage is minimal. Sadly the same can not be said about central and northern Europe where wind speeds are the current dominant factor when it come to supply of energy, but seasons dictate demand. The size of storage needed for a harsh winter is magnitudes more expensive currently than reducing the need through nuclear, but that will never be tested since what countries there are actually building right now are more thermal power plants to address the issue of low supply during periods of low energy production from wind.
Recent report on restarting German nuclear:
> The easiest group of reactors to restart could produce electricity at an average of €37 per megawatt-hour before the end of 2031.The most difficult restarts could produce electricity at roughly €58 per megawatt-hour by the mid 2030s.
* https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/restarting-german...
* PDF: https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/_files/ugd/ae75b7_bc5db59...
Prices are also expected to further increase as EU has issued regulations that customers should subsidize regions of poor transmission, in order to enable construction of more wind and solar farms where no such transmission exist.
The similar power output is not a coincidence. The biggest bottleneck for new solar and battery storage plants in Germany is getting them connected to the grid, and the freshly decommissioned nuclear plant has a great grid connection that this project wants to reuse
1: https://www.heise.de/news/Mehr-als-1-4-Gigawatt-Riesige-Batt...
Yet France, which invested heavily in nuclear[1], has energy prices that are 40% lower than Germany's[2]. Something isn't adding up about the repeated claims that renewables are cheaper than nuclear.
[1] https://montel.energy/resources/blog/two-different-energy-sy...
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Germany didn't have this incentive and they don't have the luxury of coasting on previous investments of a bygone era. Germany would have to start from scratch with all this and without the defense component (unless they change their stance on that too)
Sweden and Norway have very cheap electricity while mostly being renewables.
A sensible global policy could be:
- Tax carbon positive energy consumption to death. I.e. coal, oil or natural gas.
- Tax (close to) carbon neutral energy consumption at a fixed high rate, e.g. solar, hydro, nuclear or wind. Tax nuclear separately because of its other side effects if you want.
- Use the proceeds to negatively tax carbon negative energy consumption only.
Not that I have any illusions of any policy even remotely like this ever getting enacted. Zero consensus on earth and too many dangerous and selfish idiots.
Our children will be boiling frogs and angry.
Have a somewhat competitive energy market and falling production prices like we have for carbon neutral energy. What do you think will happen? The market will gobble up any and all production.
Look at what we currently have even with largely fossil energy. The substantial US/EU delta in energy price and energy consumption. Notice how similar the deltas are?
There is no carbon negative energy consumtion.
There are some experimental methods of capturing CO2 (or rather just carbon in CO2), but I replied to a proposed negative tax on economic activities that are carbon negative as energy consumtion. There are none. There's only experimental carbon capture with no products and no services generated as an output of this "economic activity" that consumes energy and CO2 as inputs. And it costs money - a lot more money than what CO2-positive economic activities could generate if all their CO2 were to be captured.
Experimental olivine based carbon capture looks promising to this uneducated bystander, but what do I know?
In any case, I'm not expecting climate action. Many either don't know how to even start fixing this mess. Others would rather have their own children boil than to potentially give up some material conveniences.
Really? It's certainly not in actual practice - the largest actual carbon capture and sequestration projects on the globe to date are, by definition, carbon release reduction programs that are intended to store back a small percentage of what will be released as part of large natural gas extraction projects.
(eg: proposed Browse Basin (~400 km (250 mi) off NW coast of W.Australia) expansion)
(also: Chevron’s Gorgon project, the biggest CCS operation: https://australia.chevron.com/what-we-do/gorgon-project/carb... -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Carbon_Dioxide_Injectio... -- https://ieefa.org/resources/gorgon-ccs-underperformance-hits... -- https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12... )
It's a simple (albeit technically complex) proposition - puncture a gas basin, release large amount of CO2, grab some of that and stuff it back in the hole. Overall a net positive amount of CO2 is released, before addressing any further release as a by product of consuming the LNG, etc. But it's called CCS (carbon capture and storage) because carbon is captured and stored.
