Keynote: WNA promoting a wider understanding and streamlining international licensing and regulatory frameworks

In his keynote Mr. Bilbao-Y-Leon highlighted the following points: Nuclear energy is absolutely essential to address the climate change challenge at the speed and scale that is required. Nuclear energy can not only produce low carbon electricity, but also low carbon heat. And this is going to be a game changer to decarbonize the entire economy, including sectors that are very hard to abate, such as heating and cooling for buildings, such as many industrial sectors, such as shipping, transportation, the generation of hydrogen and other synthetic fuels, the production of fresh water... And this means that we are going to need much more nuclear energy. Some of the most robust scenarios indicate that by 2050, we are going to need to have about 1200 gigawatts electric of nuclear capacity in order to provide 25% of the global electricity needs. And this doesn't even include all the other applications beyond electricity generation. However, there are challenges also! In order to have 1200 megawatts of nuclear by 2050 we need to build more than 30 new nuclear reactors every year from today to 2050, and then continue. That is quite a few nuclear reactors. It is not impossible. It has been done before: in the 70's and 80's in France and in Sweden we actually achieved those speeds of deployment. So clearly, we can do it again. However, there are a few things that need to happen for nuclear energy deployment to accelerate. These are the essential enabling conditions. First, we need the thought leadership and pragmatism of governments to put in place technology-neutral policies and markets, which recognise and appropriately price the attributes of all low-carbon technologies, including nuclear energy, of course. We also are going to need affordable financing for nuclear projects, thus to include nuclear energy among the eligible technologies for climate finance and ESG. We also need to attract and retain the best talent into the nuclear profession. And we need to ensure the generational exchange of knowledge among the experts of today and the future experts. Finally, to ensure the economic competitiveness of nuclear technology, we need to put in place the means for the emergence of a global market that capitalises on standardization and the consolidation of the global supply chain. This global market necessitates streamlined international licensing and regulatory frameworks that facilitate the deployment of nuclear technology in various countries. There is urgent need for leadership by national governments for the development of suitable legal frameworks and policies, which are going to give regulators the mandate and the resources to move forward in this direction. We also are going to need effective collaboration among international organisations, regulators and industry to streamline all these different international licensing and regulatory frameworks. We also need to continue to maintain safety and to improve the cost competitiveness of existing technologies