Nuclear power down for the count

And therein lies a fundamental problem for the nuclear industry: it is in a frightful mess in the three countries that accounted for 56 percent of global nuclear power capacity just before the Fukushima disaster: the US, France and Japan. A 2017 EnergyPostWeekly article said "the EU, the US and Japan are busy committing nuclear suicide."

Spin

Bright New World, an Australian pro-nuclear lobby group (that accepts secret corporate donations) listed these wins in 2018:

1. Taiwanese voters voiced support for overturning legislation to eliminate nuclear power.

2. Poland announced plans for a 6-9 GW nuclear sector.

3. China connected the world's first AP1000 and EPR reactors to the electrical grid.

4. Some progress with Generation IV R&D projects (Terrestrial Energy, NuScale, Moltex), and the passing of the US Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act which aims to speed up the development of advanced reactors.

Those are modest and pyrrhic wins. To take each in turn:

1. Taiwan's government remains committed to phasing out nuclear power although the 2025 deadline has been abandoned following a referendum in November 2018.

2. Poland might join the club of countries producing nuclear power - or it might not. Currently it is a member of a group of countries that failed to complete partially-built power reactors and have never generated nuclear power, along with Austria, Cuba, the Philippines, and North Korea.

3. China's nuclear power program has stalled - the country has not opened a new construction site for a commercial reactor since December 2016. The most likely outcome over the next decade is that a small number of new reactor projects will be approved each year, well short of previous projections and not enough to match the decline in the rest of the world.

4. Generation IV fantasies are as fantastical as ever. David Elliot ‒ author of the 2017 book Nuclear Power: Past, Present and Future - notes that many Generation IV concepts "are in fact old ideas that were looked at in the early days and mostly abandoned. There were certainly problems with some of these early experimental reactors, some of them quite dramatic."