Recommendations
The transition to mainstream finance requires coordinated action. Here are the key action items for each stakeholder group.
Government and policymakers
Investors and financial institutions
Multilateral development banks and development finance institutions
Energy users, supply chain, site owners, and grid companies
Nuclear OEMs, developers and owners
Government and policymakers
Provide clarity to the market on the role of nuclear energy in the economy
- Develop a detailed national position that establishes the governmental strategy and commitment to develop, implement and maintain a nuclear power market that offers long-term visibility, is investable and financially sustainable, and is treated no less favourably than other industries in the face of political change. Establishing a national position is itself a commitment of public funding.
- Recognize nuclear energy within national energy, industrial, economic development, and investment strategies in a manner consistent with its potential contribution to the economy. Ensure that public planning and analytical tools appropriately capture system-level benefits when evaluating energy investment options, recognizing nuclear’s reliability, flexibility, security of supply, and decarbonization value as well as its broader economic impact on investment, job creation and skills development.
Build a competitive hosting environment for nuclear investment
- Level the financial playing field for nuclear technologies ensuring that policies, rules and regulations are technology neutral, including green taxonomies, electricity market rules, government incentives and taxation, as well as infrastructure hosting conditions such as planning, siting, zoning, permitting, and grid access rules.
- Ensure that nuclear energy is recognized and remunerated in electricity markets for all the services it can provide and its lifecycle value. Market design should consider a broad set of evaluation metrics, including system costs, reliability, flexibility, security of supply, decarbonization, and other policy objectives.
- Establish a robust nuclear liability framework aligned with international conventions and protocols that includes adequate coverage limits, a clear insurer-of-last-resort mechanism, exclusive operator liability for third party claims, and well-defined responsibilities for decommissioning, waste management, project wind-up, and ownership transfer, including end-of-life liability arrangements.
Reduce administrative burden and regulatory delays
- Establish an independent regulatory authority with a clear enabling mandate and sufficient resources. This regulator should implement streamlined licensing and permitting pathways through parallel track-licensing processes and mutual recognition of safety cases between jurisdictions.
- Provide risk-sharing and risk-reducing support to catalyse private investment.
- Develop public-private risk sharing, funding, and liquidity mechanisms, such as revenue support mechanisms, loan guarantees, or blended finance, to promote effective project and programme de-risking and fill financing gaps.
- Enable long-term market signals to encourage private sector participation such as promoting stable supply chains and fleet approaches.
Investors and financial institutions
Build internal capability to originate, price, and deliver nuclear financing.
- Strengthen origination, data, risk management, and documentation systems to price and deliver nuclear transactions on a risk-adjusted basis.
- Develop new financial products that meet the market's growing demand for liquidity and risk-transfer mechanisms.
- Strengthen relationships with nuclear-specific legal, technical and commercial advisors, and engage regularly with the nuclear industry to better identify and assess investment opportunities.
Remove barriers and update investment policies.
- Review and update existing investment internal investment policies, lending mandates, and ESG frameworks to align with evolving policy, taxonomy, and regulatory developments.
- Remove explicit anti-nuclear provisions as well as those that impede long-term investment in, or lending to, nuclear projects (e.g. cost-of-capital penalties for long-maturity infrastructure debt). Where taxonomies or principles, such as the Equator Principles, contain criteria that effectively restrict or penalize nuclear financing, work with relevant stakeholders to seek alignment with nuclear's low-carbon, long-lived infrastructure characteristics.
Standardize financial products and transaction templates for nuclear investment.
- Leverage aggregated lessons learned from transactions and due diligence processes to inform the development of common approaches and standardized templates to nuclear project evaluation, financing structures, and market-standard contractual terms.
- Engage with relevant bodies to develop nuclear-specific underwriting guidance with broad institutional adoption.
Multilateral development banks and development finance institutions
Serve as ready partners and impartial brokers to help build sector know-how and improve financial decision-making among stakeholders.
- Act as a policy dialogue partner, provide impartial guidance, and support client states and project developers and owners’ financial decision-making.
- Develop a credible and resourced intervention strategy, standard terms of engagement, and a list of requirements and central documents.
- Provide guarantees, market and regulatory assistance, and objective, evidence-based assessments of nuclear feasibility and deployment.
Deploy catalytic finance.
- Identify and mobilize donor and grant capital available for nuclear feasibility studies, early-stage development support and improved investment decision-making.
- Deploy balance sheet capital to provide liquidity and maturity transformation to competitive programmes and projects, non-concessional balance sheet lending, guarantees and co-financing alongside commercial lenders in higher income economies with strong sovereign or utility credit, and concessional and blended instruments in markets where risk cannot yet be priced by the private sector alone.
Coordinate to avoid duplication.
- Clarify intervention policies, instruments and requirements across the multilateral and international financial system, including through shared secondments, joint due diligence and aligned client guidelines to avoid duplication, maximize market additionality and improve delivery efficiency.
Nuclear OEMs, developers and owners
Pursue a fleet approach by adopting replicable project designs and delivery models.
- Move decisively from one-off project development to fleet programmes and, if appropriate, establish programmatic project development frameworks to enable fleet replication.
- Work with supply chain partners to develop fleet procurement and contracting models to demonstrate pathways to NOAK economics on subsequent units.
Promote alignment of regulatory requirements to achieve standardized designs.
- Work within the nuclear industry to achieve industry-wide alignment on standardized solutions that will shorten project lead times to present to regulators.
Achieve financial readiness by embedding financing into project design and de-risking early.
- Share information early and close information asymmetries among stakeholders to define the opportunity, secure buy-in, and accelerate the pathway to FID.
- Identify financing needs, partners, and data requirements from the outset, developing the financial and technical aspects of the project in parallel and implement the governance, reporting and disclosure practices that investors require.
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