International leaders gathered this week to promote the expansion of nuclear power, arguing the world is going to need more of it if countries have any chance at weathering the evolving energy supply crisis and meeting climate change goals.
The three-day International Atomic Energy Agency’s nuclear power ministerial meeting, which convened in Washington on Wednesday, featured heads of government agencies, nuclear companies and utilities, and international NGOs stressing the imperative both to maintain operations of existing nuclear reactors and successfully commercialize the next generation of advanced reactors.
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The ministerial came as many countries face soaring prices and governments try to secure energy supplies in markets that have been upended by the war in Ukraine — all while attempting to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions aggressively in line with the Paris Agreement.
Energy prices have ballooned this year for all regions, in large part because of the war in Ukraine and the consequences of associated policy actions, including sanctions and Russian retaliation, on energy markets.
Higher prices for oil and natural gas have been a driving force behind overall rising inflation. Europe’s initiative to line up alternative energy suppliers to Russia, which for decades has been a leading source of fossil fuel imports into the EU, has emboldened some members to embrace nuclear more aggressively.
Others, most notably Germany and Belgium, have made moves to extend the lives of retiring reactors, if only briefly in Germany’s case, while Japan has elected to reactivate reactors idled after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.
Nuclear, like coal and natural gas, is a thermal generating source that is “dispatchable” and can be ramped up or down to flex with demand, distinguishing it from wind and solar, which are weather-dependent.
Unlike fossil fuel sources, though, nuclear power plants do not emit greenhouse gases, offering the clean characteristics of renewable sources, as well as the reliability and flexibility characteristics of traditional generating sources.
William Magwood, director general of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, said nuclear energy enables industrialized economies to maintain their quality of life, which has been built on decades of combusting fossil fuels for electricity and industrial processes, and to mitigate climate change.
“We cannot ask our populations to make a choice between energy and the environment. We have to do both,” Magwood said during remarks at the conference, “and that is where nuclear energy comes into the picture.”
Other ministers, such as IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi, sought to lure skeptics and outright opponents of nuclear, the most prominent of which are in Europe, where the energy crisis is most acute.
“We see countries reversing those decisions or decisively moving into nuclear, because we have to be led by science, by economically feasible decisions, and not by ideology,” Grossi said in introductory remarks Wednesday.
There’s also immense appetite for nuclear across the developing world, Grossi said.
“Hardly a week passes without me listening to minister of energy coming from Africa, from Latin America, from some parts in Asia, who legitimately say that they also want to benefit from the clean, reliable, dispatchable benefits of nuclear energy,” Grossi said.
IAEA’s meeting coincides with some major policy shifts around the world in favor of nuclear. The European Union amended regulations earlier in the year making nuclear eligible to be dubbed “green” by regulators, a move that has set off litigation from anti-nuclear Austria.
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In the United States, Congress has appropriated billions of dollars in subsidies over the last year for the nuclear sector, both to keep economically challenged existing reactors up and running and to help fund advanced reactor technologies.
Nuclear has bipartisan support and is a major component of the Biden administration’s climate change agenda. The U.S. “believes that nuclear must be a part of our long-term energy mix,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who served as president of the ministerial, said during opening remarks Wednesday.
“We are committed to maintaining and modernizing our existing fleet. We are committed to developing a secure and diverse supply chain for nuclear fuel, and we’re committed to growing a nuclear workforce that is skilled,” she said.
