Status and Trends of the Global Nuclear Industry: A Cruel Reality Check

Source : The National Interest – Status and Trends of the Global Nuclear Industry: A Cruel Reality Check https://nationalinterest.org/blog/energy-world/status-and-trends-of-the-global-nuclear-industry-a-cruel-reality-check

by Mycle Schneider [1] • 13 May 2025

The excitement is palpable. Enthusiasm in the nuclear community is overwhelming. Red tape is being cut. The nuclear revival is on its way. The New York Times reported that the Administration “formally specified the steps it will take to revive commercial nuclear power, an industry whose current problems the Administration regards as largely due to overregulation by the Government.” The President ordered the Secretary of Energy “to give high priority to recommending ways to speed the regulatory and licensing process for new plants.”

That was in 1981, and the president was Ronald Reagan. Ever since, at least once every decade, a global nuclear renaissance has been proclaimed by industry representatives and policymakers.

What happened in the real world? For the past eighteen years, the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report, researched by an international team of interdisciplinary experts from universities and think tanks around the world that I coordinate, attempts just that: a periodical reality check on the status and trends of the industry.

Trends in the Global Nuclear Industry

Most of the industry indicators peaked a long time ago. The largest number of units, 438, operated in 2002. With regards to commercial power, nuclear’s slice of the energy pie reached its zenith in 1996 at 17.5 percent. Startups of new reactors peaked in 1984-1985 at thirty-three per year, with only three closed in each of those years. The most units, 234, were under construction in 1979, and the number of construction starts saw its historic maximum at forty-four in 1976.

In comparison, in 2024, seven new reactors started up in the world, while four were closed. That is a net addition of three units, one-tenth of the level seen in the mid 1980s. The share of nuclear declined to around nine percent, about half of the level that existed three decades ago. As of the beginning of 2025, there were 411 reactors operating, and sixty under construction, of which twenty-nine are in China, but not a single one is on the entire American continent from Alaska to Cape Horn. The only indicator in 2024 that marginally exceeded a previous record set in 2006 is operating nuclear capacity – by four gigawatts (GW) or a one percent increase in eighteen years. Total global nuclear electricity generation also has likely exceeded the previous 2006-peak by two percent or so, but official numbers are not yet available.

In the United States, over the past forty years since Reagan’s nuclear revival efforts, Westinghouse started construction on just four AP1000 reactors, all in 2013 – two in South Carolina and two in Georgia. The builder claimed that “by using modular construction methods, Westinghouse and its project partners will be able to build the AP1000 in 36 months.” Four years later, after an investment of nearly $10 billion and nine rate increases for local electricity customers, Westinghouse went bankrupt and abandoned the construction at the V.C. Summer site in South Carolina.

The economic disaster had a serious legal aftermath, and four former utility and industry executives were sentenced to prison or home detention. The last one was Jeffrey Alan Benjamin, former senior vice president for new plants and major projects at the Westinghouse Electric Company who “directly supervised all new nuclear projects worldwide during the V.C. Summer project” and who, in November 2024, was sentenced to federal prison for causing the builder-utility SCANA “to keep false records in connection with the failed V.C. Summer nuclear construction project.”

Historically, on a global average, one in nine reactors listed as under construction at some point in time have been given up at various stages of advancement.

In the United States, the other two AP1000s at the Vogtle site in Georgia made it to the grid after, respectively, ten and eleven years of construction at an all-in cost of around $35 billion. Georgia Public Services Commission staff calculated that “the cost increases and schedule delays have completely eliminated any benefit [of Vogtle-3 and -4] on a life-cycle cost basis.”

In 2025, ninety-three percent of the capacity added to the U.S. grid is expected to come from solar (fifty-two percent), wind (twelve percent), and battery storage (twenty-nine percent). For 2025, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts a twenty-six-percent growth of solar capacity to exceed 150 GW in total. Texas alone is on track to host, by the end of the year, forty GW of solar, over forty GW of wind, and twenty GW of grid-connected battery storage.

Over the past two decades, 2005-2024, we have seen 104 reactor startups and 101 closures in the world. However, fifty-one of the new grid connections were in China, where no closures have occurred. In other words, the world outside China saw only fifty-three startups but 101 closures, a significant net decline of forty-eight units.

Changes in Nuclear Power

Were there any fundamental changes towards the end of the twenty-year period? Yes, Russia became the dominant international vendor. Over the past five years, 2020–2024, forty construction starts took place, of which twenty-six were in China, one was in Pakistan (by Chinese companies) and the remaining thirteen were implemented by Russian companies in Egypt, India, Türkiye, and at home. Basically, recent nuclear construction efforts can be summed up by saying China builds at home and Russia abroad.

Even China’s nuclear expansion is dwarfed by its renewables buildout. Three new reactors totaling 3.5 GW were connected to the Chinese grid in 2024 – just 0.8 percent of total capacity additions – while 357 GW of solar (278 GW) and wind (seventy-nine GW) capacity – together eighty-three percent of the total – was added at the same time, according to National Energy Administration data. Even if nuclear plants in China generate on average seven times more power per GW than solar and close to four times more than wind, solar and wind each generated two times more electricity than nuclear in 2024. Consequently, the share of nuclear power in the national electricity mix shrunk slightly to around 4.5 percent.

There are countless announcements of nuclear projects around the world, policy decisions, budget allocations, and design developments – especially on SMRs, which seem to be more appropriately called small miraculous reactors – but in the end, the question is what happens on the ground. For the time being, nuclear power remains irrelevant in the world market for electricity generating machines. And potential builders, other than the Chinese and Russians, have yet to prove that they are able to design, build, and commission within tight time-frames and budget constraints. Competitors on the renewable and storage side are accelerating implementation now. The probability is high that these ferocious rivals have digested nuclear’s lunch before the atomic industry has demonstrated that it can actually keep its promises on the ground. That’s the cruel reality.

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