World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2024
The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2024 (WNISR2024) assesses on 513 pages the status and trends of the international nuclear industry. It provides a comprehensive overview of nuclear power plant data, including information on operation, production, fleet age, and construction. The WNISR discusses the status of newbuild programs in existing as well as in potential newcomer nuclear countries; notably in the Türkiye Focus which provides critical context to the ongoing construction of the country’s first nuclear power plant. A section is dedicated to ambitions and prospects for nuclear deployment in Potential Newcomer Countries in Africa, while Taiwan Focus covers the current situation and implementation of the nuclear phaseout policy.
WNISR2024 includes special focus chapters on Nuclear Power vs. Renewable Energy Deployment and Power Firming and Competitive Pressure on Nuclear Energy, that assess how solar/wind + storage put increasing competitive pressures on the nuclear sector. Further focus chapters include an overview of Small Modular Reactor (SMR) developments; an analysis of the Russia Nuclear Dependencies of the global nuclear sector with a case study on Russian designed fuel assembly manufacturing; an analysis of the Militarization of Civil Power Plants based on the case study of tritium production for weapons in the United States and its significance for France; and an assessment of Civil-Military Cross-Financing in the U.K. Nuclear Sector discussing how tax- and rate-payers unknowingly subsidize the civil and military nuclear establishments.
The Fukushima Status Report provides an overview of ongoing onsite/offsite challenges of the 2011-disaster. The Decommissioning Status Report looks at the current situation of the now over 210 closed nuclear power reactors, close to one third of all units in the world that have generated electricity at some point. Annex 1 offers an overview by region and country of all operating nuclear programs not covered in the focus chapters.
Fourteen interdisciplinary authors based in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, South Africa, Taiwan, Türkiye, the U.K. and the U.S., at prestigious academic institutions like Nagasaki University, University of British Columbia, Technical University of Berlin, University of Sussex, and the University of Johannesburg, have contributed to the report, along with a data engineer, numerous proofreaders, and two artistic designers.
The foreword was provided by Andreas Molin, Former Director of the Division of Nuclear Co-ordination at the Austrian Ministry of Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility Innovation and Technology (1995–2021), and current member of the High-Level Group on Stakeholder Engagement, Trust, Transparency and Social Sciences at the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency.
