About thirty countries worldwide have built one or more nuclear power plants. Some fifty others have expressed an interest in the technology and asked the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for practical assistance developing a project. What prompts them to start generating nuclear electricity? Are their motives the same as those of their predecessors?

We shall start by presenting the countries which currently generate electricity using nuclear technology. About ten former soviet socialist republics belong to this category. They include Armenia, Lithuania and Ukraine, and satellites such as Bulgaria, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The choice to invest in nuclear power was above all made by Moscow. Three other major nuclear countries – the United States, the United Kingdom and France – belong in the same category as the Soviet Union. They all adopted nuclear power at an early stage, combining civilian and military applications. India and China joined the game later, but have also developed civilian and military applications. In contrast, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Germany have large nuclear fleets too, but no weapons. There follow a large number of countries with only a small number of reactors. Did you know that Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Taiwan, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Finland, the Netherlands and South Africa all own nuclear power plants? To this list of small-scale players we should add Pakistan and Iran. Unlike the others, the development of civilian nuclear power here is closely linked to military ambitions. Pakistan used the development of civilian nuclear power as a blind and Iran has developed an uranium enrichment programme far in excess of its needs for power generation. Counting the former Soviet Union as a single unit, there are currently twenty-one countries which have successfully developed nuclear power.