France and the US want development banks to finance nuclear energy

France and USA They lead an initiative for international financial organizations to intervene so that development banks finance the development of the nuclear energy, which requires enormous and very long-term investments.

This proposal will be one of the priorities of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, at the summit on nuclear energy organized on Thursday in Brussels by Belgium and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Elysée sources explained this Wednesday.

Paris and Washington are at the forefront of this idea of ​​activating the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) so that multilateral financial organizations open themselves to this financing, for which commercial banks are often reluctant.

The construction of nuclear reactors is a very long-term project, which normally takes more than a dozen years until it materializes, and requires an injection of billions of euros. Its profitability requires waiting a long time, something that deters a good part of private investors.

Macron is making a very strong commitment to nuclear energy, with the extension “to the maximum” of the current French park (58 reactors that provide around 70% of the country’s electricity), the construction of six new reactors between 2035 and 2050 and the promotion of small modular reactors (SMR), a technology pending development.

Within the EU, Paris has put itself at the head of a European Nuclear Alliance, in which there are fifteen of the 27 member states, to assert the interests of atomic energy and give it the same consideration as renewables in policies. climatic.

At the Brussels summit, in which fifty countries from around the world must participate, the French president wants to insist that nuclear can serve as a transition energy with the abandonment of fossil fuels, especially in countries where that coal still retains a great relative weight.

According to the Elysée’s argument, it cannot be expected that these countries – which are essentially on the Asian continent – replace coal only with renewable energies.

Along the same lines, nuclear can guarantee security of supply and does not generate greenhouse emissions like gas does, which some also present as a transition alternative to coal.

Last December, during COP28, which marked the objective of progressive abandonment of fossil fuels, around twenty countries, including France, signed a common declaration to triple nuclear capacities between 2020 and 2050.

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