LONDON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 08th September, 2018) Agneta Rising, the director general of the World Nuclear Association (WNA), called on the global community on Friday to boost efforts to decarbonize economies and increase the use of nuclear power in order to achieve a clean energy future.
On Friday, Rising addressed the participants of the annual WNA Symposium, which is being held in London on September 5-7.
In 2016, the WNA adopted its Harmony program, which aspires to ensure that the nuclear industry supplies 25 percent of global electricity by 2050, which would require 1,000 GWe of new nuclear capacity to be created.
The goal was adopted to support the efforts of the international community in mitigating the consequences of climate change by reducing emissions in order to keep the temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, as set by the Paris climate agreement.
Speaking about the future of nuclear energy at a panel discussion as part of the WNA Symposium, Rising called for abandoning the use of fossil fuels as the world's main source of energy.
"This is one very big part of the global challenge of decarbonizing our lives and our economy. We have to replace fossil fuels as the driving force of our world. We must stop burning them for electricity, for heat and for transport. We need deep decarbonization and we need clean energy forms to become the normal deployment for electricity generation," Rising stressed.
She added that a clean energy future was unthinkable without nuclear power.
"The Harmony program sets the goal for nuclear power to provide twenty five percent of global electricity by 2050 ... As an industry our role is to meet this challenge. As an association we are gaining consensus around our essential role and the changes we need to fulfill it," Rising indicated.
Rising claimed that in the past, nuclear energy had been overlooked by global institutions tasked with finding a solution to problems presented by both carbon emissions and access to clean energy.
However, such a belief was abandoned after the realization of the role nuclear power could play in future sustainability, according to the WNA director general.
Previously nuclear free-nations such as Turkey and Bangladesh are currently developing their own nuclear power capacities, with total global nuclear energy output said to be approaching 400 GWe.
"We have been building at the fasted rate of construction in twenty five years - building for the first time in Belarus, Turkey, Bangladesh as well as the United Arab Emirates [and] launching into the sea the first floating reactor which will soon supply the remote Arctic community with clean, reliable power," Rising indicated.
According to Rising, additional construction of nuclear power plants is moving forward at an exponential rate.
"But we are not done yet. The number of new units already online scheduled for the 2018 and 2019 period is not 10, is not 20, but 25 reactors online. This puts us on track to achieve the Harmony goal," she said.
The director general went on to present an optimistic view of the role of nuclear power worldwide, claiming that nuclear reactors would ultimately play a decisive role in combating climate change and shifting the global energy sector onto a sustainable footing.
According to the WNA, there are currently over 450 operating nuclear reactors worldwide, with nearly 60 other reactors currently being constructed. At the same time, however, the anti-nuclear movement started gaining momentum across the world following the Fukushima accident in Japan in March 2011, with the use of nuclear power being one of the most disputed issues, central to many political debates.
