USA Preparing To Announce Pledge The United States is preparing to announce a pledge to triple the world’s production of nuclear energy by 2050, with more than 10 countries on four continents already signed on to the first major international agreement in modern history to ramp up the use of atomic power.
Signatories to the pledge, set to be unveiled at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai later this month, include many of the largest current users of nuclear energy such as the United Kingdom, France, Romania, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, Japan and South Korea, a senior Biden administration official familiar with the efforts confirmed HuffPost. A handful of newcomers that have not yet built reactors, including Poland, Ghana and Morocco, are also said to have joined the pledge.
The plan will put pressure on the World Bank to end its long-standing ban on financing nuclear-energy projects, which the American Nuclear Society, a nonprofit of academics and industry professionals who advocate for atomic energy in the public interest, said was crucial to any buildout.
“Tripling the world’s nuclear energy supplies by 2050 is the catalyst required to halt rising temperatures and achieve a sustainable future,” the ANS said in a statement to HuffPost. “A large-scale build-out of new nuclear energy can only happen with the crafting of nuclear-inclusive lending policies by financial institutions like the World Bank.”
More countries are expected to sign on to the pledge before international negotiators convene in Dubai on Nov. 30 for the 28th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change known as COP28 the annual two-week summit aimed at brokering a global deal to speed up efforts to slash planet-heating emissions and help countries already suffering from the effects of climate change. The 2015 conference is what yielded the watershed Paris Agreement, the first pact to include the world whole in an effort to cut emissions enough to keep the planet’s temperature from climbing above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial averages. The world has already warmed by at least 1.1 degrees Celsius.
“It’s great to see the extension of this commitment to countries like Ghana and Morocco for whom nuclear could be a game-changing technology for energy reliability and emissions reduction,” said Jackie Toth, the deputy director of the progressive pro-nuclear group Good Energy Collective. “Energy demand in Africa is going to scale significantly in the coming decades, so if we’re going to hit our global climate goals, a lot of the new capacity in Africa is going to need to be carbon free.”