“Funding needs to happen” for the International Atomic Energy Agency, the State Department’s undersecretary for arms control said Tuesday at a think-tank event about nuclear power.
“People hear the word energy, I mean nuclear, and they kind of run. A lot of people run for the hills,” Bonnie Jenkins, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security at the U.S. Department of State, said in answer to a question on how the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) navigates the “stigma” against nuclear energy to acquire funding from international agencies and banks.
“That’s changing, obviously. And I think that’s a reflection of the interest in countries to incorporate nuclear,” Jenkins added. However, she said “the banks, we’re still having a challenge getting them involved, engaged.”
Jenkins spoke at a meeting at the Washington-based think tank the Stimson Center entitled, “Nuclear Disruption: Navigating a Shifting Nuclear Landscape from Energy to Defense.” Stimson hosted the event a few months after President Joe Biden’s (D) passage of the Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act.
One of the provisions of the ADVANCE Act was for the secretary of state and secretary of energy to identify, within 90 days of the act’s passage, other “factors” for allowing the U.S. to export nuclear material to another country, other than through a 1-2-3 agreement.
A 1-2-3 agreement, referring to section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act, is an importing country’s promise that it will only use U.S. nuclear material for peaceful purposes.
Since approving a 1-2-3 agreement could take seven months to a year, a representative of a nuclear energy think tank has told the Monitor over the summer that as is, the agreements are “not a way to be competitive” in the current nuclear renaissance.
A spokesperson for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the DOE’s technical consultant for 1-2-3 agreements, told the Monitor by email last week that in the 90 days since the ADVANCE Act passage, “in concurrence with the State Department, NNSA/DOE has evaluated and identified no new factors or process changes at this time.”
Meanwhile, also in July, IAEA director general Rafael Grossi visited with the World Bank Group Executive Board and said that “multilateral development banks such as the World Bank can advance sustainable development by assessing nuclear project bankability and contributing lending at affordable rates.”
Grossi also said at this meeting that international banks, alongside private investors, would need to double investments to $100 billion annually to meet IAEA’s 2023 worldwide nuclear power capacity goals by 2050.
Jenkins also said that Grossi had visited international banks to request funding, and that the Export-Import bank of the United States and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative have both been involved in funding IAEA.
“It’s something that we have to keep doing,” Jenkins said. “We’re always very supportive of that, because we need to make sure, because funding needs to happen.”
