Nuclear can't keep up with wind

The chart, from Energy Transition, shows actual output, not capacity, of wind, solar and nuclear. 

Source

Even countries with long-standing nuclear aims are adding wind power much faster, as Brazil, China, and India show. Those interested in the fastest way to mitigate climate change can forget nuclear, says Craig Morris.

China has long had ambitions for nuclear power and it still does; under current plans, installed capacity will double by 2020. But even China has experienced delays in reactor construction. In contrast, it has repeatedly had to increase its targets both for wind and solar. What’s more, wind power has taken off like a rocket, clearly outstripping nuclear power generation. The solar target for 2020 implicitly more than doubled last month.

Things are no different in India. It now aims to increase nuclear capacity some threefold by 2024, but the country has also failed to meet previous targets for nuclear. The new target for 2024, for instance, is a third smaller than the one for (not from!) 1987. Both India and China have targets for rooftop solar that they are likely to miss, but India has otherwise managed to grow wind power impressively, with solar likely to come next.

And then there is Brazil. The country initially had nuclear ambitions, which it has not completely abandoned. But since discovering wind power a few years ago, there seems to be little hope that nuclear will ever keep up. Brazil has yet to properly discover solar, but significant volumes have been tendered recently. Unfortunately, many of the winning bids were withdrawn due to the overall economic situation. But when power demand picks up again, Brazilians will not doubt see that solar and wind are the cheapest way to quickly add capacity.

In studies proposing nuclear as a solution to mitigate climate change, one rarely finds an admission that massive new builds would be needed. By 2050, the reactors completed around 1980 (almost all of those in North America and Europe, for instance) would be roughly 70 years old. The average age of the French nuclear fleet will surpass 40 by 2025. The oldest technically still operating reactor in the world, Beznau 1 in Switzerland, is only 48 years old (commissioned on 1 September 1969), but it has been offline since March 2015, when microfissures were discovered in the containment vessel. In addition, indentions considered “not relevant for safety” were reported in August 2017; they had previously been discovered in the pressure chamber but not made public. 

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These three countries are all developing countries where electricity demand is growing fast.  Together they are responsible for some 45% of global CO2 emissions, so it's important they de-carbonise their economies.  In developed countries electricity demand is stagnant, though it will grow as electric cars become common.  Note how growth in wind and solar is exponential, i.e., the slope of the curve is constantly increasing, and note how output from wind now exceeds output from nuclear.  The growth rates in solar are higher than in wind, just as the cost declines in solar are greater. 

Nuclear hopefuls continue to advocate nuclear, but I strongly suspect it isn't a goer.  It's too expensive, it will take too long to build, and no one wants a nuclear plant near them. I view the risk from global warming to be so serious that I would accept nuclear if it was a solution.  But it prolly isn't.