Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

83 renewable isn’t right, but it’s up to 67% clean in 2025, which is still pretty impressive

> That's why I mentioned expected values. Historical data alone is too sparse.

The data is sparse because the rate is very low. If the world used twice as much nuclear power as it does now, we don't have enough statistical data to predict with high accuracy if something as bad as Chernobyl would happen two more times or zero more times but the existing data allows us to be pretty confident it wouldn't be 100 more times. Meanwhile coal kills more people than 100 Chernobyls every year in just the US.

There is also reason to suspect Chernobyl was an outlier because the USSR was such an authoritarian nightmare. They not only screwed up the design of the reactor (positive void coefficient, no containment building) but then also its operation and the response. The majority of the confirmed deaths were plant workers and emergency responders who got radiation exposure after being sent in without training or relevant equipment. It took the USSR more than three days to admit that it had even happened so that people living next to the plant would know to leave the immediate area. Screwing it up that bad required more than an honest mistake.

> Especially long-term storage is tricky, and if you need to consider time horizons of millenia, even small risks add up.

The "thousands of years" thing is essentially fake. Radiological half-life is the inverse of intensity. Things with a half-life of five minutes are super radioactive. Things with a half-life of thousands of years aren't much above background.

For example, there is an isotope of uranium that has a half-life of four billion years. It's also a pain because its decay chain contains radon gas. ZOMG what are we going to do with it for that long? Well, that's the one that represents 99.3% of natural uranium straight out of the ground, which is why homes in areas with natural granite need radon reduction systems, so it turns out the answer to what we do with it is we can put it in a reactor and use it to generate electricity and that will turn it into something with a shorter half life that goes away sooner. And the major ones that are "thousands of years" can also be used to generate electricity if we would actually separate them and use them for that to get rid of them instead of wringing our hands about where we're supposed to keep them.

> In fairness, you then also have to consider "regular" industrial accidents at nuclear plants, which are probably still much lower (due to the presumably much higher energy output per employee hour than other forms).

It's also lower because nuclear plants are pretty obsessive about safety vs. random solar installation company whose job application test is to see if you can make it onto a third story roof with a two story ladder.

It's not just political reversal risk; there's the risk of technological obsolescence. It's very much a stretch to assume a nuclear plant will remain operationally viable (in the sense of being competitive) for 40 years, never mind the 60 or 80 years sometimes mentioned, because the competition isn't standing still.

Over-provisioning with renewables is cheaper

> I had another facepalm moment when I read about EU planning to go nuclear again. That would've been amazing and smart in 2015 - but now? Yeah, it's dumb af. And that's coming from a German living at the northern end of the country.

In 2015, Germany produced about 650 TWh of electricity. In 2025, it’s around 507 TWh, a drop of roughly 22–23%.

Consumption has also declined, mainly due to efficiency improvements, higher energy prices, and weaker industrial demand.

Per person, that’s about 7,900 kWh in 2015 vs ~6,000 kWh in 2025. France is at roughly 8,000 kWh per person today, so basically where Germany used to be.

This happened despite adding about 100 TWh from wind and solar combined over the same period.

Wind is still volatile and hasn’t really ramped much in recent years, while solar is growing steadily, but mostly helps in summer.

And that’s the core issue. Solar output in summer is roughly 3× higher than in winter, so just adding more solar doesn’t solve those cold, dark winter periods without massive storage or backup.

To get back to 2015 production levels of around 650 TWh, Germany would need to increase output by about 30%. With solar growing by roughly 13–14 TWh per year and wind not increasing much recently, that puts you close to a decade just to get back to where you were, while 2030 demand is already projected at 700–750 TWh.

Given that Germany still imports around 70% of its total energy, it’s hard to call it a “facepalm” to suggest nuclear as part of the mix.

Also worth noting that Germany is still slow on smart meter rollout, with only around 2% of metering points using smart metering systems so far. That limits how much consumers can respond to real-time prices. During tight periods, this can increase reliance on imports and contribute to higher prices in connected markets such as the Nordics.