Nuclear
Every nuclear power station, and what it taught us
Nuclear is the most scrutinised way humans make electricity. This map plots the world's nuclear stations — running, being built, stopped, dismantled and never started — so the record can be read as one picture. Hover a pin for its capacity, reactor count and the operating or construction lesson attached to it.
Zooming needs ctrl/⌘ + scroll on a desktop or two fingers on touch, so the page keeps scrolling normally. Marker size scales with the capacity built at the site; capacity for shut-down, decommissioned and cancelled stations is what they were designed to deliver, not what they produce today. Multi-unit sites are shown as one pin at the station.
Reactor counts are per station, so the operating total lands in the same band as the reference trackers: 404 operating units and about 369 GW in the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, roughly 416 units in the IAEA PRIS database, which also counts long-idle Japanese units as active. Background: IAEA, six global trends in nuclear power.
The fleet by status
159 stations · 418 reactor units
4 stations · 11 reactor units
1 station · 7 reactor units
19 stations · 38 reactor units
17 stations · 40 reactor units
5 stations · 6 reactor units
Where nuclear capacity is concentrated
Total capacity built at mapped sites in each country, whatever its status today.
What the record actually shows
Accidents came from cooling, not fission
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima were all failures to remove heat after shutdown — instrumentation, a prohibited test, a drowned backup supply. Modern designs assume operators and power will both fail.
First-of-a-kind is where money is lost
Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto 3, Hinkley Point C and Vogtle 3-4 each roughly doubled in cost. The same designs repeated in series — Barakah, Yangjiang, Sanmen — landed far closer to plan.
Politics closes plants that engineering passed
Barsebäck, Fessenheim, Zwentendorf, Lungmen and Germany's last three reactors were all closed or stopped while licensable. Belgium, Sweden, Japan and Taiwan have since reversed course.
Life extension beats new build economically
Bruce and Darlington refurbishments, Peach Bottom's 80-year licence and Koeberg's steam-generator swap all bought decades of output for a fraction of a new station's cost.
Newcomers succeed with a fleet, not a prototype
The UAE ordered four identical Korean units with a full turnkey team and finished near schedule. Programmes that started with one bespoke reactor — Bataan, Angra 3, Atucha II — stalled for decades.
Waste is solved on paper, and now in rock
Finland's Onkalo and Sweden's Forsmark repository are licensed and being filled. The obstacle everywhere else has been siting consent, not the geology or the engineering.