About and method
NuclearChain answers three kinds of question: what reactors exist, where their fuel comes from, and which advanced designs are actually moving through regulators. The fuel chain is the part that does not exist elsewhere in one navigable place, and it is where the curation effort goes.
Where the data comes from
- Fleet — Global Nuclear Power Tracker, Global Energy Monitor, August 2026 release, licensed CC BY 4.0. 1825 units across 64 countries.
- Fuel chain — 90 facilities curated by hand from agency capacity tables and company filings. Every capacity figure carries the year it applies to and a link to its source.
- US daily status — NRC Power Reactor Status Reports, public domain, fetched daily.
- SMR pipeline — regulator dockets and proceedings at the NRC, ONR and CNSC. Every design carries a docket or is explicitly tiered as paper.
- Verification — IAEA PRIS, used to spot-check records. Not ingested or mirrored.
Rules this site follows
- Nothing is invented. Where a value is not publicly disclosed it is null and renders as "not disclosed". It is never estimated, interpolated or filled with a plausible-looking guess.
- Every figure carries its date. A capacity figure states the year it applies to. A status figure states when it was last researched. A live number states the date of the report it came from.
- A forecast is never shown as history. A planned retirement year is stored in a separate field from an actual shutdown date, so it is structurally impossible to render one as the other.
- Inferred status is labelled. 281 units carry a status the compiler inferred from an absence of progress rather than from an announcement. Every one says so.
- Corrections are visible. Where we depart from the base dataset, the page shows the old value, the new value, the source and the verification date.
The most important limitation
93% of units the August 2026 fleet release lists as operating were last researched in May 2024 — 27 months before that release. Global Energy Monitor's own release notes say prospective projects were re-researched; the operating fleet was not.
Any unit that shut down in between still reads as operating in the base data. We spot-checked against IAEA PRIS, found the affected records, and corrected 6 of them. Every reactor page shows the date that specific unit was last researched, so you can judge the record for yourself rather than trusting the release date.
Corrections currently applied
| Record | Why | Verified |
|---|---|---|
| doel-nuclear-power-plant-1 | Permanently shut down on 15 February 2025 under Belgium's nuclear phase-out law, after the GNPT record was last researched in May 2024. | 2026-09-06 |
| doel-nuclear-power-plant-2 | Permanently shut down on 30 November 2025, after the GNPT record was last researched in May 2024. | 2026-09-06 |
| tihange-nuclear-power-plant-1 | Permanently shut down on 1 October 2025 at the end of its extended licence, after the GNPT record was last researched in May 2024. | 2026-09-06 |
| pickering-nuclear-power-plant-a1 | Permanently shut down on 1 October 2024 ahead of the Pickering B refurbishment programme, after the GNPT record was last researched in May 2024. | 2026-09-06 |
| pickering-nuclear-power-plant-a4 | Permanently shut down on 31 December 2024, after the GNPT record was last researched in May 2024. | 2026-09-06 |
| kakrapar-nuclear-power-plant-4 | GNPT records the commercial operation date as identical to the grid connection date (2024-02-20), which appears to be a field-copy error. The IAEA records commercial operation on 31 March 2024. | 2026-09-06 |
Reuse
Everything here is available as CSV and JSON under CC BY 4.0 at /data/. There is an llms.txt describing the site's coverage and its limits. Attribution is the only requirement.
Contact
Corrections are welcome and are the most useful thing you can send. Please include a source.