BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 13. Nuclear power is making a strong comeback around the world in three ways - building traditional large-scale nuclear power plants from scratch, lifetime extension to existing nuclear power plants and growing interest on an emerging technology, namely small model reactors, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) Fatih Birol said during the discussions on nuclear energy hosted by the IEA, Trend reports.
“It is around the world, in all the continents. Some countries opt not to use it, which is, of course, their decision. At the IEA, we also name the challenges in front of this. As far as the nuclear is concerned, there are many challenges, but two of them are crucial. The first one is that the nuclear industry hasn’t performed very well. There were many cost overruns and lots of delays in terms of the delivery of the nuclear industry. There may be different reasons for it in different countries, but this is the picture. The second one is the financing of nuclear power plants, because nuclear power plants typically need a substantial amount of the first capital, very capital-intensive technologies,” he said.
Birol announced that the IEA is coming up in mid-January with a report on financing nuclear power.
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