Is nuclear dead? Not quite, but it’s not scaling either. Short thread.

1/n
I tweet a lot about nuclear and while I recognise I’m unlikely to change anyone’s mind about its suitability as a technology, I do ask it’s proponents to look at the contemporary data.

So this morning I summarised the last decade of nuclear vs wind & solar in a single chart 2/n
I’ve taken the wind and solar from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2020 dataset and the nuclear grid additions from IAEA’s PRIS database.

The chart shows the actual W&S additions including any retirements as per BP and the nuclear additions calculated at 90 % CF. 3/n
By way of a trend line I’ve also calculated the number of days it takes W&S to match a 1 GW nuclear plant for any particular year. That figure has dropped from ~35 days in 2009 to just under 10 days last year.

4/n
My contention is that there is as much sense lauding the Messmer Plan as a blueprint for future decarbonisation as there is in telling Elon Musk that he hasn’t put a man on the moon, so he should build Saturn 5’s not Starship’s.

5/n
The data is pretty clear. Over the last decade, W&S have developed into global behemoths and over the next decade will likely break the back of global decarbonisation.

In contrast, nuclear has stagnated, always promising, but never quite delivering.

Ends.
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