Nuclear is going nowhere, fossils are facing a bleak future and renewables are surging to the future. A Rich Polluter Profit Tax and an Excess Profit Tax would raise over US$1 trillion each year.

Nuclear power radiates stagnation

I doubt that Australia’s nuclear power zealots are ever going to accept that it simply isn’t going to happen. For political reasons alone, the idea is never going to hold water, heavy or not. But it’s well for the rest of us to keep an eye on what’s happening with nuclear power elsewhere so we don’t get misled by any of the hype.

The main message is that nuclear power isn’t going anywhere – it’s stagnant and has been for 30 years.

In mid-2025, 31 countries had 408 operational reactors, 30 below the 2002-peak. Also in 2025, 11 countries were building 63 reactors, with little change in numbers over the last few years. China is building the most (32, of which 31 are inside China) and Russia is second (27 in total, 20 of them in other countries). Sixty of the construction projects are associated with states that possess nuclear weapons.

Governments, investors and nuclear power enthusiasts have been raving about and sinking money into Small Modular Reactor (SMR) development for decades but only two are operational and at most five are currently under construction worldwide. In 2025, CSIRO reported that SMRs were the most costly option for the generation of electricity in Australia, with a levelised cost around four times higher than the predicted cost of generating electricity in 2030.

Between 2005 and 2024, 104 reactors were started and 101 were closed down. Worryingly, of the 218 closed nuclear power reactors, only 23 have been fully decommissioned and only nine have been released from regulatory control.

Nuclear’s heyday was the mid-90s when it generated 17.5 per cent of global electricity. These days it hovers around 9 per cent. In 2024, global investment in non-hydro renewable technology was over 20 times that of nuclear. Generating capacities of wind and solar grew by 11 per cent and 32 per cent respectively and together they generated 70 per cent more electricity than nuclear.

Nuclear reactors are very expensive and very slow to build (about a third of current constructions are delayed) and the power they produce is much more expensive than alternative sources and challenging to integrate into energy systems. Disposal of the nuclear waste is an unsolved problem – not a single country has a safe and independently verified method of storing it. There is currently about 60 million tons of waste, 40,000 tons of which may be extremely toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. Current storage arrangements are makeshift and temporary.

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