In 2025, major advancements and collaborations are redefining the nuclear industry’s trajectory. From the United States accelerating small modular reactor (SMR) deployment to Saudi Arabia’s push to monetize uranium resources, the nuclear sector is buzzing with activity. In China, differential performances from its top operators highlight both progress and challenges in its expanding nuclear fleet.
Meanwhile, the UK explores the integration of nuclear power with artificial intelligence (AI) growth zones, and Canada and the UK deepen their partnership to drive innovation in nuclear technologies. This roundup explores the most impactful stories shaping the nuclear energy landscape in 2025.
Installed nuclear power capacity by country and age in advanced economies, end-2023
TVA Bids $800 Million to Speed Up Small Modular Reactors
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is leading an $800 million bid from the U.S. Department of Energy. This funding comes from the Generation III+ Small Modular Reactor (SMR) Program. TVA has teamed up with Bechtel, BWX Technologies (BWXT), Duke Energy, and others. Congress approved this funding in 2024. The goal? To deploy SMRs across the U.S. This move will boost the nuclear industry and meet the demand for clean, affordable energy.
TVA’s President and CEO, Jeff Lyash, believes advanced nuclear tech is key to energy security. If they win the bid, construction of an SMR at TVA’s Clinch River site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, will speed up. The project could start commercial operations by 2033, two years earlier than planned. TVA aims to build a domestic supply chain and prepare for future SMR deployments in the U.S. and beyond.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee backs the initiative. He says it will create jobs and strengthen the state’s nuclear ecosystem. SMRs are smaller and safer than traditional reactors. They can be built more quickly and integrated into communities easily. These reactors will provide reliable and flexible energy, essential for the country’s energy future.
A diverse group of industry leaders supports the project. Their partnership will accelerate SMR rollout and reduce costs and risks for customers.
TVA’s mission is to provide clean, reliable energy. As the nation’s largest public power supplier, TVA leads in sustainable energy tech development. With its diverse energy mix and focus on environmental stewardship, TVA is at the forefront of the U.S. push for a cleaner energy future.
- SEE MORE: Constellation Secures Groundbreaking $1 Billion Clean Nuclear Energy Deal with Federal Government
China Reports Mixed Results in Nuclear Power Output for 2024
Media agency World Nuclear News recently shared updates about China’s two major nuclear power operators, China General Nuclear (CGN) and China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC). They reported contrasting performance in nuclear electricity generation in 2024.
CGN Output
- CGN announced a 6% rise in nuclear power output compared to 2023.
- The company operated 28 reactors with a combined capacity of 31,798 MWe as of December 31, 2024.
- Total power generation reached 242.2 TWh, while 227.3 TWh was supplied to the grid—a year-on-year increase of over 6%.
- The company completed 13 scheduled refueling outages and six major maintenance operations.
- CGN also managed 16 reactors under construction, with two entering the commissioning phase and nine preparing for initial concrete pours.
- Huizhou/Taipingling Unit 1 in Guangdong is set for commercial operation in 2025.
CNNC Output
- CNNC announced a 1.8% decline in nuclear power generation in 2024 due to reactor maintenance outages.
- Its reactors generated 183.1 TWh, with 171.26 TWh supplied to the grid.
- The company controlled 25 operational reactors with a total capacity of 23.75 GWe and 18 units under construction or approved for construction, adding 20.64 GWe of future capacity.
- For 2025, CNNC plans to generate 195.4 TWh and conduct 16 scheduled maintenance outages.
China’s nuclear energy sector continues to expand, with State Power Investment Corporation and Huaneng Group emerging as additional key players. Smaller companies, including Huadian, Datang, and Guodian, also maintain stakes in various projects.
As of 2024, China operates 58 nuclear reactors, which supply approximately 5% of the country’s electricity. With multiple projects in the pipeline, the nation aims to bolster its clean energy capacity and meet growing power demands.
