The Nuclear Pipeline: 79 Reactors, 15 Countries, and a World Bank Reversal

 

For the first time in decades, the global nuclear construction pipeline is growing, the world's development bank has reversed a 30-year ideological ban, and the arithmetic is beginning to force its way into policy. Here is what the numbers actually say.

1. The state of play

As of May 2026, there are 79 reactors under construction in 15 countries, with a combined gross capacity of roughly 86 GW. Another 124 are in advanced planning — funded, approved, or firmly committed — adding a further 110 GW. And 305 more have been proposed, with site designations but uncertain timelines, representing a potential 285 GW. The full pipeline, from shovel in ground to proposal, is approaching 500 GW of new capacity.

To put that in perspective: the entire current global nuclear fleet produces about 400 GW. If half the pipeline were built, it would roughly double world nuclear capacity.

 

The geographic concentration, however, is striking. Most of this activity is happening in Asia — and most of that is China.

2. China is building half the world's nuclear capacity

China has 39 reactors under construction — nearly half the global total — with a combined capacity of 44 GW. At its current pace, China is expected to reach 100 GW of installed nuclear capacity by around 2030, displacing the United States as the world's largest nuclear power producer.

The technology mix is revealing. China is not simply replicating foreign designs. It is commercializing its own: the Hualong One (a domestically developed pressurized water reactor), the CAP1000 and CAP1400 (derivatives of the AP1000 it licensed from Westinghouse), the CFR600 (a sodium-cooled fast reactor), and the ACP100 — a 125-MW small modular reactor that became the world's first land-based commercial SMR when it connected to the grid in 2024.

In 2025 alone, China began construction on nine new reactors. Over the past decade, 94% of all reactor construction starts worldwide were of Chinese or Russian design. The West, for all its renewed enthusiasm, is mostly talking. China and Russia are mostly building.

Source: World Nuclear Association, April 7 2026. Ukraine, Japan, Brazil figures include suspended projects.

3. The technologies being built

Nearly all reactors currently under construction are large-scale light-water reactors — most above 1,000 MW. The dominant designs fall into three families:

 

Two SMR designs deserve particular attention. The ACP100 in China represents the first commercial land-based SMR anywhere in the world. Russia has two floating RITM-200S reactors (53 MW each) under construction at Cape Nagloynyn, following the already-operational Akademik Lomonosov floating plant. These are not demonstrations; they are commercial projects.

The West, by contrast, has precisely zero SMRs under construction. Canada, the UK, South Korea, and the United States all have SMR programs at various stages of planning and permitting. Several have received regulatory approvals or letters of intent. None have poured concrete.

4. When will these plants come online?

The construction pipeline is heavily front-loaded — meaning the majority of what is currently being built was supposed to connect to the grid within the next three to four years. That schedule, as anyone who has watched Hinkley Point C will know, is aspirational. Here is the official picture:

A word of caution about these dates: They represent the "latest announced or estimated year of grid connection" — a figure set by operators and developers, and historically optimistic. The average construction time for reactors completed globally between 2014 and 2023 was ten years. China has managed as few as six. Western projects have routinely run two to three times over schedule. Hinkley Point C, originally scheduled for 2025, is now projected for 2029 at the earliest.

5. The planning pipeline: who has serious ambitions?

Beyond what is under construction, 124 additional reactors have cleared the threshold of formal approval or committed funding — the "planned" category in World Nuclear Association terminology. These are mostly expected to be operational within 15 years.

 

Source: World Nuclear Association, April 2026. "Planned" = approvals, funding, or firm commitment in place. "Proposed" = specific site or programme; timing uncertain.

Several stories stand out in this data.

Romania has 8 reactors in the planned column — more than France, Sweden, or the Czech Republic. Two new units at Cernavodă using Canadian CANDU technology have been in planning for decades, but recent US financing interest (via the Export-Import Bank and the Development Finance Corporation) has materially advanced the timeline.

Poland has 7 planned and 22 proposed — one of the more serious pivots in European energy policy. A coal-dependent country, Poland is simultaneously evaluating large AP1000-type plants and SMRs, with both KHNP (South Korea) and Westinghouse competing for the large-reactor contract.

The United States is the most striking entry: zero planned, 25 proposed. The gap between aspiration and commitment tells you something about the regulatory and financial environment for new nuclear in America. Enormous interest; no concrete.

