The radiation from coal power alone (excluding accidents) kills more people every single year than nuclear power has killed in its entire existence (even including accidents).
But also: What is the cost of non-nuclear's raising of co2 levels and climate change?
Solar and wind each deployed more than double the coal displacing generation in china than nuclear over the last 15 years. And that includes their early years when they were just getting started. It's triple over the last 10 years or about 6x (wind) or 8x (solar) more in the last 5 years.
Which is an economic argument, too. It's merely not been priced in yet.
Yup. I guess we still disagree if nuclear is needed long term for Dunkelflaute, and for countries with darker winters.
It's one thing to use storage for overnight. Another if it's for a couple of weeks. And yet another for 6 months.
And take Sweden: Lots of hydro power yes, but where it can feasibly & economically be built, it already has. You can't expand it. And that's not even mentioning that all you need is a drought in winter, and you can no longer rely on it. Currently Sweden is backed by coal plants in Germany. But we need to plan for it being Dunkelflaute in Germany and Italy, at least enough to not have surplus for the nordics.
As for "it's always sunny somewhere", sure, but you need to get it there, somehow. Transmission is why electricity prices in Sweden can be "more than infinity percent" more expensive in south of Sweden compared to north. (electricity prices in the north has gone as far as negative), and is why data centers are built near power plants, or at least it's part of DC location planning.
If transmission costs were negligible then we wouldn't need to take power into account for DC placement. I have some rants about this related to how some DCs are away from population centers to save money on power, noticeably sacrificing latency to the actual end users.
If you waved a magic wand and combined them with infinite transmission for free the price in the expensive area with all the people and energy demand would barely move. (It would disproportionately rise in the cheap zones).
So any sane approach wouldn't spend money shifting the small amount of surplus power from the cheap region but spend the same money on say offshore wind feeding into the expensive zone. This is basically the pitch for zonal pricing, it tells you where demand and supply are needed. Building lots of transmission until the price is the same everywhere defeats the purpose. Building lots of offshore wind was the actual plan but most of those got rejected on bogus national security grounds.
The rejected wind farms would have doubled the entire country's generation.
> bogus national security grounds.
Nobody would sabotage energy infrastructure in or near international waters, you mean?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2026/02/27/ch...
The share of primary energy in China in 2025 was: coal 56% , oil 20.8%, gas 9.8%, nuclear 3.2%, hydro 3%, solar 2.6%, wind 2.5%
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-primary-energy-b...
But there is one positive change. 2025 was the first year in history of China when solar energy production increased more then increase in coal, gas or oil energy production.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-change-primary-ene...