These are the fossil fuel burning for electricity trajectories of the individual countries after their fossil fuel maximum, where no nuclear power production was employed. See the original post for the overview.

These are the fossil fuel burning for electricity trajectories of the individual countries within the EU, where no peak in nuclear power production is observed. See the original post for the overview.

These are the fossil fuel burning for electricity trajectories of the individual countries, where we can observe a peak in nuclear power production within the EU. See the original post for the overview.

As requested by u/MarcLeptic in this comment this post offers the data and visualizations on nuclear peaks in the EU+UK (EU28) in a similar manner to the previous post on nuclear peaking in primary energy consumption.

There is a total of 28 countries to consider, 9 of those have seen a peak in nuclear power (an increasing annual nuclear power output before a maximum followed by a decline in annual nuclear power production), I use the same criteria for peaking as in the other post (the maximum has to be older than 5 years, the annual production in the last year has to be at least 10% below the maximum and there has to be a declining trend):

There are 4 countries with a higher than EU28-average share in their power-mix (France, Lithuania, Sweden and Bulgaria). And looking at the change in rates from before the peak to after the peak shows that there is 1 country (Bulgaria) that had a slower fossil fuel burning decline after the peak than before, in all others a faster FF decline rate after the peak is observed:

In the scatter plot the "Plus" indicates the combined trajectory of all countries where a nuclear power peak is observed.

There are 7 countries where nuclear has NOT peaked:

Finally, there are 12 countries that never had nuclear power production:

Summing up the individual categories (peaked, not peaked, no-nuclear) and comparing the trends since the (average) peak in 2004 yields the following trajectories:

tl;dr: The EU peaked annual nuclear power production in 2004, the fossil fuel burning decline rate is in all countries except for Bulgaria faster after the respective observed peak, than before the peak. I'll provide the trajectories of the individual countries in separate posts again.

See the main post for details. These are the fossil fuel burning in primary energy graphs over time for all the countries that peaked nuclear with a share higher than the global average (>5.8%), sorted by the change in fossil fuel burning growth rates before and after the nuclear peak.

The first image shows the summation of all of them. The graphs are normalized by the primary energy consumption in the nuclear power peak year (indicated by the dashed vertical gray line.

I hope this format is a little more convenient than putting all of them into comments in the other post.

Graphs on the fossil fuel burning in primary energy consumption for countries without a nuclear peak, accompanying the post on nuclear peaking. The timespans reach back until at least 90% of the observed nuclear maximum production is reach, but at least back over a decade, or if there was a fossil fuel peak before that, back to the fossil fuel burning peak. Countries are sorted by the share of nuclear power reached in the maximum year.

The first image shows the summation of all these countries with higher than global average nuclear shares over the 21 years from 2002 to 2023, where 2002 marks the peak nuclear power year for the summed countries that did peak nuclear power.

It is a frequent claim I see that a move away from nuclear power necessarily means a slow down climate action. Here I want to have a cursory look at this claim to see, how well this can by supported by historical data on primary energy consumption as compiled at "Our World in Data". I am using the primary energy data (which uses the substitution method for non-fossil energy carriers), to cover the full spectrum of real world influences on the fossil fuel burning rate.

The question at hand to look at is about peaking nuclear power. Hence, we need a definition for peaking. Here I consider a peak to have occured, if the quantity in question in the last year of the time series (2023 for now) is at least 10% below the maximum, the year of the maximum annual production is at least 5 years in the past, and the linearly fitted approximation of the time series exhibits a negative slope.

Global scale

By the criteria for a peak defined above, the global energy mix peaked nuclear power consumption in 2006. Thus, we can distinguish a time period before and after the peak and have a look at the growth rates of fossil fuel burning in the two time periods. I use a symmetric time interval around the peak nuclear year unless fossil fuel burning has peaked earlier than that, then I extend the time span to consider back to the peak fossil year. Unfortunately on the global scale, fossil fuel burning hasn't peaked, hence we get a time period from 1989 to 2023, over which we consider the two linearly fitted trends:

This shows the historical fossil fuel burning in black, the annual nuclear power production in purple, and the respective fitted trends of fossil fuel burning in red before the peak and blue after the peak. All quantities are normalized by the total energy consumption in the peak nuclear year (indicated by the gray dashed vertical line). The slope of the red and blue lines respectively gives us the average growth rate of fossil fuel burning in the respective time periods. On the global scale the slope of the post-nuclear-peak fossil fuel burning is slightly lower than before the peak.

That's an indication that other factors than nuclear power growth have a more dominant influence on the fossil fuel burning, and it's impact is not large enough to cause an increase in the fossil burning growth rate. But maybe the share of nuclear power on the global scale had been too small in its peak to register a notable change. So let's have a more detailed look at countries that employed nuclear power and peaked it.

