Nuclear power has a renewed and now geopolitical appeal

As countries pledge to triple nuclear capacity worldwide as a net zero strategy, Fred Harter looks at the global picture

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A nuclear reactor building boom led by Britain, Turkey and Poland is under way in Europe.

It is a similar picture elsewhere: Vietnam, Egypt and others want nuclear plants.

Donald Trump has signed a series of executive orders to start building 10 large nuclear reactors by 2030 and deploy 500gigawatts (GW) of new nuclear capacity in the next 25 years, compared with under 100GW today. The White House is calling it an “American nuclear renaissance”.

More than 30 countries pledged to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050 as part of their efforts to reach net zero and achieve energy security.

“Governments around the world have realised two things: they need more electricity, quickly, and their preference is for it to be clean and always on,” says Josh Freed at Third Way, a US nonprofit organisation.

“Unless you have lots of hydro capacity, there just aren’t many options apart from nuclear.”

Until a few years ago, government officials were wary of nuclear. The plants are expensive to build and they generate waste, though they do not directly generate carbon emissions.

High-profile disasters such as Fukushima in 2011 gave splitting the atom a bad image.