Nuclear reactors last year made up 9 percent of the world’s commercial electricity, marking nuclear power’s lowest share of the global energy structure in 40 years, an environmental group said yesterday.
Green Citizens’ Action Alliance and partnered environmental groups made the remarks at a news conference in Taipei, citing The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2025.
The study suggests that renewables remain the key to effecting the energy transition needed to deal with the challenge posed by climate change, said the group, which has been authorized by the document’s authors to publish its Chinese-language translation.
Photo: CNA
Nuclear energy’s decline in significance came despite accomplishing a record 2.9 percent growth in raw output, the highest in the technology’s history, alliance researcher Chen Shih-ting (陳詩婷) said.
Nuclear power’s share of global energy structure last year represented a 45 percent plummet from its peak of 17.5 percent in 1996, she said, adding that wind and solar energy would overtake nuclear power five years after that.
The world is expected to decommission 243 nuclear reactors by 2050, reducing nuclear energy output by 203 gigawatts, counting possible delays, Chen said.
Chen Bing-huei (陳炳輝), professor of mechanical engineering at National Taiwan University, said that totalitarian regimes are responsible for 58 of the 63 planned nuclear power plants being built globally.
Most of the reactors are commissioned by China, which still invests a higher amount in solar energy, he said.
Even the most optimistic projections showed that small modular reactors would not account for more than 5 percent of global nuclear energy generation by 2050, Taiwan Climate Action Network Research Center director Chao Chia-wei (趙家緯) said.
Such reactors require significantly higher costs, and create two to 30 times more radioactive waste compared with current-generation nuclear reactors, exacerbating nuclear energy’s problems, he said.
Academia Sinica Institute of Sociology associate research fellow Paul Jobin said that Taiwan’s growing dependence on natural gas and stalling the development of renewables underscored the nation’s “gas poisoning.”
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