[yodelshady]

Aspiration for 20 GW of power by 2040, or in 15 years time.

In the period 1980-1990, I repeat in a 50% shorter period commencing forty years ago, France installed 34 GW of nuclear.

All I want is for someone advocating renewables over nuclear to give me a single example of a buildout of available-in-winter power exceeding that target with the forty years of investment available.

Or to agree that we have, fundamentally and quite deliberately, become worse at generating carbon-free energy.

[ZeroGravitas]

Both wind and solar have deployed faster than nuclear ever did globally.

And that's in Wh terms, you specify capacity but I guess you'd be annoyed if I replied that renewables beat that capacity easily, like China deploying 80GW of wind just last year.

Here's an article looking at per capita increases show that France and Sweden did really well but renewables are accelerating past their records:

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/solar-wind-nuclear...

The growth of renewables in France (!) over the last five years matches the best periods of nuclear rollout in Japan and the USA.

[knowitnone]

except nuclear was prevented from growing by governments so let's not talk about how one grows faster than another

[ted_dunning]

It's all part of the problem that has to be solved. You can't pretend that nuclear is better technically and that is the end of the story. As long as governments regulate and as long as people motivate governments to slow-roll more nuclear, nuclear generation will have a serious competitive disadvantage.

That disadvantage will manifest as cost and slow growth, among other objective measures.

[pjc50]

It's never succeeded without government backing. Most of the early reactors co-evolved with weapons programmes.

[MichaelNolan]

I’d be open to making a prediction (on longbets.org) that in the 2025 to 2034 timeframe, more solar, wind, and batteries get deployed globally than any 10 year period of your choice for nuclear. And if you want to limit that to winter time capacity that’s fine by me.

The current buildout of solar/wind/batteries is definitely faster than anything we ever saw with nuclear.

[pjc50]

> we have, fundamentally and quite deliberately, become worse at generating [nuclear] energy

Yes. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

Nuclear has a negative learning curve: it gets more expensive over time. Solar gets (spectacularly) cheaper over time. You might not like it but that's what the built infrastructure and its invoices tell us.

[specialist]

I'm very interested to see if China's current nuclear power generation build out manages to climb onto the cost-learning curve.