There are no larger programs at scale on the planet, they are net CO2 release programs, and less CO2 would be in the atmosphere if no LNG was extracted at all.
How about taking the money spent on fossil energies and invest it in both nuclear and renewables?
They had this as an explicit choice, and they demanded other parties went along with closing the nuclear power plants. They knew, it was discussed, that keeping them open would help with global warming, and they explicitly chose against that. Then they stood by that choice, and kept standing by it even up to 2023.
Now you obviously can't fault them for the fact that the Ukraine war would make things 10x worse (by forcing Germany back onto coal and LNG), but you CAN fault them for making that choice, and standing by it. This makes them the main responsible party for the current electricity prices problem in Germany.
European green parties have explicitly chosen that their other goals mattered more than global warming. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they are absolutely 100% unwilling to make compromises elsewhere to help fix global warming, when they are the ones making a compromise.
And, frankly, if we can't compromise as a country in parliament we may as well stop attempting to do anything about global warming. Green parties are demanding big compromises from everybody else, but cannot give a millimeter themselves? Obviously everybody else is just going to fight them tooth and nail, forever, and we'll get nowhere.
I think that is what is meant by that question.
Oh the traditional European way. "You need 50% of the votes in parliament of a government. It's either us or the extreme right. Here's our list of demands, and a phone number. Kthxbye"
30 years ago the answer was nuclear. Not today, it's just a distraction to try to keep us burning dead dinosaurs for longer.
To put it another way, I could flip your statement on its head: Renewables are just a distraction to try to keep us burning dead dinosaurs for longer instead of building durable nuclear power capacity.
Nuclear is different in that regard.
So the question is: what can we preserve once we don't have oil anymore? And my point was that renewables are piloted with electronics, and we haven't tried building and maintaining that system in a world without oil.
People like to extrapolate the growth of renewables, but they tend to forget that the current growth is totally subsidised by oil: your solar panel was built and transported with oil, period.
If you are serious about the "after the end of oil", you have to wonder if that system works, at scale, without oil. Don't you?
Our power demands are increasing faster than we can build out renewables and storage.
Despite how much investment we are making into solar, wind, batteries, we're still burning more carbon year over year to make up for the demand for energy. We need a source of energy that can actually replace the base load carbon, not just augment it like renewables are. Nuclear is the most likely source to use for that purpose.
Edit: if we're being honest, we probably should have built out nuclear 20, 30, 40 years ago but we didn't. The expense now is kind of the cost of our poor policy decisions in decades past. We can continue to make poor decisions or we can learn our lesson and eat the cost now to fix those mistakes. I think failing to invest and shift to nuclear now would be yet another instance of passing the buck to the future generations, with even more interest
Check out this year's edition of Ember's Global Electricity Review [0]. The table on p. 78 lists the following five countries as having the highest CO2-equivalent emissions (in Mt):
| China | 5,565 |
| United States | 1,737 |
| India | 1,395 |
| Russia | 536 |
| Japan | 492 |
All these numbers should probably be put into perspective, though, by taking the population size into account. But even then, the whole of the EU does not fare too bad.
[0] https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electric...
Obviously, each individual should have a right to emit a certain amount of GHGs independently from the size of the country he happens to be born in. So the correct list is this (2024 data [1]). Quite surprising in places (e.g. the position of the UK, Australians emitting GHGs at the level of a petro-state, and Canadians too, well above the US).
| Country | MtCO2e/ capita
| Qatar | 54.54
| Kuwait | 38.14
| Bahrain | 35.13
| United Arab Emirates | 25.62
| Oman | 24.02
| Saudi Arabia | 22.79
| Australia | 22.26
| Canada | 19.76
| Russia | 18.02
| United States | 17.34
| New Zealand | 15.59
| South Korea | 12.83
| Ireland | 11.86
| China | 10.81
| Poland | 9.28
| Belgium | 9.15
| Netherlands | 8.35
| Germany | 8.17
| Italy | 6.32
| Spain | 6.16
| Brazil | 5.93
| France | 5.68
| United Kingdom | 5.63
Also, while it's important to look at the global picture, let's not ignore the local effects: air quality in Germany is pretty bad, perhaps the worst in Europe. Poland is pretty bad too, especially in the winter. That's not China's or USA's fault.
