China Set to Displace US as World's Largest Nuclear Power Holder by 2036
Wood Mackenzie projects global nuclear capacity will surge 44% over the next decade, driven by a Chinese buildout that now carries an explicit policy target.
The world's nuclear power fleet is entering its sharpest expansion in decades. Wood Mackenzie projected on 2026-07-08 that global installed nuclear capacity will jump 44% over the next ten years, with China overtaking the United States as the world's largest nuclear power holder and India scaling up to strengthen energy security. The forecast follows Beijing's concrete policy commitment: China's National Energy Administration and National Development and Reform Commission unveiled a plan in the week of 2026-06-22 to generate 50% of the country's electricity from non-fossil sources, including nuclear, hydro, wind and solar, by 2030.7,6
Nuclear sits at the centre of that target for a reason renewables cannot replicate: baseload reliability. Wind and solar generation is intermittent; nuclear runs continuously at near-full output regardless of weather. China aims to have the world's largest nuclear sector by 2035, producing 10% of its electricity from atomic power, roughly twice the current share, according to analysis cited by The Economist in May 2026 (2026-05-19).2,6
The construction record backs the ambition. Between 2008 and 2021, China built reactors across multiple designs at a pace unmatched in the Western world. China and Russia were, in that period, the only countries connecting new reactors to national grids with any regularity and at reasonable cost. The rest of the world's recent nuclear projects ran late and over budget.3
The 50% non-fossil target does not mean China is abandoning coal quickly. Power cuts across 20 Chinese provinces in 2021 and 2022 elevated electricity supply to an emergency priority for party leadership. The response was blunt: construction started on nearly 100 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity in 2024 alone. Coal still accounts for approximately 35% of global electricity supply, with over 2,100 gigawatts of capacity operating worldwide as of 2024, according to GlobalElectricity data, and China and India remain the primary drivers of continued additions.2,1
The tension between coal construction and the 2030 clean power target is partly a timing argument. Reactors approved now take a decade or more to complete; the nuclear contribution to the 2030 target depends on approvals already made or under way. Coal plants built in 2024 will operate for decades, but Beijing appears to be betting that rising nuclear and renewable output will eventually displace the newest coal units or sharply reduce their utilization rates.6
Storage is the remaining gap. A third of all pumped-hydro storage under development worldwide sits in China, yet the country is on course to miss its own 130-gigawatt pumped-storage target by 2030, according to The Economist's analysis. Without adequate storage to balance intermittent renewable output, nuclear's always-on characteristic becomes more valuable still: grid operators need generation that runs regardless of what the wind and sun are doing.2
The United States faces a structurally similar problem from a weaker starting position. Washington has announced plans to quadruple domestic nuclear capacity by 2050 and is fast-tracking advanced reactor permits, with Microsoft, Amazon and Google already signing power agreements with nuclear operators. IEA data show US data-centre electricity consumption is projected to more than triple over the next decade, from 34.7 gigawatts in 2024 to 106 gigawatts by 2035 — a demand profile that renewable buildouts alone cannot serve.4
But decades of political ambivalence have left the US nuclear sector badly eroded. Far more reactors are aging toward retirement than are under construction, and the country's few recent new-build attempts ran years late and billions over budget. The gap between Washington's stated ambitions and the sector's actual construction capacity is wide, and closing it within a decade would require a scale-up the industry has not demonstrated. China, by contrast, has the manufacturing base, trained workforce and regulatory machinery to build reactors at volume.5
For commodity markets, the trajectory has layered effects. A sustained nuclear buildout in China supports structural uranium demand over the next decade. The parallel coal construction programme keeps thermal coal markets underpinned in the nearer term, with physical Newcastle coal at $119.70 per tonne as of Friday's close (2026-07-18). Asian LNG prices are partly exposed to the pace of the nuclear ramp: JKM front-month stood at $20.98 per MMBtu as of Friday (2026-07-18), and if Chinese reactors connect to the grid on schedule through the late 2020s, they will displace a portion of the gas and spot LNG China would otherwise need to import.7
Whether that displacement materialises on schedule is the variable the policy announcements cannot resolve. China's reactor commissioning rate over the next three years will either validate the 50% non-fossil target as operationally credible or expose the gap between construction approvals and completed capacity. That answer will show up in official grid connection figures, not in further NEA press releases.6,2