Nuclear power plants produced 17.7 percent of U.S. utility-scale electricity generation in 2025, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data drawn from its Electric Power Monthly. Total utility-scale generation reached about 4.43 trillion kilowatthours for the year.

The EIA chart breaks the national generation mix into five groups. Natural gas led at 40.8 percent. Renewable sources combined for 24.1 percent. Nuclear followed at 17.7 percent, just ahead of coal at 16.6 percent. Petroleum and other sources made up 0.7 percent.

Within the renewable group, wind supplied 10.5 percent of total generation, solar 6.7 percent, hydropower 5.6 percent, biomass 1.0 percent and geothermal 0.4 percent. Nuclear output exceeded wind, solar and hydropower individually and ranked second among single fuel sources behind natural gas.

Applied to the 4.43 trillion kilowatthour total, the 17.7 percent share works out to roughly 780 billion kilowatthours of nuclear generation in 2025. Nuclear plants use steam turbines to convert heat from fission into electricity, and the fleet runs as baseload supply across the year.

The figures cover power plants with at least 1,000 kilowatts of generating capacity. EIA separately estimates that small-scale solar photovoltaic systems produced about 0.09 trillion kilowatthours outside the utility-scale total. The 2025 values are preliminary and were published in the February 2026 edition of the Electric Power Monthly, and EIA notes that shares may not sum to 100 percent because of independent rounding.

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration - https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php