It already takes longer to build new nuclear starting now than build enough renewable + batteries + transmission starting now. So good news! We don't have to "get there soon", we are there already! We have everything we need except the political will to take resources away from fossil fuels and invest them towards a clean energy future.
Nuclear will continue to be built and it should but it is not the thing we need to focus heavily on.
And how long from proposal to breaking ground?
And how many can we build at the same time?
Can we find enough sites or extend existing ones enough?
What problems will we have with water shortages for cooling?
And so on.
We are, thankfully, going to continue to build nuclear all over the world, perhaps most importantly in places like China where they may convert thermal coal plants to nuclear, but it's going to be a relatively small part of the energy mix overall and is not going to solve the doubt that the poster had and my original response was aimed at. Renewables + batteries + transmission, and I should add efficiency improvements, can do it now, at scale, and faster than we can imagine.
The United States, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom have all reduced their per-capita energy usage since the peak (earliest peak usage was UK in 1973, latest was Canada in 2007), and I think we can argue that quality-of-life (by at least some metrics) has increased since then.
Let's use the UNCTAD definition of developing countries - there are a number of countries which exceed Canada's per-capita energy usage (the highest of those I mention above) - Qatar, UAE, Trinidad and Tobago and Kuwait.
But those are all small countries, the highest per-capita energy usage by a larger nation is Turkmenistan (exceeding all of the European countries mentioned in the parent - UK, France, Germany - and Japan).
But that's not really the point. Doubtless there is a correlation between energy usage and standard of living. But it's not a 1:1, and there are some huge benefits to be gained - e.g. the US (77,028 kWh / person / year) has triple the usage per capital of the UK (28,501 kWh / person / year). Even in Europe, France and Germany could reduce their usage by a quarter to bring it to the UK level.
This slightly mad take seems very popular with people who at the very same time seem to hate cheap solar and wind energy and love expensive (and/or nonexistent) nuclear and fossil fuels.
It's a really weird subculture that's grown out of climate denial.
Energy efficiency is a thing. The lowest hanging fruit is EVs and heat pumps that provide 4x more travel or heat than using fossil fuels directly. They're so much more efficient that you could burn the fossils in power plants to generate electricity and still come out ahead. That would be silly though since wind and solar are the cheapest available electricity.
And of course you can power these with nuclear, which would be relevant if they weren't just pretending to like nuclear and really just stalling progress for fossil fuel interests.
> What do you think will happen to the power grid when everyone switches to EVs?
Well the people who run grids keep suggesting that it'll help them make better use of their grid assets and so reduce the average cost of a kWh of electricity to consumers. It is after all a giant fleet of smart batteries.
But you, the person who thinks more energy use is better for society, are apparently making an exception for electricity use, which if it goes up will cause some unspecified calamity?
That doesn't seem very consistent? Well, I suppose it's consistently pro-fossil fuels.
> Yes, it is. There's a limit to how efficient you can go though
This is why reducing energy use needs to be in addition to everything else: solar, nuclear, wind, batteries, the works. Some of the R&D won't work out as planned; some solutions will only work in specific situations. That's okay, as long as we don't have all our eggs in one basket.
The orders of magnitude needed for storage are not competitive with nuclear in any reasonable scenario.
Nuclear exists and is proven technology. Battery storage at the capacity and price scale required are not. That remains true even if you want absolutely to believe we can't build nuclear reactors faster than in 10 years, and we almost certainly can by starting mass producing them again.
> However, the company warned in Tuesday’s report that the “termination” of some clean energy projects during 2023 had pushed down the amount of renewables it had access to.
I just have doubt that we will get there soon with battery tech, and nuclear seems like a rational dropin solution until then.