6th September 2026
There is a new nuclear race developing around the world, but Britain could be forgiven for not noticing.
For years, nuclear power in Britain has seemed like an argument about one enormous project at a time. Hinkley Point C has dominated the headlines, Sizewell C has followed it, and politicians regularly talk about small modular reactors as the technology that might eventually transform the country's energy system.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, China has been doing something rather different.
It has been building nuclear reactors.
Lots of them.
And it is not simply building one or two large plants and then waiting years to see what happens. China is developing an industrial capability capable of constructing multiple reactors at the same time, while simultaneously expanding solar, wind, transmission networks, storage and other forms of electricity generation.
That raises a much bigger question for Britain than whether we like nuclear power.
Has Britain already fallen so far behind in the construction of reliable electricity that catching up will become increasingly difficult?
The latest figures should make policymakers sit up.
China now has 64 nuclear reactors operating, with almost 64 gigawatts of nuclear generating capacity. Another 37 reactors, representing almost 39 GW of capacity, are under construction. Four new Chinese reactors have already been connected to the grid during 2026, while construction has begun on several more.
The United States and France still have enormous nuclear industries and, importantly, much larger or more mature existing fleets in several respects. So this is not a story about China having already overtaken America in total nuclear electricity production.
It is a story about momentum.
And momentum matters enormously when building nuclear power.
China is building an industry, not just power stations
This may be the most important part of the story.
A nuclear reactor is not something that can simply be ordered like a new fleet of buses.
It requires specialist engineers, designers, regulators, construction companies, nuclear-grade steel and components, highly trained workers, fuel expertise and a supply chain capable of meeting extraordinarily demanding standards.
The first reactor built by a country is therefore much more difficult than the tenth.
The tenth should be easier because the country has learned how to build the first nine.
China appears to understand this.
It has developed its own reactor designs, including the Hualong One, while also using and adapting technology originally developed elsewhere. It has built up a domestic supply chain and accumulated experience by constructing reactor after reactor.
The result is potentially self-reinforcing.
More reactors mean more skilled workers.
More skilled workers mean more construction experience.
More construction experience means greater confidence in building the next reactor.
The supply chain becomes stronger.
Companies become familiar with the regulatory and engineering requirements.
And the country becomes increasingly capable of undertaking several projects simultaneously.
The United States, France and Britain face a rather different problem.
They allowed nuclear construction to slow dramatically.
As the years passed, specialist skills and industrial capacity became harder to maintain. When new reactors were eventually required, they were often treated as enormous individual projects rather than as part of a continuous programme.
That difference may prove crucial.
America has enormous strength, but China has momentum
It would be wrong to write America off.
The United States remains a nuclear superpower. It has a huge installed nuclear fleet, enormous financial resources, world-leading universities and decades of nuclear engineering expertise.
But America's problem is that possessing nuclear expertise is not the same thing as being able to build new reactors quickly and economically.
The experience of Vogtle in Georgia illustrates the difficulty.
After decades in which America built very few new large reactors, the construction of two new units became a huge undertaking.
China, by contrast, has been developing a continuous construction programme.
The American fleet therefore represents a huge existing advantage, but China's construction pipeline represents a huge future advantage.
That distinction is easy to miss if we concentrate only on how many reactors each country operates today.
Energy infrastructure lasts for decades.
The question is therefore not simply who has the most nuclear power in 2026.
It is who will have the strongest electricity-generating base in 2040 or 2050.
France faces a different version of the same problem
France is perhaps the most fascinating comparison because it once did exactly what China is doing now.
Following the oil shocks of the 1970s, France embarked on an extraordinary nuclear construction programme.
The country built a large fleet of reactors and consequently became one of the world's most nuclear-dependent electricity systems.
It was a remarkable demonstration of what can happen when a country decides that energy security is a national industrial project rather than simply another item of government policy.
But the construction programme eventually slowed.
The result is that France still possesses enormous nuclear expertise and an important reactor fleet, but it has also had to confront ageing reactors and the difficult question of how to rebuild its nuclear construction capability.
