Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
     Other Australians at COP29 say it is important not to overstate nuclear’s presence, and its place in the global net-zero carbon effort.
     Tennant Reed is the Director of Climate Change and Energy at the Ai Group, and he is a veteran of COP climate summits. He said the arrival of nuclear energy in the climate change scene had certainly been noticeable.
     Reed added, “When I was at the 2018 climate summit in Poland, there was something of a fuss and surprise when a person in a giant inflatable polar bear costume burst into the cafeteria, accompanied by pro-nuclear youth and an opera singer singing pro-nuclear songs. That was very unusual but there’s a lot more visibility for the nuclear power industry, and nuclear advocates, in the trade show element of these conferences these days.” He continued that growth in nuclear power wasn’t a feature of the main negotiations at Baku, but neither was scaling up any other particular energy source.”
     Reed went on to say that nuclear advocates were hosting events on the sidelines, and they were very sensitive to one criticism in particular. He said, “They’re all conscious that they have to show that they can deliver new projects ‘on time and on budget’. I must have heard that phrase fifty times from nuclear people.”
     Reed added, “I think that they’re conscious that this is an ambition that the last wave of nuclear development in Western countries certainly did not meet. But they are very focused on making sure that this time is different.”
     The IAEA is forecasting a few big decades for nuclear power, expecting global production to more than double by 2050. However, Reed said much of the growth in nuclear power was coming from countries with established industries. While other countries were expressing interest in setting up an industry, few had recently broken ground. He said there was a much more momentum in the roll-out of renewables. He added that “Wind and solar deployment, and especially solar at the moment, is taking off like a rocket. It took the world a very long time to deploy its first total terawatt of solar energy production. We are now doubling every couple of years. And so there’s a vast amount of on-the-ground deployment of wind and solar that is happening.”
     Some conservation groups have tried to push back on the rising prominence of nuclear power, seeing it as a threatening distraction in efforts to combat climate change. The Australian Conservation Foundation’s (ACF) Dave Sweeney attended the COP29 conference in Baku. He cast some doubt on nuclear’s future, at least compared to renewables. Sweeney said, “It’s one thing to have agreements and aspirations, it’s another to have projects and power. The industry is having some very good rhetoric, but it’s having a very poor reality. We’ve seen thirty countries say that they will triple nuclear (power) by 2050; we’ve seen one hundred and twenty-five say that they will triple renewables by 2045.”
     Sweeney argues that part of the nuclear industry’s ambition is attracting public funding, in an effort to “de-risk” its projects. He added, “At meeting after meeting, they’ve spoken about the need for market reforms to de-risk nuclear projects. I think that is very bold code for ‘no-one wants to fund us, so we’re looking for the public purse’.”

Australian Conservation Foundation

Part 1 of 2 Parts
     Nuclear’s share as part of the global energy mix has been falling for the past few decades, and incidents like the Fukushima disaster in 2011 highlighted for many the risks of the technology. Some countries started mothballing or shutting down nuclear power plants, and many new projects have been plagued by cost overruns and construction delays. However, in the past few years there has been a remarkable turnaround.
     Countries are pledging to triple the production of nuclear power globally. Industry advocates are a growing presence at global climate summits. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is a United Nations body that advocates for peaceful use of nuclear technology. It is forecasting substantial growth in the nuclear power sector over the coming decades.
     Australia is heading into a federal election with the adoption of nuclear power at the center of the political contest. The Liberal-National Coalition (LNP) argues that Australia risks being left behind if it doesn’t get on board with nuclear power.
     Others point out that while there is plenty of global interest in nuclear power and the as-yet unrealized promise of new technology such as small modular reactors (SMRs), there is a lot more money flowing into renewable energy sources, which are already transforming global energy grids.
     The U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP29) climate summit held in Baku, Azerbaijan late last year was dedicated to climate financing. It was focused on finding the money needed to fund a massive global effort to tackle climate change.
     COP29 made headlines for a few different reasons. One reason was that for the second year running, the global climate summit was being held in a country that derives most of its income from oil and gas. Last year’s climate summit was held in the UAE.
     Another reason was the growing presence of nuclear power. Six more countries have signed a pledge to triple nuclear’s global production by 2050, taking the total number of countries on board to thirty-one.
     These countries range from relatively small countries such as Moldova, to major Australian allies like Canada, Japan, the UK and US. All four of those larger countries have long-established nuclear power industries.
     Nuclear power attracted plenty of attention at COP29, including headlines labelling it a “rising star” at the climate summit.
     David Gillespie is the retiring Nationalist Party (NP) MP for the NSW North Coast seat of Lyne. He travelled to the summit (with some backing from Coalition-aligned environment group Coalition for Conservation). Gillespie has been one of nuclear power’s longest and loudest supporters in Australia, chairing the “parliamentary friends of nuclear industries”. He acknowledges that a large part of COP29 was devoted to renewable energy, and a lot of money and ambition is flowing into solar and wind. However, he said that the shift in thinking on nuclear power at a global scale was clear to see.
     Gillespie said, “The world — and climate summits — for the first twenty-five years ignored nuclear. People have worked out, they realize for us to reduce our world’s requirement for fossil fuels, for industry, for running cities, for running sovereign energy systems that are not weather dependent — the way to go is nuclear. You build a fleet (of power plants), you don’t tip your toe around the edges.” He said the message he took from the climate summit was go nuclear, and go big. You do what France, and what Canada, and what America did in the 80s, you build a lot of them. And then you’ve got a grid that’s resilient and clean.”

COP29