Qvist and Brook reported in 2015 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. The authors demonstrated 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, then coal- and gas-fired electricity could be replaced worldwide in less than a decade.
Under more conservative projections that take into account probable constraints and uncertainties such as differing relative economic output across regions, current and past unit construction time and costs, future electricity demand growth forecasts and the retiring of existing aging nuclear plants, our modelling estimates that the global share of fossil-fuel-derived electricity could be replaced within 25–34 years. This would allow the world to meet the most stringent greenhouse-gas mitigation targets.
The authors concluded that any climate change mitigation strategy will, due to the magnitude of the challenge, inevitably be based on extrapolation of existing data and assumptions about the future. This is true whether the technologies to displace the use of fossil fuel will be based on nuclear fission, fusion, wind, solar, waves, geothermal, biomass, pumped-hydro, energy efficiency, smart grids, electric cars or other technologies and any combination of the above. No renewable energy technology or energy efficiency approach has ever been implemented on a scale or pace which 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.
The authors make 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..... [and whether something catastrophic occurs in the world that would upset the world economy? Would that encourage or hinder nuclear power development .... SMRs, etc.]
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