China has been moving in the opposite direction.
It has spent years building.
France now needs to build again.
That distinction matters because construction skills do not remain perfectly preserved when they are not regularly used.
Britain has an even bigger problem
This is where the story becomes particularly uncomfortable.
Britain still has a significant nuclear heritage.
We developed some of the world's earliest commercial nuclear technology. We have generations of nuclear engineering expertise. We have Sellafield, Rolls-Royce and other companies with major capabilities, and we are developing plans for new large reactors and small modular reactors.
But compare the speed of our programme with China's.
Hinkley Point C is Britain's flagship new nuclear project.
It is also an enormous and extraordinarily complicated undertaking.
The two reactors are expected eventually to provide around 3.2 GW of electricity. Yet the project has taken years to construct and its costs have risen substantially. Recent estimates of the project's eventual cost have reached tens of billions of pounds.
Sizewell C is supposed to follow.
Then there are proposals for further nuclear development and the UK's small modular reactor programme.
All of these may be worthwhile.
But there is a fundamental problem.
If Britain decides today that it needs considerably more nuclear electricity, the electricity does not arrive today.
Planning takes time.
Regulation takes time.
Financing takes time.
Construction takes time.
Training workers takes time.
Building the supply chain takes time.
And commissioning takes time.
That is the central weakness of nuclear power, but it is also its strength.
A reactor can potentially provide reliable electricity for many decades.
But you have to build it first.
China is not waiting for Britain to catch up
The scale of China's programme is difficult to comprehend.
The World Nuclear Association currently records around 80 reactors under construction worldwide, with most of the construction concentrated in Asia. China alone accounts for a huge proportion of the global pipeline.
The US Energy Information Administration reported earlier this year that China's nuclear capacity had increased dramatically since 2016 and that China accounted for more than 49% of nuclear reactors under construction globally at that point.
And China is not relying upon nuclear alone.
This is an important point because the argument is sometimes presented as though China has chosen nuclear power while Britain has chosen renewable energy.
That is not what is happening.
China is building enormous amounts of solar and wind power as well.
Solar has expanded at extraordinary speed. Wind generation has also grown enormously. Transmission infrastructure is being expanded to move electricity around the country.
Nuclear provides another piece of the puzzle.
The Chinese approach is increasingly to build whatever combination of technologies is required to provide enough electricity for a rapidly expanding economy.
Britain sometimes appears to spend considerably more time arguing about which technology we should build than actually building enough of any of them.
That could become an economic problem.
Electricity is becoming an industrial weapon
This is where the nuclear argument changes completely.
For decades, electricity policy was largely treated as an environmental issue.
How do we reduce carbon emissions?
How much renewable electricity can we generate?
How much will household bills rise?
Those questions remain important.
But electricity is increasingly becoming a question of economic competitiveness and national security.
Artificial intelligence requires enormous quantities of electricity.
Data centres require enormous quantities of electricity.
Electric vehicles require electricity.
Heat pumps require electricity.
Modern manufacturing requires electricity.
Hydrogen production requires electricity.
Digital infrastructure requires electricity.
Even defence increasingly depends upon enormous quantities of reliable electrical power.
The country that can provide abundant, reliable and reasonably priced electricity has an enormous economic advantage over the country that cannot.
This is why China's nuclear expansion should not simply be regarded as an environmental story.
It is an industrial story.
And this is where Britain should be worried
Suppose a British company wants to establish a major new data centre.
It needs electricity.
Suppose a manufacturer wants to expand a factory.
It needs electricity.
Suppose an industrial process is to move away from natural gas.
It needs electricity.
Suppose millions more vehicles move from petrol and diesel to electricity.
They need electricity.
The demand keeps growing.
Now imagine that one country can construct new generating capacity relatively quickly while another country spends a decade or more deciding how to finance and approve each major project.
Eventually the difference becomes more than an energy-policy difference.
It becomes a competitiveness gap.
This is why China's nuclear programme deserves much more attention in Britain.