What... you know you could've looked this up pretty easily before posting?
https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/sites/default/files/styles/...
I provided you a map showing historical data collected over a year.
Yeah, other emit more, but the rank stupidity of this environmental vandalism deserves the scorn it gets!
Except their emissions have continued to go down.
Whether you count just electricity or economy wide.
And even before this "explosion" they were about half the US on per capita economy wide and now are less than half.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
I believe they are singled out in a feeble attempt by climate change deniers and fossil fuel boosters to discredit renewables. Which Germany played a pivotal role in kick-starting and which are currently saving the world.
In Germany add in that they then needed to rely on Russia to provide natural gas to fill in the void - which drove up the costs of power and made their manufacturing base a little less competitive.... Best intentions don't always prove to be good policy making. That's the TL;DR why Germany gets singled out.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-scrap-deadline-...
In the mean time, they're keeping they're using the sites of their former nuclear power plants as temporary storage locations for the nuclear waste produced while the plants were still running.
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/What-now-for-Germany-s-re...
On top of all that, there's new challenges like this: https://www.msn.com/en-us/urban-infrastructure/energy-infras...
Largest battery storage in Germany set for partial commissioning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104584 - July 2026
Analysis: Wind and solar power overtake fossil fuels in Germany for first time ever - https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-wind-and-solar-power-ov... - July 28th, 2026
> Germany has various targets in place that require a rapid expansion of wind and solar power, including cutting economy-wide emissions to net-zero by 2045. The nation is also aiming to increase renewables’ share of electricity consumption to 80% by 2030 to achieve a “largely climate neutral” power system by 2035.
It's time to get over the nuclear issue, it's history. It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid, and tens of billions of dollars or euros. Germany deploys ~2GW/month of solar. Total global nuclear generation capacity is ~380GW as of this comment. At current global solar PV deployment rates, even assuming capacity factor delta between solar and nuclear, you could replace total global nuclear generation with ~18 months of solar PV deployment. Batteries and solar will continue to rapidly decline in cost, nuclear will not.
(total annual solar PV deployment is approaching, but not quite yet, at 1TW/year, and continues to increase year over year)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
Nuclear is an amazing solution for industrial steady state demand... This is data centers, smelters (glass and metal), lots of industrial processes (think auto plants).
But nuclear is terrible at TV pickup situations because it is simply not that responsive.
Delivery to industrial customers (regardless of source) is also much simpler than it is to domestic - and I don't think that were even beginning to address the issues there.
In and around winter? I think that's a fantasy.
X to doubt, I'll believe it when I see it, for now they are like a galaxy away from that goal.
And also that'll be even harder to reach if they want to improve their atrociously low electricity heating rate.
Fossil gas will fill the gap until solar, wind, batteries, and transmission push the last of fossil generation out of the mix, and every year less and less gas will be used until remaining fossil gas generators sit idle.
Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/spain-s-n... | https://archive.today/4fB7K - April 11th, 2025 (“Spain is a postcard, a glimpse into the future where you’re not going to need baseload generators from 8am to 5pm” with solar and wind providing all of the grid’s needs during that time, said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, a European power markets analyst with BloombergNEF. Still, she said, there is a reasonable chance this goal may take longer than expected and “extending the life of the nuclear fleet can prove as an insurance for these delays.”) (My note: As of this comment, Spain has 7.12GW of nuclear generation capacity per ree.es, and assuming ~2GW/month deployment rate seen in Germany, could replace this capacity with solar and batteries in ~17 months; per Electricity Maps, only 18.79% of Spain's electrical generation over the last twelve months has been sourced from this nuclear: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/ES/12mo/monthly)
Nuclear doesn't have this requirement. It's truly zero carbon.
