Nearly two years since a group of countries threw their weight behind a goal to triple the world’s nuclear power capacity by 2050 to fight climate change, energy experts say the target is unlikely to be met due to shortages of investment, uranium and time.
The nuclear declaration, launched on the margins of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, was signed by 20 nations at different stages of nuclear power development, including the US, South Korea and Japan. Turkey, Kenya and Nigeria were among six other countries that joined the initiative at COP29 last year.
Nuclear power provides a stable source of low-emissions energy known as “baseload”, which can complement renewables at times of lower solar and wind power output.
According to an analysis from the Nuclear Energy Agency, increasing nuclear power capacity three times from 2020 levels to an average of 1,160 gigawatts (GW) offers “a realistic and practical path” to help the world meet its goals to limit global warming to 1.5C and reach net zero emissions by 2050.
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While the COP28 nuclear goal set in late 2023 was always seen as ambitious, faltering multilateralism and dwindling development aid over the last two years are raising further questions about whether it is achievable – particularly in poorer nations unable to access sufficient affordable financing.
Can it be done?
Meeting the 2050 target is still “theoretically possible” but would need a supply chain scale-up of “epic” proportions, said Jacopo Buongiorno, nuclear science and engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
“It would require all countries that make nuclear reactors to be 100% committed, including China, the US, Canada, South Korea, India, Russia – everybody pushing on all cylinders. It’s massive investments and massive commitments, so it’s really, really difficult,” Buongiorno told Climate Home News.
Atte Harjanne, a lawmaker from Finland, one of the 20 countries to endorse the declaration, acknowledged it is a challenging goal, but said it could help spur climate and energy security targets.
“We need ambitious goals, and we need ambitious action and this is an example of that, so I would rather focus on enabling the work instead of thinking of whether it can be done,” he said.
Short on time and uranium
A shortage of time is one of the biggest challenges to achieving the nuclear capacity target because new nuclear power projects can take more than a decade to go from construction to operation due to their complexity and stringent safety regulations.
In the US, for example, the last reactors to come online – Vogtle Units 3 & 4 – began construction in 2009 at an initial estimated cost of $14 billion. They eventually came online with a $30-billion price tag in 2023 and 2024, almost a decade behind schedule, due to significant construction delays and cost overruns, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
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Asian countries generally bring new reactors online more quickly, according to a 2025 report by the International Energy Agency (IEA).
But ramping up the global supply chain to build reactors at such short notice will be almost impossible, said Jan Haverkamp, a senior expert on nuclear energy and energy policy at Greenpeace Netherlands.
Haverkamp called the COP28 pledge “pie-in-the-sky”, though he acknowledged that it had “made a lot of people sit up and think ‘we can do that’.”
Limited supplies of uranium – the main source of fuel in nuclear reactors – could be another constraint on boosting atomic energy rapidly. A handful of countries including Kazakhstan, Canada and Australia hold two-thirds of the global supply of uranium.
Nuclear power’s comeback
Even if it faces an uphill struggle, the COP28 target has added impetus to renewed global interest in the climate benefits of nuclear power – long the target of protests by environmentalists and a source of safety concerns.
While countries might not achieve all the goals in the declaration, having the pledge “is a step forward in acknowledging the need to transition away from fossil fuels”, said Heba El-komey, a nuclear energy analyst at Nigeria-based Nuclear Aware Africa.
Governments’ interest in nuclear power is at its highest level since the oil crisis in the 1970s, according to the IEA report.
Adding to the global fleet of about 420 nuclear reactors, 63 reactors are currently under construction – half of them in China, according to the IEA report. And more than 60 reactors have had their lifetime extended globally in the last five years.
The IEA projects a record high in nuclear electricity generation in 2025 as Japan restarts production, maintenance works are completed in France, and new reactors begin commercial operations.
Banks, governments change tack
Germany, which phased out more than 30 reactors in the last decade over safety concerns, has shifted its position since the election of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union party, who said he would not object to treating nuclear as a clean source of energy.
Nuclear power has so far survived the US government’s axing of most funding for clean energy projects. Last May, President Donald Trump issued an executive order aiming to reinvigorate the country’s nuclear energy industry and directed a speed-up in nuclear reactor licensing and deployment.
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In line with the nuclear capacity tripling pledge, Trump wants to accelerate deployment of new nuclear reactor technologies and expand US capacity from about 100 GW in 2024 to 400 GW by 2050.
Major financial institutions have also backed the COP28 nuclear declaration in recent months, including the World Bank, which in June lifted a long-standing ban on financing for new nuclear reactors. Last year, a group of major banks – including Barclays, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs – also pledged support for the declaration.
For David Yellen, director of climate policy innovation at the Clean Air Task Force, an international nonprofit, such shifts indicate that “conditions for nuclear to succeed over the next few years” are stronger than ever.
If governments can come to November’s COP30 climate talks working together with multilateral development banks to lower financing costs in the Global South, that would be “more transformational to the future of nuclear than perhaps anything else we can do in the next couple of years”, he added.
“Nuclear newcomers”
Numerous African countries – including Egypt, Ghana and Nigeria – and other Global South nations have announced their intentions to venture into nuclear energy.
Ghana, for example, has completed the site selection process for its first nuclear power plant, which has been successfully reviewed by a team of experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
And with support from Russia, Egypt is also building its first nuclear power plant after decades of reliance on natural gas for power generation.
Harjanne, the Finnish lawmaker, said Finland was tapping its own experience to support other countries “with expertise, especially in safety regulation and waste management, but also in construction”.
Not all environmental campaigners think that such initiatives should be part of the continent’s clean energy transition, however.
In a 2025 report, a group of grassroots African NGOs said building nuclear reactors was “too slow, too harmful, too expensive and too difficult to combine with renewables”. They also voiced concern about the handling of radioactive waste, a byproduct of nuclear energy production.
“Nuclear power is the costliest means possible of reducing carbon and methane emissions and worse, it detracts from investment in clean energy sources,” they wrote, calling instead for a “wholehearted commitment” to renewables.
