A New ‘Global Bank’ Wants To Compete With Russia On Nuclear Energy

Nuclear plants are cheap to operate, last decades longer than other power sources, and generate unrivaled volumes of zero-carbon electricity rain or shine on relatively tiny slivers of land. Yet despite growing demand, few investors are willing to take a risk on new atomic energy stations as they’re expensive and difficult to build. The United States hasn’t built more than two from scratch in decades, and similar projects in Europe have gone billions of dollars over budget and taken years to complete.

Of the nearly five dozen reactors under construction worldwide, the majority are funded by the Chinese or Russian governments, with the Kremlin financing virtually every debut project underway in countries like Bangladesh, Egypt and Turkey. Unlike buying Russian gas or Chinese-made solar panels, a nuclear power station is not a one-off purchase. Given the maintenance and fuel these plants require, the relationships forged between the buyer and the authoritarian exporter are expected to last as long as a century between construction, a typical lifetime of operation and final decommissioning.

A new campaign launched this week aims to rally support behind a potential alternative, HuffPost has learned: a global bank backed by the world’s biggest nuclear-powered democracies and dedicated to building nuclear power plants around the world.

The idea for the International Bank for Nuclear Infrastructure has been circulating for a few years. But a global team of 15 lawyers, financiers and regulatory experts officially incorporated a new Washington, D.C.-headquartered nonprofit in hopes of persuading Congress to put up to $7 billion toward getting the new lender off the ground. It’s the first of what the organization envisions as a globe-spanning network of nonprofits promoting IBNI.

With a goal of raising an initial $25 billion to start the bank, IBNI would ― at least for now ― cut out Russia and China in favor of establishing a new multilateral institution akin to the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund with atomic allies such as Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates. IBNI could then provide financing for projects in would-be newcomer nations like Ghana, Indonesia or the Philippines, reducing the risk for other lenders and lowering the cost of choosing American, European or South Korean technology over cheaper Russian exports.

“It will be a playing field leveler in the international competition for nuclear technology,” said Daniel Dean, the Vienna-based American investment banker who serves as the new nonprofit’s chief executive. “This bank will enable these countries and stakeholders to select technology independent of which country is providing a full financing package.”

Dean stressed that IBNI is “geopolitically neutral,” and said that while present global tensions make forming a new group with Russia and China untenable, the organization would not be fundamentally designed to exclude anyone.

While cost estimates vary, the price of Russian reactors is typically less than half of what nuclear plants built by Americans or Europeans cost, and about 40% cheaper than those constructed by South Korea, currently the leading atomic exporter in the democratic world.

China, which is building more reactors at home than any other country, is developing novel reactor designs and is widely expected to begin exporting its technology in the next decade. In the meantime, Russia is the main game in town. The state-owned Rosatom offers a one-stop-shop for technology, construction, maintenance, fuel and financing, making Moscow the vendor of choice for most countries building their first nuclear power stations.

The U.S., by contrast, struggled until earlier this year to complete the only two new American reactors started this century, and ― with a notable exception ― depends on a privatized network of companies to build, run, fuel and finance its own atomic fleet.

In practice, that model has yielded limited progress in recent years. Centrus Energy, the U.S. uranium enricher spun out from federal government ownership in the late 1990s, last year started fabricating a special type of nuclear fuel over which Russia has a monopoly, but still can’t produce enough to keep the American fleet going and needed a special exemption to continue importing Russian fuel. Terra Power, the Bill Gates-backed developer of next-generation reactors, broke ground just last month on what could be the first of a new kind of technology anywhere in the democratic world, the likes of which China not only completed but hooked up to its…