“The world’s nuclear plants continue to perform excellently,” Agneta Rising, director general of the World Nuclear Association, wrote in the preface to the recently released World Nuclear Performance Report 2019. Yet, if the nuclear industry is to reach its “Harmony” goal, which is for nuclear generation to supply 25% of the world’s electricity before 2050, it must accelerate capacity additions significantly in the future.
In the report, the World Nuclear Association said it expects more than 20 new nuclear reactors to be connected to the grid before the end of 2020. However, Rising wrote in her concluding remarks that meeting the Harmony goal would require the addition of at least 1,000 GW of new nuclear capacity. To achieve that, new capacity added each year would need to grow from the current 10 GW to about 35 GW in the 2030–2050 period.
