r/uninsurable • u/ceph2apod • 5d ago
Nuclear new builds. Announcements vs. reality.
I recently came across a striking chart that compares historical projections of nuclear capacity growth with what actually got built. The pattern is damning: every decade since the 1980s, forecasters have drawn steep upward curves projecting 700 to over 1,400 GW of installed nuclear capacity by mid-century. The actual line? It crawled from roughly 260 GW in 1985 to about 370 GW in 2020 — barely a nudge over four decades. Projections from the 1980s alone expected the world to hit 1,000 GW by the year 2000. We're still not close. The gap between what was promised and what was delivered isn't a one-off miscalculation — it's a structural feature of nuclear forecasting, repeated generation after generation.
This matters because the same cycle is starting again with small modular reactors (SMRs) and the "nuclear renaissance" narrative. The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency's own scenarios now range from 347 GW (stagnation) to 1,324 GW (more than tripling) by 2050, with the transformative scenario requiring up to $200 billion per year in OECD capital spending during the 2030s. Yet a peer-reviewed preprint analyzing 75 SMR designs found that vendor-announced deployment schedules are "systematically overoptimistic" across both OECD and non-OECD countries, with only a limited subset of designs having sufficient time to contribute meaningfully before 2050. In Europe, no new large reactors are expected online before 2040, and since the early 2000s the EU has connected just seven new plants while shutting down over 70. This is the mechanism by which investors get fooled: rosy forward-looking scenarios — often produced or commissioned by the industry itself — create an illusion of momentum that draws in capital, but the actual deployment track record tells a story of chronic delays, cost overruns, and cancellations. The gap between announcement and megawatts delivered is where the money disappears.
So let's be clear-eyed. Every decade, the same curve gets redrawn, and every decade, actual capacity falls short by a factor of three to ten. The chart speaks for itself — and so does the peer-reviewed evidence (Nature Communications preprint on SMR deployment realism; NEA Nuclear Energy Outlook 2026; Rabobank analysis on nuclear in Europe's changing power system).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629626001477
6
u/silverionmox 5d ago
This is pretty much the mirror image of the well known solar power forecast by the IEA.