6. The World Bank reversal: a genuine inflection point

The most consequential development of 2025 was not a new reactor design or a construction start. It was a policy shift at 1818 H Street in Washington, D.C.

In June 2025, the World Bank lifted its longstanding ban on financing nuclear energy, signing a formal partnership agreement with the IAEA to support nuclear deployment in developing countries. The Asian Development Bank followed in November 2025, removing its own parallel exclusion. Two of the most important development finance institutions in the world had, for over three decades, refused to touch nuclear power with borrowed money. That era is now over.

Why this matters: IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said it plainly: "Nothing could change without the World Bank. It's as simple as that." Access to World Bank financing — low-interest, long-tenor sovereign loans — unlocks the economics of nuclear for dozens of developing countries that cannot otherwise absorb the upfront capital cost of a large reactor.

The initial scope of the Bank's new policy is deliberately narrow: lifetime extensions of existing plants, and small modular reactors in developing nations. Greenfield large-reactor financing is not yet formally on the table. But the architecture is in place, and the direction is clear.

Four countries appear to be the most likely early beneficiaries, based on their existing World Bank relationships and the state of their nuclear programmes: Argentina, India, South Africa, and Ukraine — all seeking lifetime extensions for aging fleets. For new build in Europe, Romania is the leading candidate; it already receives World Bank lending and has a partially built reactor at Cernavodă.

 

Bangladesh and Egypt are an interesting edge case. Both are building Russian VVER-1200 reactors financed largely by Russian state credit — a mechanism that comes with its own geopolitical strings. As Rosatom financing terms become more fraught in the post-2022 environment, both countries have strong incentives to diversify their financing sources. The World Bank is now an option where it was not before.

7. The investment gap

The financing picture remains insufficient even with the World Bank's reversal. Global annual investment in nuclear reached approximately $75 billion in 2024 — up from a 2017–2023 average of $50 billion. But the IAEA's high-case projection for tripling nuclear capacity by 2050 requires $125 billion per year. The global pledge made at COP28 — to triple nuclear capacity — implies $150 billion annually.

The gap between current investment and what is needed is roughly $75 billion per year. The World Bank's total annual lending across all sectors runs to about $100 billion. Nuclear will be a small slice of that. The signal matters more than the volume, for now — what the Bank's participation does is unlock the conditions under which commercial and multilateral co-financing can flow.

8. What this tells us about the energy transition

The nuclear pipeline, read alongside the World Bank reversal, tells a coherent story — even if it is not the story that dominates the energy transition discourse.

First, the countries that are actually building nuclear are the ones with the most serious energy needs: China, India, South Korea, Egypt, Bangladesh, Turkey. These are not ideologically driven decisions; they are engineering decisions made by governments that have looked at the arithmetic of energy density, reliability, and carbon intensity and concluded that nuclear belongs in the mix.

Second, Russia and China are winning the export competition for nuclear technology in exactly the way the United States and France once did. The VVER-1200 is in Bangladesh, Turkey, Egypt, Hungary, and China. The Hualong One is in Pakistan and, eventually, elsewhere. The geopolitical implications are not subtle.

Third, the West has rediscovered enthusiasm for nuclear without yet rediscovering the industrial capacity to build it. The United States has 25 proposed reactors and zero planned ones. The UK is building two EPRs a decade behind schedule. France has announced new plants without yet committing to finance them. The gap between declared intent and actual construction start remains wide.

Fourth — and this is the development I find most significant — the financial architecture is finally shifting. The World Bank ban was not merely a financial obstacle; it was a signal to the entire multilateral development community that nuclear was radioactive in the reputational, not just the physical, sense. That signal has been reversed. The Asian Development Bank followed within five months. Others will follow.

The world is waking up to what the arithmetic always said: you cannot decarbonize reliably without high-energy-density, dispatchable, land-efficient power. The pipeline is not perfect — it is weighted toward Russian and Chinese technology, several key projects are years behind schedule, and the financing gap remains large. But the direction is unambiguous. The nuclear renaissance that has been announced repeatedly since 2000 may, this time, be real.

 

Data sources: World Nuclear Association (April 7, 2026); IEA Global Energy Review 2026; IAEA PRIS database (May 12, 2026); Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (August 2025); World Economic Forum (October 2025).

Note: Help of Anthropic's Claude in retrieving the data and assembling graphics is gratefully acknowledged