Nuclear power plants currently operate in 31 countries. Most are in Europe, North America, East Asia and South Asia. The United States is the largest producer of nuclear power, while France has the largest share of electricity generated by nuclear power. 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. Global nuclear electricity generation in 2012 was at its lowest level since 1999.
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".
Some countries operated nuclear reactors in the past but have currently no operating nuclear plants. Among them, Italy closed all of its nuclear stations by 1990 and nuclear power has since been declared illegal in a referendum. Lithuania, Kazakhstan and Armenia are planning to reintroduce nuclear power in the future.
Several countries are currently operating nuclear power plants but are planning a nuclear power phase-out. These are Belgium, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland. Other countries, like Netherlands, Sweden, and Taiwan are also considering a phase-out. Austria never started to use its first nuclear plant that was completely built.
Due to financial, political and technical reasons, Cuba, Libya, North Korea, and Poland never completed the construction of their first nuclear plants, and Australia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ghana, Ireland, Kuwait, Oman, Peru, Singapore, and Venezuela never built their planned first nuclear plants.
Video Nuclear power by country
Overview
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. Other countries have significant amounts of nuclear power generation capacity. By far the largest nuclear electricity producers are the United States with 805 647 GWh of nuclear electricity in 2017, followed by France with 381 846 GWh. As of December 2017 448 reactors with
net capacity of 391 721 MWe are operational and 59 reactors with net capacity of 60 460 MWe are under construction, of those 18 reactors with 19 016 MWe in China.
Maps Nuclear power by country
Nuclear power policy by country
History of deployment
The first nuclear reactor, known as Chicago Pile-1, was built in the United States and achieved criticality on December 2, 1942. The reactor was part of the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb. The United Kingdom, Canada, and the USSR proceeded to research and develop nuclear industries over the course of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Electricity was generated for the first time by a nuclear reactor on December 20, 1951, at the EBR-I experimental station near Arco, Idaho, which initially produced about 100 kW.
On June 27, 1954, the USSR's Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant became the world's first nuclear power plant to generate electricity for a power grid, and produced around 5 megawatts of electric power. Later in 1954, Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (U.S. AEC, forerunner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the United States Department of Energy) spoke of electricity in the future being "too cheap to meter". Strauss was very likely referring to hydrogen fusion --which was secretly being developed as part of Project Sherwood at the time--but Strauss's statement was interpreted as a promise of very cheap energy from nuclear fission. The U.S. AEC itself had issued far more realistic testimony regarding nuclear fission to the U.S. Congress only months before, projecting that "costs can be brought down... [to]... about the same as the cost of electricity from conventional sources..."
List of nuclear power reactors by country
Only the commercial reactors registered with the International Atomic Energy Agency (as of October 2017) are listed below.
References:
See also
- List of nuclear reactors
- List of nuclear power stations
- Nuclear energy policy by country
- Nuclear power accidents by country
- Uranium reserves
- World Nuclear Industry Status Report
- Nuclear industry in Canada
- Category:Nuclear power by country
References
External links
- World Nuclear Statistics
- 2006 statistics in Neutron Physics by Paul Reuss
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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