Nuclear Power to Recover from Fukushima Foolishness, On Track for New Records in 2025.

[NNadir]

This note came in through one of my Nature Briefing News Feed emails: The link therein refers to the Financial Times of London, which is behind a firewall, but the excerpt points to a recent IEA report.

The IEA link is here: Electricity Reports Executive Summary, IEA

Excerpts:

By 2025, global nuclear generation is forecast to exceed its previous record set in 2021. Even as some countries phase out nuclear power or retire plants early, nuclear generation is forecast to grow by close to 3% per year on average through 2026 as maintenance works are completed within France, Japan restarts nuclear production at several power plants, and new reactors begin commercial operations in various markets, including China, India, Korea, and Europe. Many countries are making nuclear power a critical part of their energy strategies as they look to safeguard energy security while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. At the COP28 climate change conference that concluded in December 2023, more than 20 countries signed a joint declaration to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050. Achieving this goal will require tackling the key challenge of reducing construction and financing risks in the nuclear sector. Momentum is also growing behind small modular reactor (SMR) technology. The technology’s development and deployment remains modest and is not without its difficulties, but R&D is starting to pick up...

After Fukushima, where few, if any people died from radiation released in the natural disaster, came a period during which nuclear generation declined owing to a festival of ignorance and fear that killed people by driving climate change and air pollution.

There is a lot of the usual praise in the article for so called "renewable energy" which continues to soak up vast sums of money for no result in rates climate change. I have no use for the rhetoric, but in 2023, continuing into 2024, we are beginning to see the tragic results of this unsustainable affectation.

The growth of nuclear energy is not fast enough to save what is left to save and to restore that which can be restored, but I expect that the scales are falling off the eyes of humanity in general and antinukes are finally being seen for the absurd poor thinkers they've always been. In my opinion antinukes have killed a lot of people by their appeals to selective attention, fear, and ignorance, but it's nice to understand a recovery is on the way.

Tripling nuclear capacity is not enough. It needs to grow by one order of magnitude at least, and do so quickly. Hopefully that sinks in sooner rather than later.

Reality bites.

Have a nice weekend.