Nuclear power plants operate in 31 countries. Most are in Europe, Northern America, East Asia and South Asia.
France has the largest share of electricity generated by nuclear power. China has the fastest growing nuclear power program with 28 new reactors under construction, and a considerable number of new reactors are also being built in India, Russia and South Korea. At the same time, at least 100 older and smaller reactors will "most probably be closed over the next 10-15 years".
In 2010, before the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, it was reported that an average of about 10 nuclear reactors were expected to become operational per year, although according to the World Nuclear Association, of the 17 civilian reactors planned to become operational between 2007 and 2009, only five actually came on stream. As of 2016, Italy closed all of its nuclear stations and Belgium, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland are phasing-out nuclear power while Netherlands, Sweden, and Taiwan have some same intentions. Lithuania and Kazakhstan shut down lone nuclear stations earlier but plan to build new ones instead. Armenia earlier shut down its lone nuclear plant but then started to use it again. Austria never started to use its first nuclear plant that was completely built. Due to financial, politic and technical reasons, Cuba, Libya, North Korea, and Poland never completed the construction of their first nuclear plants (but the latter two plan the nuclear stations again) and Australia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ghana, Ireland, Kuwait, Oman, Peru, Singapore, and Venezuela never built their planned first nuclear plants. Global nuclear electricity generation in 2012 was at its lowest level since 1999.
As of 2011, countries such as Australia, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, and Portugal have no nuclear power stations and remain opposed to them.
Canada's Bruce Nuclear Generating Station is the largest nuclear power plant now whereas Japanese Kashiwazaki-Kariwa was regarded as such earlier.
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Of the 31 countries in which nuclear power plants operate, only France, Slovakia, Ukraine, Belgium, and Hungary use them as the source for a majority of the country's electricity supply, although many other countries still have significant amounts of nuclear power generation capacity. According to the World Nuclear Association, a nuclear power advocacy group, over 45 countries are giving "serious consideration" to introducing a nuclear power capability, with Belarus, Iran, Jordan, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam at the forefront. China, India and South Korea are pursuing ambitious expansions of their nuclear power capacities, with China aiming to increase capacity to at least 80 GWe by 2020, 200 GWe by 2030 and 400 GWe by 2050. South Korea plans to expand its nuclear capacity from 20.7 GWe in 2012 to 27.3 GWe in 2020 and to 43 GWe by 2030. India aims to have 14.6 GWe nuclear power generation capacity by 2020 and 63 GWe by 2032 and to have 25% of all electricity supplied by nuclear power by 2050.
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List of reactors of nuclear plants by country
Only the commercial reactors registered with the International Atomic Energy Agency (as of January 2017) are listed below.
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Source of the article : Wikipedia
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