Unless you can show me plans to fill this gap with batteries on a national scale, renewables < nuclear
Yes, some fossil fuels will be burned to fill energy consumption gaps until we have fully replaced all fossil generation with that produced from the sun. Again, remember the fact that every year we are adding ~1TW of solar that can account for energy consumption growth and push out fossil generation. We won't know until we look back over time, but we are very likely at peak fossil fuel consumption globally. New generation will be clean tech simply out of economics, and old fossil generation will be replaced eventually with clean tech, because it cannot last forever.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/solar-panel-prices-... (solar panel prices have fallen by around 20% every time global capacity doubled)
https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline (lithium-ion battery prices fell by 19% every time global cumulative production doubled)
Ember Energ: Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... - June 21st, 2025
The Economist: The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40746617 - June 2024 (66 comments)
> To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.
> Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.
> To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.
(think in systems)
Sure, the sun is incredible, but our capacity of actually using that power is the bottleneck. We still have to have energy to dig up the materials and manufacture the panels and batteries and deploy them and such.
Ember Energy: From scale to system: navigating the next phase of China’s battery storage - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/from-scale-to-syste... - July 16th, 2026
China Battery Storage Use Surges After Policy Shift, Ember Energy Says - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-15/china-bat... | https://archive.today/QBXxV - July 15th, 2026
China Crosses Energy Milestone as Coal Falls Below 50% of Power - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49110187 - July 2026
Nearly a third of new heavy truck sales in China Electric in 2025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48676673 - June 2026 ("China targeting EVs to make up 40% of heavy truck sales by 2030 - EVs to make up 20% of heavy truck fleet by 2030 - Trade-in schemes will prioritise EV trucks to boost adoption")
China Is The World’s First Electrostate - https://cleantechnica.com/2025/05/26/china-is-the-worlds-fir... - May 26th, 2025
China’s Oil & Gas Giant Sinopec Says Peak Oil Demand Already Happened In China - https://cleantechnica.com/2023/10/11/chinas-oil-gas-giant-si... - October 11th, 2023
https://globalenergymonitor.org/research/china-building-half...
:)
Lets see what 2030 looks like.
China’s Nuclear Energy Priorities Under Its 15th Five-Year Plan - https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-nuclear-energy-prioriti... - May 11th, 2026
> China continues to view nuclear as an electricity source that advances its energy security while also reducing reliance on fossil fuels, as noted in the latest FYP (Part II, Chapter 7): “Promote the safe, reliable, and orderly replacement of fossil fuels with non-fossil energy sources; pursue a multi-pronged approach that combines wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear power; and implement the ten-year plan to double non-fossil energy capacity.” The remarkable growth of renewable energy sources and coal’s continuing preeminence have shaped nuclear energy’s role as a non-carbon-emitting baseload in China’s power generation portfolio (Table 1). Nuclear energy seems to serve as a versatile power source that supplements coal’s role as an energy security enforcer as well as the role of renewables as clean energy boosters. By 2030, China targets 110 gigawatts (GW) of installed nuclear power capacity. If realized, the installed capacity in China will surpass that of the United States unless U.S. capacity—currently the world’s largest—grows substantially from 102.5 GW (gross) in 2025.
If you're going to point at them and say "we should be doing what they're doing" then part of that includes doing nuclear.
Lazard Levelized Cost of Energy+ 2026 - https://www.lazard.com/media/kcfconhf/lazards-lcoeplus_vf.pd... [pdf]
> Renewables Remain Lowest Cost New-Build Generation; All Generation Faces Increasing Cost Pressure: Despite rising and inflationary cost pressures across all generation technologies, renewables remain the most cost-competitive form of new-build generation on an unsubsidized basis and will account for the majority of near-term capacity additions in the U.S. Continuous upward revisions to demand projections have driven a sharp increase in announced new-build gas generation despite a 15-year high LCOE, which is expected to continue to rise, and historically long development and equipment delivery timelines.