Saudi Arabia Eyes Minerals Market and Nuclear Expansion
Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman plans to tap into the country’s mineral resources, including uranium. Reuters revealed that at a conference in Dhahran, he announced plans to enrich uranium and produce “yellowcake,” a concentrated form used for nuclear fuel. While yellowcake requires careful handling, it poses minimal radiation risks.
Saudi Arabia aims to diversify its energy mix with nuclear power. The program is still in its early stages, with plans for uranium enrichment. However, there are concerns about the potential future implications. In 2018, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hinted that Saudi Arabia might pursue nuclear weapons if Iran does.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) offers a regional comparison. It has the first multi-unit nuclear energy plant in the Arab world and has committed not to enrich uranium or reprocess spent fuel, demonstrating a commitment to non-proliferation. Furthermore, they have not yet activated its first nuclear reactor, keeping its activities under the Small Quantities Protocol’s (SQP) limited monitoring.
Westinghouse and Korean Partners Resolve Intellectual Property Dispute
Westinghouse Electric Company has reached a global settlement with Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) and Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Company (KHNP) to resolve their ongoing intellectual property dispute.
The agreement brings clarity and allows both parties to focus on developing and deploying new nuclear reactors worldwide. It also paves the way for future collaboration on global nuclear energy projects.
As part of the settlement, all legal actions related to the dispute will be dismissed. Westinghouse, KEPCO, and KHNP have agreed to work together to support the growth of nuclear energy, enhancing their ability to deliver innovative reactor technologies.
This resolution marks a significant step forward for both companies. By resolving these issues, Westinghouse and its Korean partners can focus on strengthening partnerships and advancing nuclear energy solutions for the global market.
Westinghouse President & CEO Patrick Fragman said,
“Westinghouse is pleased to reach an agreement with KEPCO and KHNP on this important issue. As the world demands more firm baseload power, we look forward to opportunities for cooperation to deploy nuclear power at even greater scale.”
UK Plans AI Growth Zones Powered by Nuclear Energy
Bloomberg reported recently that the UK is setting up special “AI Growth Zones” districts to boost technology growth and artificial intelligence ecosystems. According to a government announcement, these zones will offer streamlined planning approvals and improved electricity access for data centers. The first zone will be established in Culham, the location of the UK Atomic Energy Authority.
The government plans to create an energy council comprising public and private stakeholders to address the energy demands of advanced AI systems. The council will explore small modular reactors (SMRs) using nuclear fission technology to power these data centers. This initiative aligns with the UK’s plans to expand supercomputing capabilities, enhance AI applications in public services, and attract global tech talent.
Private investments are already flowing into the initiative. Notably, Vantage Data Centers has pledged over £12 billion for data center projects in the UK, while Nscale plans to invest $2.5 billion over the next three years.
Canada Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) and AECL Explore Nuclear Technologies
Additionally, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) and CNL have issued a Request for Expression of Interest (RFEOI) to explore licensing their SLOWPOKE and Nuclear Battery reactor technologies. The RFEOI invites stakeholders to share insights on these designs, which can be used for power generation, heating, isotope production, and research.
AECL’s SLOWPOKE and Nuclear Battery Technologies
AECL’s SLOWPOKE reactors, including the SLOWPOKE-2, are simple, safe, and cost-effective. These low-pressure reactors have operated for decades in Canada, offering reliable energy for various applications like neutron activation analysis and education. Their ‘safe by physics’ design allows for up to 24 hours of unattended operation.
Now coming to the Nuclear Battery, it’s a solid-state micro-reactor, that produces 600 kWe of electricity and 2400 kWth of heat for 15 years without refueling. With passive safety features, it’s ideal for off-grid use. CNL is exploring market interest in these technologies, seeking opportunities for electricity generation, district heating, and isotope production.
The post 2025 Nuclear Energy Roundup: Top Stories You Need to Know appeared first on Carbon Credits.
Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
- Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
- Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
- Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
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