Uranium mining and production at Katko, in Kazakhstan.
The World Nuclear Association (WNA) has forecast that worldwide nuclear energy generation capacity will grow by 2.6% a year over the next 20 years.
The prediction is contained in the WNA publication, ‘The Nuclear Fuel Report: Global Scenarios for Demand and Supply Availability 2021–2040’, which was launched this month.
Currently, nuclear energy produces some 10% of global electricity, but the role of nuclear is expected to grow, because it is a near-zero carbon emissions technology. In capacity terms, as of the middle of this year, nuclear provided 394 GWe, generated by 442 reactors. Another 60 GWe of capacity, or 57 reactors, is currently under construction.
The 2.6% yearly growth is the prediction in the report’s ‘reference scenario’. The result would be a total nuclear generating capacity of 439 GWe by 2030 and 615 GWe by 2040. The ‘lower scenario’ sees a lower increase in capacity, but nevertheless a steady rise over the forecast period. As for the ‘upper scenario’, this predicts global nuclear capacity of 521 GWe in 2030 and 839 GWe in 2040.
These figures exclude the likely contributions by small modular reactors (SMRs), except for the Russian KLT-40S design. Two of these are already in service with the floating nuclear power plant Akademic Lomonosov. The report does not ignore SMRs, but analyses them ‘qualitatively’ and not ‘quantitatively’.
“Our expectation is that by 2023, [the SMR] market will have matured sufficiently that we’ll be able to shift from a qualitative treatment to a quantitative treatment,” James Nevling told World Nuclear News. Nevling, from Exelon Generation, co-chaired the group of 80 experts from across the global nuclear energy industry which drew up the report. The other co-chair was Alexander Boytsov of Tenex.
These predictions have, of course, implications for the nuclear fuel cycle supply chain, which includes uranium mining, conversion, enrichment, and fuel fabrication. Currently, the global reactor fleet needs a supply of 62 500 t of uranium (tU) a year. Under the reference scenario, this will have to increase to 79 400 tU in 2030 and 112 300 tU in 2040. But global uranium production fell from 63 207 tU in 2016 to 47 731 tU in 2020.