Historical Vetting|Primary Energy|Nuclear

Why this criterion? This criterion flags scenarios that report nuclear primary energy production that is inconsistent with historical values.

This is a concern because the underlying modelling likely makes false assumptions on the mitigation effort required to reach net-zero emissions.

Why this threshold? Historical values are provided by the International Energy Agency (IEA, 2025), where we assume that Primary Energy variables are given by the "total energy supply" reported by the IEA.

Based on this historical data, we assume the following global threshold for years 2010, 2015, 2020 and 2025:
• Lower and upper threshold, failed vetting: ±20% deviation.

Note that these ranges not only give models some leeway to deviate, but also account for uncertainty in the underlying data sources.

The threshold for 2025 is derived using the 2023 value and the 2021–2023 growth rate.

To account for the COVID-19 shock, the threshold for 2020 is derived using both the reported value in 2020 and the value averaged over the period Jan 2018 until Dec 2022, taking whichever is more permissive for the scenario in question.

World

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Note

The value for Primary Energy|Nuclear is taken from the statistics of "Electricity generation by source, World, 1990-2023" of the IEA Energy Statistics Data Browser (here) and then converted from GWh to EJ (assuming 1 GWh = 3.6e-06 EJ).

Reference data

Dataset	Source	Description
IEA-ESDB-20250610	IEA (2025)	Based on IEA (2025). Primary Energy variables are taken from the total energy supply reported by the IEA.
IEA-ESDB-20250610-extrapol25	IEA (2025)	Data from IEA (2025) extrapolated to 2025 using the 2021-2023 average growth rate. Primary Energy variables are taken from the total energy supply reported by the IEA.

Sources

Identifier	Bibliographic information	Links
IEA-ESDB-20250610	IEA. Energy Statistics Data Browser. International Energy Agency, Paris, France, June 2025.	URL