This year’s COP28 climate conference featured a historic agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels. One less-ballyhooed undercurrent was renewed enthusiasm for nuclear energy as a means toward getting there.
International climate negotiators explicitly mentioned the technology as a route to decarbonization in their first-ever “stocktake” of global emissions. Looking back across the final texts agreed on at the annual U.N. climate conference since the 2015 Paris Agreement, this is the first time the word “nuclear” has ever been used.
Twenty-five countries made the point even more emphatically at the start of the conference in Dubai, where — led by the U.S. — they pledged to triple nuclear electricity capacity by 2050.
“We’ve never had anything like this on nuclear at a COP before,” said Ted Nordhaus, executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, which promotes technological solutions to environmental challenges. “It reflects how much attitudes have changed over the last decade.”
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