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For press releases, policy changes, and promises to build new nuclear power, 2025 was a gangbusters year. For actually adding new reactors to the grid, not so much.
In fact, around the world, more gigawatts’ worth of nuclear reactors were retired than turned on this year, according to new data from the consultancy BloombergNEF.
In the 11 months leading up to Dec. 1, only two new reactors came online, totaling 1.8 GW. Meanwhile, seven reactors totaling 2.8 GW of capacity were permanently shuttered. The net effect? Global nuclear operating capacity declined by just over 1 GW. Overall, the world had 417 reactors in operation churning out 337 GW of power as of the start of this month.
Belgium led the retreat, shuttering two reactors this year, even as the country’s lawmakers voted in May to repeal a 2003 law that required the country to phase out nuclear power entirely.
Taiwan also contributed to the decline when it closed the last reactor at its Maanshan plant on the island’s southern tip, completing the country’s long-awaited exit from atomic energy. Russia will round out the closures by decommissioning three 12-megawatt units at a plant in the Arctic by the end of this month.
The shutdowns are the result of a yearslong pullback on nuclear power across much of the world, with China and Russia being the key exceptions.
But they also come at what may be a turning point for that global retreat from nuclear. Around the world, new technologies are racing toward maturity, shuttered reactors are being revived, and dealmakers are seeking to shore up the future supply of clean electricity by investing in new nuclear power. Next year is the first time in at least 15 years that zero reactors worldwide are slated to shut down. While closures will pick up again in 2027, new capacity is projected to dramatically outpace shutdowns through 2029.
The West and its allies have struggled to build and maintain reactors, and recent developments affecting South Korea, one of the more efficient nuclear developers, will not make matters easier.
The country’s state-owned nuclear companies have managed to avoid the sluggish build-outs that have plagued other developers. In June, however, South Korean voters returned to power the center-left Democratic Party, which tried to phase out the industry entirely the last time it held the Blue House. Further, an intellectual-property dispute between the American nuclear champion Westinghouse and Korea’s state-owned companies — Korea Electric Power Corp. and its subsidiary Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. — came to a close this year with a settlement that bars Seoul’s firms from competing for projects in North America, most of the European Union, Britain, Japan, and Ukraine.
On top of that, according to Chris Gadomski, the lead nuclear analyst at BloombergNEF, “there’s a lot of hesitation among countries in the world to do business with the Chinese,” who are currently building reactors at a far faster rate than any other country.
That makes President Donald Trump’s efforts to revive nuclear construction at home and sell more reactors abroad particularly impactful for the industry’s future in the West and among its allies, especially countries in Africa and Asia building nuclear plants for the first time.
“The No. 1 question is how effective Trump’s pushing and shoving will be,” said Gadomski, who authored the market overview report published last week. “He’s really trying to reestablish American nuclear dominance.”
Unlike buying solar panels or batteries from China, nuclear reactors are century-long commitments between the construction, operation, and eventual decommissioning of the plant. Each of those steps is traditionally carried out by the vendor country.
“People are just concerned, so there is an opening for U.S. technology to be exported overseas,” Gadomski said. “People are dying to get U.S. technology.”
But right now, he warned, the small modular reactors attracting most of the attention have yet to be proven. And the only new reactor the U.S. has built from scratch on its own turf since the 1990s is the Westinghouse AP1000 at Southern Co.’s Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia. The two new units there ran billions of dollars over budget.
Estimates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggest that the next AP1000 will come in significantly cheaper than even the shrunken-down small modular reactors currently under consideration, since the supply chain and design are now cemented. Indeed, Vogtle Unit 4 came in roughly 30% cheaper than Vogtle Unit 3, the first AP1000 to be built in the U.S.
Washington is working to expand the AP1000’s footprint. Both the Export-Import Bank of the U.S. and the U.S. International Development Finance Corp. have expressed interest in financing the construction of Poland’s first nuclear plant, made up of three AP1000s. In October, the Department of Commerce announced a deal with Japan to furnish Westinghouse with at least $80 billion to build 10 AP1000s in the U.S.
But Gadomski cautioned that the willingness to make such big investments largely hinges on the rising demand for power from data centers providing artificial intelligence software.
“If the AI boom collapses, we won’t need so much energy,” he said. “We’ve got tons of cheap natural gas, and there are technical and social risks to building out nuclear.”
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