The civilian nuclear industry can be broadly divided into two main markets: the building of nuclear power stations and the production and supply of enriched-uranium fuel. The first is dominated by countries with big domestic fleets, such as America, China, France and South Korea, which tend to build their own. The fuel market is even more lopsided, with just a few countries able to enrich uranium.
Customers can in theory buy reactor technology from seven main countries: America, Canada, China, France, Japan, Russia and South Korea. But Russia is far in the lead when it comes to exporting them. Rosatom, its state-owned nuclear firm, has about 65% of the global export market for nuclear reactors, according to the World Nuclear Association.
Russia controls 44% of the world's uranium-enrichment capacity. In 2023 the EU imported a quarter of the enriched uranium it needed from Russia, much of which went to five countries with Russian-designed reactors: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary and Slovakia. In 2023 America bought roughly a quarter of its enriched uranium from Russia.
In 2023 America, Britain, Canada, France and Japan formed the "Sapporo Five" group to collaborate on at least $4.2bn-worth of investments in new enrichment. In May 2025 Donald Trump signed four executive orders aimed at re-establishing America "as the global leader in nuclear energy" and securing its supplies of enriched uranium. Westinghouse, an American firm, has developed nuclear-fuel assemblies that fit Russian VVER reactors and has agreements to supply them to Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Ukraine.
Western companies struggle to compete with Rosatom in the reactor export market. EDF, France's state-backed electricity firm, has faced long delays and cost overruns at its three recent nuclear projects in Britain, France and Finland. Only one nuclear plant has been built in America since 2017; it reportedly cost around $35bn, more than double the initial estimate, and was finished seven years behind schedule.
China has an experienced nuclear workforce, a solid pipeline of projects, a track record of building reactors in as little as six years, and can offer state-backed financing—making it a plausible rival to Russia. However, China has wobbly credentials on non-proliferation. For decades it denounced the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as unfair; in the 1970s and 1980s it helped Pakistan with its nuclear-weapons programme, providing blueprints for a bomb. China acceded to the NPT in 1992 and has since eschewed sales to rogue states, but it has recently weakened scrutiny of bomb-making by North Korea, a regime it sees as a useful buffer state.
Torness nuclear power station, on Britain's coast in East Lothian, is the last nuclear power plant in Scotland. Construction began in the early Thatcher years; power started flowing in 1988. It is the second-newest of Britain's working nuclear sites (after Sizewell B in Suffolk). Originally planned to run for 25 years, it has now been operating for 37 years and generates enough to supply over 2% of Britain's electricity. EDF, the French utility, runs Torness and plans to keep it going until at least 2030.
The reactors are built around thousands of graphite bricks that moderate the nuclear reaction. The graphite is slowly cracking under radiation and cannot be replaced; the plant will keep running only as long as operators and regulators are persuaded it can withstand a one-in-10,000-year earthquake. Two new nuclear plants are planned in England: Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C. Most Scots, and even a majority of SNP voters, support new nuclear power, according to polling by Britain Remade. However, the SNP has used its sway over Scotland's planning system to effectively ban new nuclear projects.
Japan had 54 operational reactors by 2010, providing some 25% of its electricity. After the Fukushima disaster on March 11th 2011, all reactors were shut for inspections and a new Nuclear Regulation Authority was established. Japan now has 15 operational reactors; another three have safety clearances but remain idle, and 18 more await regulatory approval. The rest have been decommissioned. The latest energy plan envisions nuclear providing 20% of the electricity mix in 2040, up from under 10% recently. In February 2026 the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation (TEPCO) restarted the first reactor at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, the world's largest nuclear power station (seven reactors), on Japan's northern coast—TEPCO's first nuclear plant to restart since it ran the ill-fated Fukushima reactors. The legal lifetime of reactors has been extended from 40 to 60 years, but most were built in the 1970s-1990s and will have to be phased out in the 2040s-2050s. Only one potential new plant has reached the stage of preliminary geological surveys.
Growing optimism about nuclear energy reflects three developments: governments' desire for secure, independent electricity; big tech's thirst for reliable, low-carbon power; and novel financial and operational models.
In America, Donald Trump has called for a quadrupling of domestic capacity to 400GW by 2050. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed in July 2025, showers tax credits on the industry. Republican states such as Texas are rolling out a welcome mat, as are some blue states: officials in New York, which shut a big nuclear plant in 2021, now want the state-owned utility to build a new one.
Rick Perry, a former governor of Texas who served as energy secretary in Trump's first term, launched Fermi America on July 4th 2025, a firm hoping to build the world's largest energy and data-centre complex outside Amarillo. The facility will initially generate electricity using natural gas and solar before construction of conventional reactors and several small modular reactors (SMRs), producing 11GW of power. On August 25th 2025 Fermi and Westinghouse unveiled a partnership to seek approval for four AP1000 reactors in Amarillo. Westinghouse separately wants to start building ten AP1000 plants in America by 2030.
