In a watershed moment for the nuclear power industry and world energy – the United States government will lead a new global initiative to triple nuclear power capacity across the world by 2050 – documents seen by Bloomberg suggest.
The initiative will see global nuclear energy triple from 2020 levels by 2050.
The news would also see the US commit to significant new nuclear energy builds.
The world currently produces around 2545 TW hours of electricity from nuclear power, about 10% of the world’s total power supply.
The commitment would take place at the COP28 Climate Change summit in Dubai, UAE.
The group of nations would work with partners around the world to make nuclear power the centrepiece of a new movement, to power the world with nuclear energy and provide reliable clean baseload power.
The US, UK, France, Sweden, Finland and South Korea are all set to be part of a leadership group.
The group will work to make nuclear energy the predominant source of clean power in the world by mid-century and throw its weight behind financial incentives to make that happen – including their own domestic commitments to new nuclear power plants.
The group will sign a document in Dubai that will include various incentives and initiatives to boost nuclear energy construction around the world.
The countries will sign a document that will recognise “the key role of nuclear energy in achieving global net-zero greenhouse gas emissions/carbon neutrality by or around mid-century.”
“Nuclear energy is already the second-largest source of clean dispatchable baseload power, with benefits for energy security,” the document says.
“Nuclear is 100% part of the solution,” John Kerry, Joe Biden’s special presidential envoy for climate change told reporters earlier this month – this is a major change of sentiment for the sector which was often forgotten by politicians and activists.
Nuclear energy is seeing a huge return in interest, after long being forgotten by climate change activists – despite the long-time proven tech supplying most of humanity’s clean energy for decades.
“In all my years in the nuclear power business (since 1969) I have never seen such widespread support for nuclear energy. While humanity wasted 50 years it is better late than never,” said veteran nuclear engineer Malcolm Rawlingson said this week.
COP28 will take place over two weeks in November, bringing nations and major NGOs and corporations together to commit to stopping dangerous global warming.
