A new record year for nuclear energy, are tripling capacity plans on track?

So another record year building on the previous year's record.

What about over the longer term? How does it compare?

Well, prior to last year, the best ever year was actually in 2006, really since the start of nuclear generation coming into force worldwide, had been a steady increase in nuclear generation through the 70s, through the 80s and 90s.

But there began to be a leveling out around the 2000s, and 2006 was the previous peak.

Now, with the Fukushima Daiichi accident, there was the closure of some reactors in Germany, the accelerated closure, as well as the temporary shutdown of reactors in Japan.

And so that saw a reduction in generation in 2011, 2012.

But ever since then, for the last 15 years nearly, there's been an ongoing trend of increasing generation.

And that has been driven really by a very rapid expansion of generation in Asia.

So over the last 10 years, electricity generation in Asia has increased by, well, it's nearly doubled, primarily due to the growth of generation in China.

But we've also seen new reactors coming into operation in the United Arab Emirates.

And we're seeing new build in countries like Turkey.

So we're seeing a lot of new activity in Asia.

So that has led generation growth for the last 10 years.

But if we start to see countries worldwide taking actions needed to reach the targets that they have set for 2050, we should expect to see generation increasing in many more regions around the world in the fairly near term.

And the record was set despite there being seven units shut down in 2025 and just three grid connections.

Is that because the three new ones have more combined capacity than the seven that were shut down?

That's right.

Some of the reactors that shut down, some of that seven were very small reactors, I think less than 30 megawatts in size.

Whereas the new reactors that are joining the grid, the three reactors that are joining the grid, they were large reactors, gigawatt scale and above.

So in terms of actual difference in capacity, I think capacity was almost unchanged.

In fact, there may have been a one gigawatt increase in capacity worldwide of operable reactors.

But it's not only the addition of reactors to the overall generation mix that's important.

It's also the performance of the existing reactors.

There's around 440 of those operable reactors worldwide.

And with that, we saw an increase in capacity factors on average for the global fleet.