Has Britain actually lost the race?
That depends on what we mean by "lost".
If the race is to have more nuclear power than China, Britain was never going to win.
China has a population of more than a billion people and an enormous and rapidly developing economy.
But that is not the relevant comparison.
The real question is whether Britain can maintain an electricity system capable of supporting a wealthy, technologically advanced economy.
And here the answer is much less comfortable.
Britain does not necessarily need to copy China.
We have different geography, different population density, different institutions and a different energy system.
Nor should we pretend that Chinese construction methods can simply be transplanted into Britain.
But we do need to confront the underlying issue.
We have become very good at announcing energy ambitions and considerably less good at turning them into completed infrastructure.
That is the danger.
Nuclear power exposes Britain's wider infrastructure problem
The nuclear debate also tells us something about Britain beyond nuclear power.
Look at major roads.
Look at railways.
Look at housing.
Look at electricity transmission.
Look at reservoirs and water infrastructure.
Look at large energy projects.
Again and again, Britain can spend years discussing whether something should happen, followed by years of planning and legal challenges, followed by years of construction.
There are perfectly good reasons for some of this.
Democratic scrutiny matters.
Environmental protection matters.
Safety matters.
Local communities matter.
Financial discipline matters.
But eventually there is a point where a country has to ask whether its processes have become so complicated that it can no longer build infrastructure at the speed required by the modern economy.
China's nuclear programme brings that question into sharp focus.
It may not be too late
There is a danger in this discussion of becoming unnecessarily gloomy.
It is not too late for Britain.
The country still has enormous scientific and engineering capabilities.
We still have a nuclear industry.
We still have operating reactors.
We have Hinkley Point C under construction and Sizewell C moving forward.
We are developing small modular reactor technology.
And there is growing recognition across much of the political spectrum that nuclear power can play a role in providing reliable low-carbon electricity.
The opportunity is therefore still there.
But Britain needs to stop thinking of nuclear power as a succession of heroic mega-projects.
If nuclear is going to form a significant part of Britain's future electricity system, it needs to become a programme.
Build one.
Learn from it.
Build another.
Strengthen the supply chain.
Train the workforce.
Build another.
Standardise wherever possible.
Reduce uncertainty.
Keep going.
That is how industrial capacity is rebuilt.
The clock is ticking
The uncomfortable truth is that Britain cannot suddenly decide in 2035 that it needs another 20 or 30 gigawatts of nuclear power and expect the electricity to be available a year later.
Nuclear power has a long lead time.
That makes decisions made today extraordinarily important.
China understands this.
Its programme already stretches decades into the future. The World Nuclear Association's current outlook records a substantial pipeline of Chinese reactors beyond those already under construction, with China's longer-term ambitions pointing towards a dramatically larger nuclear fleet.
Britain, meanwhile, is still debating how much nuclear power it wants.
That difference in mindset may ultimately matter more than the technology itself.
The uncomfortable question for Britain
There is a temptation to see China's rise in nuclear power as simply another example of China building things faster and cheaper.
It is more important than that.
China is demonstrating what happens when energy security, industrial policy and infrastructure investment are treated as parts of the same national strategy.
America has enormous resources but is struggling to rebuild a nuclear construction industry.
France has enormous nuclear expertise but is having to rebuild its construction capability.
Britain has expertise too, but has an even smaller programme and longer lead times.
Meanwhile China is building.
And while we debate the cost of building new electricity generation, China is building the electricity generation that its industries will need tomorrow.
That should concern Britain.
Because the future economic battle may not be about who has the cheapest labour.
It may not even be about who has the most advanced artificial intelligence.
Increasingly, it could be about something much more basic.
Who can generate enough affordable, reliable electricity to power the technologies of the future?
China appears to have understood that question.
The United States and France are now trying to respond.
Britain needs to decide whether it is prepared to do the same.
Because when it comes to nuclear power, the greatest danger may not be that Britain chose the wrong technology.
It may be that we simply took too long to build anything at all.