Help poor countries go nuclear, Sarkozy urges

Poor countries should be helped to build their own nuclear power stations to help fight climate change, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said today.

His vision won over international energy officials from India to Brussels and French executives eager to market their expertise abroad, all present at a Paris conference.

But some experts said Mr Sarkozy’s push was opening the door to risks of deadly technology getting into the wrong hands, and warned consumers to pay attention to the staggering price tag of potential nuclear energy growth – up to €2.9 trillion worldwide by 2050.

“We need nuclear energy” to meet international goals set for slowing global warming, Mr Sarkozy said. Nuclear reactors do not produce the carbon emissions that scientists blame in part for climate change.

His recommendations come at a time when the Obama administration has called nuclear power a key part of comprehensive energy legislation in the United States, where reactor building has been halted since the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979.

Mr Sarkozy wants France, which is reliant on atomic reactors for a large majority of its electricity, to lead the way.

France has long marketed itself as a nuclear pioneer globally. But it hit a recent setback – the loss of a lucrative deal to build reactors in the United Arab Emirates to a South Korean consortium – that has raised questions about the French industry’s prospects in a nuclear renaissance.

The international Nuclear Energy Agency estimates that global electricity demand will increase 2.5 times by 2050. It forecasts that between 2030 and 2050, the world will need between 23 and 54 new reactors per year both to replace plants to be decommissioned and to increase nuclear power production.

Overall, the NEA forecasts the number of reactors worldwide to grow to between 600 and 1,400 by 2050, from 430 today, NEA chief Luis Echavarri said.

Mycle Schneider, an independent researcher on France’s nuclear industry, warned that costs of nuclear plants have been “systematically underestimated” by governments worldwide for decades.

He warned that the nuclear push was premature, since many small countries where France is marketing technology do not even have large enough electricity grids to support a nuclear reactor.

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano, also at the conference, said, “Nuclear reactors should not only be reserved for developed countries but should be accessible to all.”

Mr Sarkozy dismissed the “egotistic” rich-country perception that poor countries do not have the right to nuclear technology because they cannot be trusted to keep it safe.

“That is closing the door to progress and a better life to those who have nothing,” he said. He said nuclear energy should be “the cement of a new international solidarity.”

Mr Sarkozy said international financial institutions should play a key role in financing nuclear projects.

“I do not understand and I do not accept the ostracism of nuclear energy by international financing,” he said, urging the World Bank and other global lenders to help fund nuclear investments in developing countries.

Bulgaria’s energy minister, Traitcho Traikov, welcomed the idea.

“Multilaterals’ involvement in financing nuclear would have a wider effect, influencing the perception of such projects by other lenders – commercial banks that are abstaining precisely for reasons of perception,” he said.

World worries about Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear programmes hung over the conference.

Mr Sarkozy said the international community should be “steadfast in its opposition to those countries that violate the standards for collective security”.

The West. including France, suspects Iran’s uranium enrichment activities are aimed at building weapons, while Tehran says they are only for peaceful nuclear energy. Iran has defied UN calls to halt enrichment and faced three rounds of international sanctions.