Beautiful, should add more countries and some economic indicator to show how stop of nuclear energy growth stopped economy growth.
Solar is growing fast, and much faster in China than nuclear. Nuclear is down globally. Germany made right decision to focus on renewables with legacy coal as backup, simply due to astronomical costs of refurbishing/extending life of its ageing nuclear a few years. There is no economic benefit of new nuclear energy.
It’s just faster to add another solar panel to existing infrastructure than build a nuclear reactor. Nuclear reactor is 10 years investment so in current news and statistics you won’t see it. But you can see how fast coal power plants are growing in China because coal power plants are easier than nuclear. Nuclear power is not short time investment but long term commitment that is lacking in current governments policies. Current gov officials are no different than instagram celebrities so they seek cheap methods to stay in power. That’s why world is collapsing, because of expotential need of power source and expotential lack of delivery of so. Look at how many nuclear power plants China have in plans or started building and how many of them rest of world combined have.
But you can see how fast coal power plants are growing in China because coal power plants are easier than nuclear.
Thermal electricity generation in China rose 1.5% in 2024, while total electricity consumption grew 8.5%. They added more storage than coal plants. While there was hope that 2024 would see a decline in thermal, it will happen in 2025. Coal’s share of electricity dropped from 60% to 53%. China’s strategy for coal is resilience and national security. They build them for construction sector sponsorship, and the main 2 benefits, rather than their energy policy.
Look at how many nuclear power plants China have in plans or started building and how many of them rest of world combined have.
I’ve read reports that many nuclear plans are on hold/cancelled in China. Among the biggest difficulties for nuclear, is forecasting a demand increase 10 years from now, while not filling that demand gap earlier with much cheaper electricity sources. Nuclear needs the corruption of forcing scarcity until it is completed, so that it can sell all of its electricity. The capital costs of nuclear overwhelm all other costs, such that operating at 50% capacity doubles the breakeven/target ROI electricity price per kwh.
That’s because they needed to basically reinvent the Westinghouse reactor because of technology ban. As a result they also progressed with own reactor technology. Ex china move towards SMR with cooperation with Russia.
As of 2024, only China and Russia have successfully built operational SMRs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
And they plan to finish Thorium reactor this year that will revolutionize amount of waste and reactor location problems. https://min.news/en/science/28ee0f79aafe4d7a2deb675f4f1b1620.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov 70mw for $700m including the boat, is still way cheaper than Vogtle, and western nuclear sub/ship power plants, Low enriched fuel. Heat use in Arctic adds value. China’s HTR-PM at $6/w is good for a prototype SMR. Even lower enriched fuel. Western corruption is incapable of reaching this value level. Hatred levels incapable of buying them. All western SMR designs use more expensive fuel that are sourced from traditional military purposed reactors as well.
The $6/w figure would be great for US, but in China it is over 12x more than solar. But it becomes reasonable tech to pursue. High tech that gets cheaper as it scales up. Unique SMR approach is that the nuclear heat is generated in “container sized units”, but traditional built turbine unit can be fed by multiple containers.
Thorium plans link are not inspiring because it fails to address why thorium failed historically.
I did some research on that graphic. The image originates from this article: https://www.datapulse.de/en/nuclear-energy/. It has a pro nuclear power tone: „The discussion for or against nuclear energy is likely far from over even after shutting down German reactors domestically.“ This is rhetoric from the CDU, FDP or AfD, even though no energy provider agrees with this. Also the article doesn‘t mention the problem of nuclear waste disposal, which for Germany is not due to be solved until 2046.
Digging around in Data Pulse affiliation I couldn‘t find much. May be someone else can find more on this. The CEO Nicolas Caramella has founded Data Pulse in 2023 with only prior experience in different marketing / SEO positions: https://de.linkedin.com/in/nicocaramella
Thanks for the research. I was a bit confused because the headline of the graph didn’t mention “nuclear” and with the little renewable energy boom Germany had within the last year the line going down was weird. That they are trying to push Söder talking points makes it obvious that this was likely on purpose.
Mark Uwe Kling started a challenge for Söder and other politicians to find someone to build a nightmare power plant without subsidies and summarized in layman’s words why they won’t be able to find someone.
There are some good documentaries on Arte about this topic. Providing insights to ongoing building projects in France and never-ending demolition projects in Germany. What they all have in common is that they are way more expensive than planned and take centuries longer to build and later to demolition than planned. Sadly the one I watched is currently not available anymore, I just found the German version on YouTube.
Why is Japan not on this graph?
Graph mentions it’s just top 3 countries, and Germany
Then it’s just propaganda aiming to manipulate the German public.
It’s a little bit too late for that.
In Italy the anti-nuclear stance was voted in a referendum in 1987, but they still keep trying.
Good luck to them.
Canada India UK
I guess that could be a more objective way of looking at it: http://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/20750.jpeg
