The Age and Future Size of the Global Nuclear Fleet
This is the last in my mini-series on global nuclear power. There are 441 reactors operational world wide today with an average age of 29.3 years. The current fleet is ageing. The oldest reactors in service today are 47 years old. By assuming that reactors will close aged 50 and by making simple assumptions about the commissioning of reactors under construction and those planned I estimate that come 2036 the fleet will comprise 424 units. The number is slightly down on today but the increase in mean power rating suggests that installed capacity will increase by about 25%.
Let me begin by thanking Russian commenter Syndroma for extracting the reactor data for me from the World Nuclear Association web site.
A good starting point is to look at the age distribution of the current fleet of 441 operational reactors* (Figure 1). With a mode of 31-35 years and a life expectancy of 50 years the fleet is getting rather long in the tooth. With only 12 reactors in the 6 to 10 year category it did look as though the global nuclear industry was going to die. But there has been a renaisance in recent years, especially in countries like China, India and Russia. But is this going to be sufficient to turn nuclear fortunes around?
[* note by using the term reactor I mean a nuclear power station that may contain more than one reactor. For example, in the UK today, most nuclear power stations have two reactors.]
Figure 1 The current age distribution of the global nuclear fleet.
Table 1 The current distribution of global reactors by design type.
Table 1 shows that the current fleet is dominated by pressurised and boiling water reactors. The majority of these are Generation II reactors though some Generation III boiling water reactors were operational in Japan.
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