New Nuclear Power Commitments At COP29 And Nuclear Uncertainty In The US

Today's Deep Dive is 1,168 words and a 7-minute read.

Nuclear energy commitments have been on show at the UN Climate Change Conference in Baku this past week, with six additional countries endorsing the Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy. There has been considerable criticism of this agreement, which is now endorsed by 31 countries, as being aspirational without realistic pathways for attainment. When the Declaration was launched in 2023, experts estimated that tripling capacity meant an addition of 740 GW of nuclear capacity would need to be added to the existing 370 GW by 2050. To this end, a number of countries have new reactors under construction, plus more reactors in planning or proposal stages. The US brought online two new reactors in 2023 and 2024, Vogtle 3 and Vogtle 4, and at COP29 rolled out a domestic framework for action, setting nuclear energy deployment targets to triple nuclear capacity by 2050. With the Biden administration transitioning out in