The European Commission unveiled a roadmap in June 2025 forecasting that nuclear capacity would rise from 100GW to up to 145GW by 2050. Germany has scrapped its opposition to classifying nuclear energy as "green" in European legislation. In July 2025 Britain made the final decision to proceed with Sizewell C, two giant reactors that could cost over £38bn ($51bn). Sweden confirmed plans to build several SMRs.
Deep Fission, a nuclear-power startup in Berkeley, California, founded by Elizabeth Muller, proposes building a reactor at the bottom of a mile-deep shaft drilled into the Earth's crust, then filling the shaft with water. The optimum pressure inside a pressurised-water reactor is approximately 155 times atmospheric pressure at sea level—equivalent to the pressure at the bottom of a column of water 1.6km deep. By placing a stripped-down reactor core at such depth, the water replaces the pressuriser and the surrounding rock stands in for the containment vessel, eliminating much of the paraphernalia that makes conventional reactors expensive to build and run.
Ms Muller has spent the past decade collaborating with her physicist father Richard Muller, a former academic at the University of California, Berkeley, to run Deep Isolation, a firm that proposes burying reactor waste in deep shafts. About three years before the firm's founding she realised the approach could be applied to the reactors themselves.
Deep Fission's target diameter for the core is 75cm, which its (currently anonymous) drilling partner considers feasible, since wider and in some cases deeper boreholes were routinely dug from the 1950s to the 1970s to accommodate underground nuclear-warhead tests. Once in place, heated water would be brought to the surface through a pipe, used to produce turbine-turning steam, and returned to the shaft. Each core would be pre-loaded with enough uranium fuel for two years, after which another would be lowered on top of it for a total working life of 50-60 years, after which the shaft would be pumped dry and sealed with concrete, disposing of the waste.
Each unit (borehole plus initial core) would cost about $30m and produce 15MW of electricity at 5-7 cents per kWh. On August 12th 2025 the Department of Energy selected Deep Fission as one of ten firms in its Nuclear Reactor Pilot Programme, intended to speed up testing of new designs. Ms Muller has signed a deal with Endeavour, an American data-centre company.
More than 120 firms are attempting to develop SMRs, which can be churned out by factories and transported to suitable sites. Barclays predicts that between 2030 and 2050, net nuclear capacity outside China and Russia will increase by more than half, to over 450GW, with SMRs accounting for 40-60% of the total, suggesting a $1trn market. SMR startups have raised more than $2bn since early 2024. In June 2025 Oklo, backed by Sam Altman of OpenAI, raised $460m and TerraPower, founded by Bill Gates, raised $650m. Google has signed a deal to help Kairos Power develop a fleet of SMRs by 2035. X-energy, another SMR startup, is preparing to build its first four reactors at a Dow petrochemical facility in Texas, with Amazon as an investor.
Dozens of startups are also pursuing nuclear fusion. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, backed by Mr Gates, unveiled $863m in fresh funding on August 26th 2025. Fusion startups raised $2.6bn in the year to July 2025.
Tech giants are funding both conventional and advanced nuclear technology. Michael Terrell of Google says his industry needs "clean, firm power" from nuclear to complement renewables, supporting the technology "short to middle to long". Meta signed a 20-year deal in June 2025 to fund a life extension of the Clinton Power Station in Illinois, run by Constellation Energy, the world's largest private operator of nuclear plants. Microsoft signed a similar deal to restart a retired reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. Constellation's chief executive, Joe Dominguez, reckons 7-10GW could be added to America's fleet through incremental improvements such as equipment, software and process upgrades, and that big tech's support will enable 30GW of power to be made available to the market that would not otherwise exist.
Both conventional nuclear and SMR costs today exceed the market price for power. No plant has been built on time and on budget in Europe or North America over the past 20 years. However, China and South Korea have demonstrated that it is possible to build big reactors in five years and on budget by standardising designs, building multiple reactors per site and moving quickly between projects. A paper in Nature by Daniel Kammen of Johns Hopkins University emphasises the importance of China's "vast and expanding electricity market" in providing demand certainty and spurring supply-chain investment.
In the decades after the second world war, when America had a clear lead in civilian nuclear power, it set international standards and enhanced safety through its push to set up the IAEA. In 1978 America required countries to sign the NPT before gaining access to its technology. Russia, however, has since 2022 "become markedly counterproductive, and outright obstructive" on non-proliferation, according to the Royal United Services Institute.
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