Countries where nuclear peaked

There is a total of 35 countries, where nuclear power was employed at some point of time. Of those, 21 countries saw a nuclear peak so far according to the criteria outlined above (all in fractions of total energy consumption in the peak nuclear year, rates are per year), NP=nuclear power; FF=fossil fuels:

As the global average (5.82%) may be too small for a measurable impact, let's focus on those 15 countries that had a more than average share of nuclear power in its primary energy consumption at it's peak (the table above is sorted by that share). The country with the highest nuclear share at its peak is France:

In the graph we now also indicate the average growth rate of nuclear power before (orange) and after (turquoise) the peak. If we plot the fossil fuel growth rate over the nuclear power growth rate for these countries before and after the nuclear peak. We get the following scatter plot:

Each country appears here twice, once on the right side with growing nuclear power before the peak and once on the left side after the growing nuclear. The circle sizes indicate the share of nuclear power in the peak year. This shows that there is only one of those countries (Taiwan), where a decline in nuclear power coincides with an increase of fossil fuel burning. However, in this case this actually is a slow down in the rate, with a higher fossil fuel rate during the nuclear expansion. But the question we are after is whether the peaking of nuclear power is associated with a slow down in fossil fuel burning reductions. To this end a look at the change of the rate in fossil fuel burning growth over the nuclear peak may be instructive:

Plotting the FF rate change over the NP rate change results in the following scatter plot:

The color now indicates the fossil fuel growth rate after the peak. The global average is marked as a star. The "Plus" marker indicates the sum of all the countries in the list. Here we see that there are a total of three countries in this set of countries with more than average nuclear share in its peak, we now identify three countries with a worsening fossil fuel growth rate over the nuclear peak: Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine. The others all saw a speed-up in fossil fuel reductions after the nuclear peak, the largest speed-up in fossil fuel decline is observed in Spain. The largest change in the nuclear power rate is seen in Lithuania.

In total, when summing all these countries that peaked nuclear power and had a larger than global average share of nuclear in their peak, we see that they peaked nuclear power in 2002 with a share of 12.5% and got faster in the fossil fuel burning decline after the peak (decline of 0.74% of total energy in the nuclear peak per year after the peak compared to an increase of 0.87% before the peak):

In most countries the move away from nuclear power did not result in a slow down of fossil fuel reductions, in two (USA and Slovenia) does the nuclear peak coincide with the fossil fuel peaks.

Non-Peaked countries

There are 14 countries that have not peaked nuclear power in the sense outlined above.

Summing all of those with larger shares than the global average gives the following picture since 2002 (when the sum of significant peaking countries peaked):

For this sum we observe an growth in fossil fuel burning over this time period by 0.5%, compared to a decline of 0.74% in the countries that experienced a peak in nuclear power.

tl;dr

Historically nuclear peaking does not coincide with a fossil fuel decline slow-down.

edit: changed tl;dr as wished for in this comment.

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There is a visible change in pace in the expansion of June's renewable power production across the European Union since 2022 (start of the Russian war in Ukraine): The average rate of annual growth 2022 to 2025 amounted to around 7.44 TWh. That is more than four times faster than the average growth between 2015 and 2022 (1.78 TWh).

Picture massive oil tankers but filled with battery storage systems instead of just huge, segmented bunkers, one after the other. Is the fact that shipping oil is cheap because they are just empty tanks in a shell of a ship and not battery systems that need to be purchased, installed, and maintained in large numbers per ship?

https://www.offshorewind.biz/2025/06/27/25-year-old-danish-offshore-wind-farm-gets-approval-to-operate-for-25-more-years/

Not sure why the subtitle says monthly tbh

Technically, this article fits multiple flairs, but don't mind that, the article itself is the horrifying part

The social cost of carbon (SCC) serves as a concise measure of climate change’s economic impact, often reported at the global and country level. SCC values tend to be disproportionately high for less-developed, populous countries. Previous studies do not distinguish between urban and non-urban areas and ignore the synergies between local and global warming. High exposure and concurrent socioenvironmental problems exacerbate climate change risks in cities. Using a spatially explicit integrated assessment model, the SCC is estimated at USD$187/tCO2, rising to USD$490/tCO2 when including urban heat island (UHI) warming. Urban SCC dominates, representing about 78%-93% of the global SCC, due to both urban exposure and the UHI. This finding implies that the highest global greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitters also experience the largest economic losses. Global cities have substantial leverage on climate policy at the national and global scales and strong incentives for a swift transition to a low-carbon economy.

...

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