America has nearly twice as many reactors and at least five times more data centers, an advantage the Chinese Communist Party aims to erase by 2030.
The United States has nearly twice as many nuclear reactors and at least five times the number of artificial intelligence-generating data centers that China now has.
But while only two new nuclear power plants have been built in the United States this century, China has built nearly 40 and, as China Atomic Energy Authority Vice Chair Wang Yiren told the China Nuclear Energy Association in May, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “aims to overtake the United States in installed nuclear capacity by 2030.”
China’s rapid development of nuclear energy to power artificial intelligence (AI) “has triggered a Sputnik moment” among the United States’ reactor designers and operators, Oklo Chief Technology Officer Pat Schweiger said.
“AI leadership is a civilization-level challenge, and we face a geopolitical imperative to achieve AI supremacy,” Schweiger said in his testimony during a June 12 hearing before the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee’s Energy Subcommittee.
The United States is the world’s largest generator and consumer of nuclear energy, with 94 nuclear reactors in 55 power plants.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration calculates that the plants generated 18.6 percent of their electricity in 2023.
However, most were built between 1970 and 1990 and average more than 40 years in service.
The only new reactor to come online in the United States since 2016 is Vogtle’s fourth reactor in Georgia, $16 billion over budget and six years behind schedule.
According to the World Nuclear Association, China has 58 operating reactors with 32 under construction, including 10 projected to come online in 2025.
During a March 11 roundtable discussion at CERAWeek by S&P Global in Houston, six Chinese energy leaders and academics said CCP leader Xi Jinping made nuclear energy development a key in achieving a 2020 pledge to “peak carbon dioxide emissions” from fossil fuels “before 2030” and “achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.”
Including solar, wind, hydropower, biomass, and nuclear—since 2020, China built at least five new nuclear plants a year, bringing its fleet to 58, contributing nearly 6 percent to its energy mix—35 percent of China’s power comes from renewable sources, according to the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA) and Ember, a global energy analysis firm.
“China is definitely moving fast,” Schweiger said. “They have the infrastructure in place, manufacturing capabilities that have accelerated their ability to perform. Currently, they’re on pace to build reactors in about 52 months, so just over four years.”
Under current regulations posted by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it takes 10 to 12 years just to license and permit a new nuclear reactor in the United States.
President Donald Trump’s May executive orders seeking to “reinvigorate” the United States’ nuclear energy industry call on Congress to trim back those timelines, especially for the 60-plus emerging reactor technologies, such as “plug-in” small nuclear reactors, natrium-cooled reactors, “fast fission” reactors, and fusion reactors.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s 70-year-old matrix of federal rules poses an “unreasonable burden for micro-reactor developers,” hindering domestic implementation of technologies being pioneered in the United States but exported elsewhere, Washington-based Last Energy argued in a December 2024 lawsuit filed against the commission.
The primary beneficiary of this “innovation export” is China, which is incorporating and advancing these emerging technologies in its rapidly expanding fleet of reactors, capitalizing on stillborn technologies developed in the United States.
By John Haughey
