The nuclear fleet and the fuel chain behind it
Reading today's US fleet availability…
Global Nuclear Power Tracker, Global Energy Monitor, August 2026 release · 1823 units tracked across 62 countries · fusion devices excluded from these totals
The fleet
Every unit ever built, building, or cancelled, 1823 of them, with specification, ownership and milestone dates.
The chain
Where the fuel comes from. Seven stages from mine to fabricated assembly, and the handful of companies controlling each one.
The pipeline
Which SMR and advanced designs are actually moving through regulators, and which exist only in press releases.
Largest operating fleets
| Country | Units | GW gross |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 94 | 102.5 |
| China | 61 | 64.6 |
| France | 57 | 65.7 |
| Russia | 34 | 29.8 |
| South Korea | 26 | 27.1 |
| India | 22 | 8.4 |
| Canada | 17 | 13.5 |
| Ukraine | 15 | 13.8 |
Building now
How it works
Fission, moderators, decay heat, and why a reactor still needs cooling for years after it is switched off. Diagrams, no equations.
What it costs
Uranium, conversion, enrichment and fabrication indicators, forty years of price history, and a worked cost breakdown of one reactor core.
The raw data
Every table here as CSV and JSON, with the provenance of each field and the corrections applied on top of the source.
Beyond the civil fleet
Reactors that make electricity for a grid are only part of the picture. There are also 24 naval propulsion programmes running on fuel the civil chain never handles, an estimated 12,187 warheads held by 9 states whose fissile material came from the same enrichment and reprocessing plants, 16 fusion projects that have never delivered a watt to a grid, and 10 accidents that shaped every rule the rest of the industry now operates under. Each is kept on its own pages, with its own sources, and deliberately excluded from the fleet totals above.
Recent writing
- Four organisations enrich the world's uranium Rosatom, Urenco, CNNC and Orano hold about 99% of world enrichment capacity between them. Here is how that happened and why it is hard to change.
- Most SMR designs need a fuel that barely exists Ten of seventeen tracked advanced reactor designs require HALEU. Western production runs at roughly 900 kilograms a year.
- The reactor design that skips enrichment entirely CANDU and other heavy water reactors run on natural uranium. That removes the tightest chokepoint in the fuel chain from their supply.
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