Aerial view of the Qinshan Nuclear Power Plant in Zhejiang, China, November 28, 2023. China has spent decades building a nuclear energy industry, and now the United States must compete or risk being left behind. (Shutterstock/Vladimir Tretyakov)

The Nuclear Race Between the United States and China Is Already Underway

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China builds nuclear reactors at unmatched scale while America relearns how. The real competition is who can manufacture and deploy nuclear power fastest.

Over the past two decades, the United States has treated nuclear energy as an aging technology in need of preservation. That assumption is now under pressure from an increasingly productive Chinese nuclear energy sector. Washington and Beijing are now moving away from the stagnation that characterized much of the post-Cold War nuclear industry. China is building reactors at a pace unmatched anywhere in the world, while the United States is attempting to reconstruct an industrial ecosystem that can once again design, finance, regulate, manufacture, and deploy nuclear technology at scale.

This is not a simple energy competition. Nuclear energy is becoming a test of whether two very different economic systems can translate technological ambition into physical industrial capacity. China’s pace of construction is staggering. China currently has 60 operable reactors and 37 reactors under construction, according to data from the International Energy Agency (IAEA). The IAEA reports that roughly half of all nuclear capacity under construction worldwide is in China. In 2025, nine of the world’s 10 nuclear construction starts were in China. China’s nuclear generating capacity increased by 76 percent between 2016 and 2024, and the country added another 3.3 gigawatts of capacity in 2025 and the first five months of 2026. The United States, by contrast, has only brought three new reactors online since 1996.

China’s Growing Nuclear Energy Advantage

China’s advantage is not simply that Beijing has decided to build more reactors. It has spent years building an industrial system capable of repeatedly building the same kinds of reactors. State-owned enterprises dominate the sector, financing is closely connected to state policy, and reactor design, engineering, construction, manufacturing, and operation are increasingly integrated.

China’s Hualong One reactor illustrates the strategy. The design has moved from development to serial deployment, with dozens of units in operation or construction. Chinese officials describe Hualong One as a technology with complete domestic intellectual-property rights, while Chinese nuclear companies increasingly market it overseas.

The result is an advantage that is difficult to replicate through research........

© The National Interest