China Keeps Beating Renewable Targets And Missing Nuclear Ones - https://cleantechnica.com/2026/07/25/china-renewable-targets... - July 25th, 2026
> China set a 2020 wind target of 210 GW and finished the year with about 282 GW. Its solar target was 110 GW, while delivery reached roughly 253 GW. The later commitment to reach at least 1,200 GW of combined wind and solar by 2030 was crossed in 2024, six years early. By the end of 2025, China had about 640 GW of wind and 1,202 GW of solar, for a combined 1,842 GW. Nuclear moved in the other direction: about 50 GW against a 58 GW target in 2020, and about 62 GW against a 70 GW target in 2025. The current goal of 110 GW by 2030 may still be achieved, but the previous record gives no reason to convert it directly into a forecast.
> This is not evidence that Beijing has quietly abandoned nuclear power. China has the world’s largest reactor construction programme, continues approving new units and is building an increasingly domestic supply chain around designs such as Hualong One. The divergence lies between approval and operation. Another difference is that when renewables blow past targets China set much bigger targets, but when nuclear misses targets, the targets don’t change. That difference is harder to explain than the results.
Certainly sounds like China's nuclear goals are aspirational, based on the data. The construction and messaging gives nuclear proponents hope, but construction is not generation. At some point, you have to deliver.
If you purely think about the climate and don’t care for things like fair resource distribution, forget about the Germans.
Update: Actually if every country with a per capita higher emissions than Germany would drop to German standards we would reduce co2 emissions by 25%.
That sounds like a goal, sind this is even possible without nuclear power, it should be easy for the is and china, who could throw it into the mix.
France and Spain are having to shut down their nuclear plants because they can't cool them during heatwaves: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/weather/extreme-weather-events/fra...
"The crisis in France has claimed dozens of lives, with 40 people drowning while attempting to call off from the heat since June 18"
Call off should be "cool off".
And forgive me if this is a stupid question, but don't nuclear power plants produce enough energy that they could power their own cooling? Why do they have to rely on the free cooling provided by a river?
In the meantime batteries + solar or wind can be built quickly and hooked up pretty much anywhere.
Even if we had nuclear fusion, solar+batteries could still win on cost and time to deploy!
In a world with abundant fossil fuels on which globalisation relies.
The question is: what happens when it stops? Can renewables win in a world without abundant oil? We don't know, we haven't tried.
The supply chain already exists, available worldwide as long as you don't bomb your suppliers.
Renewables are making progress with the help of fossil fuels. We don't know how it will be without it, because we haven't tried. We as "the global economy", obviously.
The same people who dismiss green policies as damaging to the economic are often the ones calling for nuclear power.
I like a daily paradox.
Frankly, it doesn't matter what Germany or other European nations do - their carbon footprint has dramatically decreased.
The issue is everyone else [0]. China (12 GT), the US (5 GT), and India (3 GT) alone represent over half of all global carbon emissions. The EU and UK's combined carbon emissions are half of Asia (excluding China and India) emissions.
Countries like India and Vietnam are expected to see GDP growth in the 6-8% range for the next decade, and both are doubling down on coal [1][2] and other carbon heavy fuels, so emissions are only going to grow further. Any marginal decrease in carbon emissions at this point is too little too late given that much of Asia and South America is expected to see carbon emission grow in the 3-8% range.
[0] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mul...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vietnam-looks-more-c...
Their carbon footprint is only going to increase as a result.
India [0], Vietnam [1], and others have all doubled down on coal for energy security reasons.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mul...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/vietnam-looks-more-c...
co2 per country or capita doesn't mean shit when the world uses China as a factory:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-embedded-in-...
Edit: can't reply
> they don't pollute because they're Chinese, they pollute because they're your factory
If that was the case, then global CO2 emissions would have been stagnant for 30 years, not rising.
They have to bear responsibility, and to be fair to them, they have taken steps to address that.
Something can be urgent while no one is doing anything about it. Would not be the first time. That point would be the first of many incoherences in you comment.
I don’t debate that there is urgency, that so much more should be done, etc. but your comment really isn’t helping.
We can rant all day about how stupid it was of the conservatives to re-enact the ban on nuclear power without restarting the subsidies for renewables, and lament that they thus ensured that coal power would thus have to replace more of the lost load, but that's all in the past and we can't change that.
If you think we need more nuclear power to fight CO2 emissions, you're 50 years late. That ship has sailed before most of us here were born.