A CONFERENCE hosted by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Brussels last month was supposed to bring together national-level nuclear energy planners and the banking sector to encourage the latter to develop the estimated $5 trillion in funding needed to meet the goal of tripling nuclear generation capacity by 2050. As I explained in Thursday's column ("Nuclear ambitions meet financial reality in Brussels," April 4), the conference was successful with the "bringing together" part. But as things turned out, that was only so the bankers could patiently explain concepts such as creditworthiness and value-at-risk and how nuclear energy, at least for the foreseeable future, does not even come close to meeting acceptable standards for those things.
The letdown of the Brussels conference has led to a stronger push for an alternative proposal, the formation of what is being called the International Bank for Nuclear Infrastructure (IBNI). IBNI is modeled on existing multilateral finance institutions such as the World Bank Group, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Asian Development Bank, but would have a narrow focus on "enabling nuclear technology to rapidly scale and become both highly affordable and accessible within all its member-countries globally."
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