Nuclear fission power

Assembled from 33 blocks · 3 evidence · 26 related

1. Story
2. The controlled fission of heavy nuclei to raise steam, and the most important counter-example to the learning curve in the energy system. Fission supplies roughly nine per cent of world electricity from a fleet of some four hundred and forty reactors, down from a peak share of around seventeen or eighteen per cent in the mid-1990s — a decline driven by flat construction alongside rising total generation rather than by closures alone. Its cost history runs the wrong way. Lovering, Yip and Nordhaus assembled overnight construction costs for most of the world fleet and found that costs rose over time in the United States and France even as cumulative capacity grew, the opposite of what a learning curve predicts; other national programmes show flatter or mixed trends. The structural explanation is the one this Journey turns on: a reactor is constructed on a site by a coalition assembled for that site, not manufactured repeatedly on a line, so the units of experience are few, separated by decades, and not obviously transferable. Recent Western projects are consistent with that reading — the two Vogtle AP1000 units in Georgia entered service in 2023 and 2024 at a total project cost several times the original estimate, and European first-of-a-kind EPR projects ran long by comparable factors. Fission nevertheless supplies something intermittent generation does not: dispatchable, weather-independent output with very high capacity factors, which is why the argument about it is not really an argument about carbon.
3. Knowledge
4. The experience (learning) curve
5. Nuclear fission power
6. Variability and intermittency in generation
7. Connections
8. Variability and intermittency in generation
9. The experience (learning) curve
10. Vogtle Unit 4 enters commercial operation
11. Lithium-ion battery storage
12. Nuclear fission power
13. The duck curve
14. Dunkelflaute (dark doldrums)
15. Transmission and grid interconnection
16. German power prices spike during a December Dunkelflaute
17. Theodore Paul Wright
18. Photovoltaic solar generation
19. The horizontal-axis wind turbine
20. Lithium-ion battery storage
21. Nuclear fission power
22. International Energy Agency
23. Wright publishes the airframe cost-quantity relationship
24. The conventional start of the photovoltaic module price series
25. Germany's Renewable Energy Sources Act takes effect
26. Chinese manufacturing takes over the photovoltaic supply chain
27. The photovoltaic learning curve is popularised as Swanson's law
28. Vogtle Unit 4 enters commercial operation
29. Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition
30. Evidence
31. Supports the finding that overnight construction costs for nuclear reactors rose over time in the United States and France rather than falling with cumulative experience, with more varied trends in other national programmes — the empirical basis for treating constructed generation as behaving differently from manufactured generation. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session. This paper has been contested in subsequent literature on both data selection and interpretation, and a curator should represent that dispute rather than the finding alone.
32. The reference source for world energy balances, final energy consumption by carrier, generation mix, technology cost trends and scenario pathways used throughout this pack. V55 verification basis: no edition was retrieved in this session — iea.org was refused by the network egress proxy — so every figure attributed to this series is stated as a magnitude with the specific gap named on the citing record, and no current-year quantity should be presented to a reader without confirmation against a named edition.
33. Supports the sectoral emission structure used throughout this pack, the treatment of industry process emissions as distinct from energy emissions, the assessment of technology cost declines in solar, wind and storage, and the identification of aviation, shipping and heavy industry as hard-to-abate. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; no chapter, table or page number is cited because none could be confirmed, and every sectoral share attributed here is given as a range rather than a figure.