‘Revival’ Interrupted: World Nuclear Industry Won’t Sustain 2024 Growth, Struggles for Relevance as Renewables Surge

Although global nuclear generating capacity grew 2.9% to a record 2,663 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2024, the industry won’t likely be able to sustain that growth in the face of limited investment, aging power plants, continuing project delays, and overwhelming competition from cleaner, more affordable renewable energy, a leading industry analyst concluded this week.

The nuclear industry struggled for real relevance in 2024, with just seven new reactors brought online and four shut down, while solar alone added hundreds of gigawatts of new capacity, Mycle Schneider writes [pdf], in the latest edition of his annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR). Energy storage “passed a trigger point,” there are first signs of “a revolution behind the meter,” and low-income countries are starting to leapfrog to renewables.

“Risks around aging fleets, sluggish construction, accelerating system disruption from renewable energy, and China-centred development are expected to impact growth and lead to declines in regional electricity production shares,” Reuters states, citing the report. “To keep global nuclear output steady through 2030 the world would need 44 additional startups beyond those already scheduled, lifting annual startups to roughly 2½ times the past decade’s pace.” [Assuming, against a great deal of history, that a nuclear project scheduled today could begin generating power in just five years—Ed.]

That won’t be easy, with more than one-third of the world’s 63 nuclear construction projects behind schedule, 14 of them reporting increased delays. Meanwhile, “competition from cheaper non-hydro renewables and battery storage is expected to have a broad impact, as investment in renewables was 21 times that of nuclear last year, while added capacity was more than 100 times net nuclear additions,” Reuters says. “Battery costs are also falling, down about 40% in 2024, while nuclear plant costs continue to rise.”

Most of the nuclear growth is in China, the WNISR data show, where capacity grew by 3.5 gigawatts in 2024 while solar added 278 GW. “Between 2005 and 2024, there were 104 startups and 101 closures,” the report states. “Of these, 51 startups and none of the closures were in China. Thus, outside China, there has been a net decline by 48 units over the same period.”

The report warns that it will be increasingly difficult for nuclear to break into a global energy system dominated by renewables. “New energy technologies disrupt markets and systems,” it explains. “Photovoltaics directly produces electricity from solar radiation in harmless, nanometer-thin semiconductor junctions, allowing for ongoing steep cost reductions and performance increases. This is complemented by similar advances in power electronics and batteries. Together, these new technologies are evolving towards a highly flexible, fully electrified energy system with a decentralized control logic, outcompeting traditional centralized fossil and nuclear systems.”

Nuclear energy, it adds, “increasingly has difficulties to survive in this context.”

“The continuous disconnect between public narrative and industrial reality remains very worrying,” Schneider told PV Magazine.

“It is startling to see the breathtaking speed of the transformation of the world’s power systems,” he added. “While the nuclear industry proudly announces—correctly—a new record of nuclear power generation, the event is insignificant in the system context.” The 14 TWh of output the industry added this year broke an 18-year record, but it was only the equivalent of a single large reactor, “or what UK offshore wind turbines generated in the fourth quarter of 2024.”

Outside China, the report states, “nuclear generation in 2024 remained 363 TWh below the 2006 level, an almost 14% plunge.”

Despite the incremental growth in nuclear output worldwide, the industry is still mired at 9% of the global electricity mix, its lowest value in four decades, down from 17.5% in 1996. That share “is likely to erode further…unless project delivery and economics improve markedly,” Reuters writes. The world’s nuclear fleet is also aging—around two-thirds of reactors have been in operation for more than 31 years, and their average age increased slightly from 32 to 32.4 years between mid-2024 and mid-2025, another measure of the small number of new projects going online.

And so far, very few of those projects are the small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) that have captured the imagination of politicians and pundits in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and beyond. China is the only country with two designs in operation or built, with limited operational data available. Elsewhere, they “remain largely aspirational, as despite rising public and private funding, no Western SMR construction has begun,” Reuters says.

In September 2020, with nuclear already losing ground to affordable renewables, Schneider tagged SMRs as “PowerPoint reactors, not detailed engineering, and it’s not the first time. They’ve been doing this for decades.”

“Nobody, not even industry, pretends they can produce anything before 2030. That’s the earliest,” he told The Energy Mix at the time. So “it’s already very simple—it’s much too late, and we don’t know if it’ll work or what it’ll cost.”

Only 11 countries hosted nuclear construction projects in mid-2025—two fewer than in mid-2024, and five fewer than in mid-2023—and companies controlled by the Chinese and Russian governments accounted for 44 of 45 of the world’s reactor construction starts between January 2020 and mid-2025, the WNISR states. China accounted for seven of the nine construction starts in 2024. Russia “continues its key role” as a supplier of uranium fuel for its own reactors, and as a provider of parts and service to western nuclear companies, while the Zaporizhzhia site in Ukraine, Europe’s largest, is a “constant cause of concern” due to the continuing occupation by Russian troops.

The nuclear industry may also be running out of the uranium fuel it relies on to run its reactors. Earlier this month, the World Nuclear Association warned that supplies will be tight if the industry ramps up, with existing mines expected to halve their output between 2030 and 2040. The “significant gap” between demand and supply projections would threaten an awaited nuclear power “renaissance,” the Financial Times wrote (although this week’s analysis would appear to solve that problem).

The WNISR also reports that:

• The total of 408 nuclear reactors in operation in mid-2025 was unchanged from the previous year, down 30 from the industry’s peak in 2002.

• Russia dominates the international market for nuclear reactor construction projects, with 20 under way in seven countries. While multiple countries have announced plans to build their first nuclear reactors, only Bangladesh, Egypt, and Türkiye have started construction, all with Russian designs.

• In France, the Flamanville nuclear plant finally went online, 12 years late and at a cost of US$25.6 billion, “a staggering sixfold increase over the original $4.3 billion estimate.”

• At the site of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, “onsite and offsite challenges remain overwhelming, with an initial removal of fuel debris amounting to around a billionth of the total,” the WNISR states. “A focus on food safety monitoring finds an opaque system that makes it challenging for the government to convince observers it has control over the situation.”

• Of the 218 nuclear reactors that have been shut down worldwide, only 23 have been fully decontaminated, and only nine of been released by regulators and declared safe.

Cover photo:  Hinkley Point C photo by Nick Chipchase/wikimedia commons