China Drove All Global Nuclear Growth in 2025, Setting the Pace for Beijing's 2030 Clean Power Target
China accounted for all net global nuclear growth in 2025, underscoring how much Beijing's 50% clean electricity goal by 2030 rests on continued reactor expansion.
Global nuclear power generation reached a record 2,845 terawatt-hours in 2025, and China supplied every terawatt-hour of the net increase, according to the latest Statistical Review of World Energy, published on Saturday (2026-08-01). Growth at that pace will be essential to Beijing.8
The National Energy Administration and the National Development and Reform Commission, in the week of June 22 (2026-06-22), unveiled a plan to source 50% of the country's electricity from non-fossil fuels — including nuclear, hydro, wind and solar — by 2030. Nuclear is the central pillar. Unlike wind and solar, it generates on demand, and China cannot close the gap to its target on variable renewables alone.5
China ranked second globally last year with 485 terawatt-hours, representing 17.1% of worldwide nuclear generation. The United States still led with 826 terawatt-hours, nearly 70% more than China produced, accounting for 29% of the global total. France was third at 390 terawatt-hours, or 13.7%. But the trajectory favors Beijing: China nearly tripled its nuclear output over the past decade at an average annual growth rate of roughly 11%, while the global fleet barely moved.8
That global stagnation is worth registering. Nuclear plants worldwide generated 2,803 terawatt-hours back in 2006, meaning last year's record stood only about 1.5% higher despite nearly two decades of investment and stated policy support. Japan contributed one of the few other notable gains, adding 9.2 terawatt-hours to reach 94 terawatt-hours, an 11.1% rise. Outside China and Japan, the expansion has been largely notional.8
Beijing's declared ambitions run further. By 2035, China aims to produce 10% of its electricity from nuclear, twice its current share, and to hold the world's largest nuclear sector, according to the Economist. Wood Mackenzie has forecast global nuclear capacity rising 44% over the next decade, with China eventually overtaking the United States as the biggest capacity holder.1,7
But the government's recent behavior complicates that picture. Power cuts across 20 provinces in 2021 and 2022 turned electricity security into an acute concern for party leaders. The response was not primarily nuclear: construction began on nearly 100 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity in 2024. That commitment to coal as a reliability backstop runs directly against the non-fossil targets Beijing is simultaneously advancing.1
Storage adds another constraint. A third of all pumped-storage capacity under development worldwide sits in China, and the country is on track to exceed its own 130 gigawatt target by 2030, the Economist reported. Storage helps smooth variable renewable output, but it does not replace dispatchable generation. The scale of pumped storage under construction suggests the government knows the intermittency problem is real and unresolved.1
Geopolitically, the reactor build race is reshaping the export market. Rosatom, Russia's state nuclear company, had plans at the start of this year to construct 70 gigawatts of capacity outside Russia's borders, including four reactors in the European Union representing about 7% of that total. Those EU contracts face political pressure given the war in Ukraine, but Rosatom's pipeline in Asia and the Middle East remains intact.2
Washington is mounting a competing push. President Trump's 2025 executive orders targeted a quadrupling of U.S. nuclear capacity by 2050, and the federal government announced over $17 billion in loans to support reactor development. Technology companies are pulling demand forward: U.S. data-center power consumption is projected to more than triple from 34.7 gigawatts in 2024 to 106 gigawatts by 2035, according to IEA data cited by Forbes, turning new reactor commitments into both a climate and an industrial strategy. Microsoft, Amazon and Google have all signed generation deals.3,6,4
The near-term signal is whether China's reactor approval pace holds into the second half of 2026. The 11% annual growth rate of the past decade was built on steady commissioning; any slippage against that cadence would push the 2030 non-fossil target into territory that wind and solar alone cannot cover, and would sustain the coal construction program that Beijing is already running alongside its clean energy commitments.1,5