According to Jim Green of RenewEconomy, “The latest World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR-2025) has crunched the numbers to show that 2025 was another underwhelming year for nuclear power. As of Jan. 1, 2025 … nuclear accounted for nine percent of global electricity generation, half its historic peak of 17.5 percent in 1996.”
Overall, the 25-year pattern of nuclear’s global stagnation continues, with no end in sight. Installed nuclear capacity of 4.4 gigawatts (GW or 1 billion watts) in 2025 was 180 times lower than the estimated 793 GW of solar and wind capacity (up from 717 GW in 2024). In China, new nuclear capacity in 2025 amounted to 2.5 GW whereas solar capacity installed in the first 11 months of 2025 amounted to an estimated 275 GW — 110 times more than nuclear.
Conspicuously absent from the lists of reactor startups and construction starts are any small modular reactors or any ‘Generation IV’ reactors such as fast neutron reactors, fusion reactors, molten salt reactors, etc.
Even in the face of such data, the Trump White House, Big Tech, and the acolytes of the “Nuclear Renaissance” are still pushing the wasting of federal dollars on massive infrastructure build-outs for experimental new fuel chains and prototypes of hypothetical small modular nuclear reactors. — World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2025; RenewEconomy, Jan. 27, 2026
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