around twenty countries are calling for the development of nuclear power to limit global warming

2023-09-28 17:05:53

Nuclear power, an ally of the climate. This is the tone of the debates held in Paris, Thursday September 28, during an international conference organized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on the means to be implemented to revive the atom civil. Ministers from around twenty countries, from the European Union but also from Asia and the American continent, took part. A first.

“If we want to limit global warming below 1.5°, nuclear power is an essential tool,” particularly given the intermittency of renewables, we argue in the office of Agnès Pannier-Runacher. The Minister of Energy Transition was at the initiative of this meeting, based on a “non-ideological approach, based on material and physical realities”.

The ministers appealed to international financial institutions and multilateral development banks to finance nuclear power. The cost of capital is, in fact, a key element for the construction of new power plants, while the OECD estimates that the capacities of the current fleet would have to be doubled or even tripled to meet the carbon neutrality objectives in 2050.

Political alliance

The objective is not to launch a common reactor program, but to influence the debates by creating a “political alliance”like the Nuclear Alliance, launched at the start of the year at the initiative of France and which brings together sixteen countries of the European Union. “This allows us to have a blocking minority and to change the software on how to approach nuclear power,” we emphasize at the ministry – in other words, to counter the opposition of Germany and its allies.

With the support of opinions, the context begins to shift a little. On Tuesday September 26, the President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, recognized that nuclear power could benefit from public subsidies, without them appearing as State aid.