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Nuclear Renaissance: Real Comeback or Replay?

Global nuclear generation hit a record high in 2024, but almost entirely because existing plants ran harder—not because new capacity was built, and outside China and Russia, virtually no new reactors broke ground. The core tension is that nuclear is genuinely necessary for climate goals and has surging political and tech-industry support, yet the Western industry keeps repeating the same pattern of cost overruns, missed timelines, and unbuilt SMRs that collapsed the last "renaissance" in 2008. The most important fault line isn't optimists versus pessimists—it's whether the structural barriers (workforce gaps, enrichment bottlenecks, regulatory inertia, capital costs that keep rising while renewables keep falling) have actually been solved this time, or whether better marketing and larger subsidies are papering over the same unresolved problems.

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