Staffan A. Qvist and Barry W. Brook report that there is an ongoing debate about the deployment rates and composition of alternative energy plans that could feasibly displace fossil fuels globally by mid-century, as required to avoid the more extreme impacts of climate change. Here we demonstrate the potential for a large-scale expansion of global nuclear power to replace fossil-fuel electricity production, based on empirical data from the Swedish and French light water reactor programs of the 1960s to 1990s. Analysis of these historical deployments show that if the world built nuclear power at no more than the per capita rate of these exemplar nations during their national expansion programs, then coal- and gas-fired electricity could be replaced worldwide in less than a decade.
No renewable energy technology or energy efficiency approach has ever been implemented on a scale or pace that has resulted in the magnitude of reductions in CO2-emissions that is strictly required and implied in any climate change mitigation study, neither locally nor globally, normalized by population or GDP or any other normalization parameter.
This paper makes an extrapolation of actual available historic data from regional expansions of a low GHG-emitting energy technology, rather than trying to speculate further on future potential deployment strategies. The results indicate that a replacement of current fossil-fuel electricity by nuclear fission at a pace which might limit the more severe effects of climate change is technologically and industrially possible, whether this will in fact happen depends primarily on political will, strategic economic planning, and public acceptance.
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