Besides the five countries mentioned above, the 22 signatories include, in alphabetical order, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ghana, Hungary, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Sweden, Ukraine, and the UAE.<\/p>\n
In addition to setting a goal of tripling the world\u2019s installed capacity of nuclear energy by 2050 compared with 2020, the declaration also mentions expanding the introduction of small modular reactors (SMRs) and advanced reactors, as well as hydrogen production using nuclear energy. The project also envisions nuclear applications in industrial fields other than electric power.<\/p>\n
The declaration also addresses the financing of nuclear energy projects and encourages international financial institutions\u2014led by the World Bank, as well as financial institutions in other countries\u2014to include nuclear energy as a financing target.<\/p>\n
Other initiatives included in the declaration are as follows:<\/p>\n
The progress of those efforts will be reviewed annually at the COP.<\/p>\n
In recent years, the global nuclear energy industry has been engaged in a series of international collaborative activities to promote the awareness of the role that nuclear energy can play in ensuring both energy security and net-zero CO2<\/sub> emissions. The Net Zero Nuclear (NZN) initiative, launched in London in September 2023, is part of that trend.<\/p>\n In the same month, on September 28 and 29, the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the French Ministry of Energy Transition co-hosted a high-level government-industry collaborative forum, \u201cRoadmaps to New Nuclear,\u201d in Paris. There, various national nuclear industry associations issued a joint statement urging the rapid and large-scale deployment of nuclear energy to mitigate climate change and enhance energy security.<\/p>\n The statement was based on a similar one adopted by the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum (JAIF) and others in conjunction with the G7 Ministers\u2019 Meeting on Climate, Energy, and Environment held in Sapporo in April, and emphasizes the need to expand the generating capacity for nuclear energy by two to three times the current level in order to achieve the goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.<\/p>\n According to a survey by the JAIF, the world\u2019s nuclear energy capacity was 407.88GW at the end of 2020, and tripling that capacity would mean increasing it to over 1,200GW.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the latest World Energy Outlook by the International Energy Agency (IEA), released in October 2023, projects a nuclear energy capacity of 916GW[1]<\/sup><\/a>2022 = 417GW<\/span><\/span>