Notes
Short pieces on the parts of the nuclear industry that are hard to see from a reactor list: where the fuel comes from, who controls each stage, and how to tell a project from a press release.
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The reactor fleet is old, and only 36 units have a retirement date
193 of 419 operating reactors are 40 years old or more. The data on who retires when is thin: 36 units carry a planned retirement year, and licence expiry is not in the open dataset at all.
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Where the world's reactors sit: on the coast, on a lake, or inland
Of 171 operating nuclear sites we can place precisely, 72 are on the sea and carry about 47% of the capacity. Here is how that splits by country, and what it does and does not tell you.
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Reactor type is not taxonomy, it is a different control problem
Coolant and moderator decide how a plant behaves when something goes wrong: what the operator reaches for, which direction power moves on its own, and how fast it can be stopped.
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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.
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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.
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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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Five plants convert the world's uranium, and one of them was switched off for six years
Conversion is the least discussed stage of the nuclear fuel chain and one of the two tightest. In 2017 the only US plant simply stopped.
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How to read a nuclear announcement
The gap between announced units and regulatory position is large and measurable. Here is what to check before believing a number.