Wood Mackenzie Projects 44% Nuclear Capacity Surge With China Set to Lead by 2036
A decade-long reactor build-out will shift the global nuclear rankings, with China overtaking the United States in capacity while simultaneously adding coal at record pace.
Global nuclear power capacity is set to jump by 44% over the next decade, Wood Mackenzie forecast in a July 8 (2026-07-08) report, with China on course to displace the United States as the world's largest nuclear holder before 2036. India is also expanding its fleet to bolster energy security.8
The projection is anchored in a concrete Chinese policy target. China's National Energy Administration and National Development and Reform Commission unveiled a plan in the week of June 22 (2026-06-22) to derive 50% of the country's electricity from non-fossil sources — nuclear, hydro, wind and solar — by 2030. Nuclear's role within that mix is structural: it delivers firm baseload that wind and solar cannot.7
China's 2035 target reinforces the 2030 goal. By that year, Beijing aims for nuclear to supply 10% of national electricity — twice its share as of mid-2026, The Economist reported in May 2026 (2026-05-19). Reaching that level implies a reactor approval rate with no modern precedent outside China.2
Yet the same country placing the largest single bet on nuclear is also building coal at an extraordinary pace. After power cuts struck 20 provinces in 2021 and 2022, Beijing recommitted to coal-fired generation; in 2024 alone, construction started on nearly 100 GW of new coal capacity, The Economist noted in May 2026 (2026-05-19). The clean-energy expansion and the coal expansion are running in parallel, not in sequence.2
That parallel sits inside a larger global coal picture. As of 2024, roughly 2,100 GW of coal capacity operates worldwide, supplying around 35% of global electricity despite continued renewable growth, according to GlobalElectricity.org data from May 2026 (2026-05-20). Newcastle thermal coal was unchanged at $120.25 per tonne on Monday (2026-07-27). If China's nuclear build succeeds at the pace Wood Mackenzie projects, coal demand from China's power sector should decline over the medium term — but 100 GW of new Chinese coal starts in 2024 means any displacement of thermal demand is years away.1
The United States is chasing a similar transition from a weaker starting position. Washington has set a target to quadruple U.S. nuclear capacity by 2050 and is pushing to accelerate advanced reactor permitting, Forbes reported in May 2026 (2026-05-28). But the domestic fleet is aging: far more reactors are retiring than are being built, according to OilPrice.com's June 2026 (2026-06-23) analysis. Microsoft, Amazon and Google have all signed deals with nuclear operators, Forbes reported, a shift that injects private-sector demand alongside government-driven capacity targets.6,4
The load-growth case behind U.S. nuclear ambitions is specific. IEA data showed U.S. data-center power demand alone set to more than triple from 34.7 GW in 2024 to 106 GW by 2035, according to Forbes's May 2026 (2026-05-28) report. Global investment in data centers reached roughly $580 billion in recent years, per the same IEA estimates. Nuclear is being positioned by planners and hyperscale buyers as the firm-power response to that scale of load growth.4
Europe's nuclear trajectory is complicated by Rosatom exposure. At the start of 2026, the Russian state nuclear firm was still expecting to build four reactors within the EU — 7% of the 70 GW of capacity it has contracted beyond Russia's borders, The Economist noted in May 2026 (2026-05-19). That dependency has drawn sustained political scrutiny since Russia's invasion of Ukraine but remains operationally real for several member states. Ukraine's experience managing its grid under wartime conditions has been flagged by the Atlantic Council in May 2026 (2026-05-28) as a case study in grid resilience that European planners are beginning to study as they weigh their own build-out options.3,5
Storage will be as important as generation capacity. China accounts for a third of all pumped-storage capacity under development worldwide and appears on track to exceed its own 130 GW target for that technology by 2030, The Economist reported in May 2026 (2026-05-19). Without dispatchable storage, nuclear provides baseload but cannot absorb the variability that comes with deploying wind and solar at China's current scale.2
The uranium ETF (URA) was down 0.25% on Monday (2026-07-27) at $39.89 per share — a session reading that reflects no particular new catalyst. The near-term signal is whether China's reactor approval rate, when annualized, puts the 2035 nuclear target within reach, or whether the construction pipeline slips and extends the country's reliance on the same coal capacity it is simultaneously building.8