 So, good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this session at the Atoms for Climate Filion on taking stock of the role of nuclear energy in climate action. This event is framed by the first global stock take under the Paris Agreement, which as you all know is a key process for assessing progress towards the goals of the agreement and for accelerating climate action. So just to quote the UNFCCC, although I'm sure you're all aware of the stock take, the aims of the stock take are to enable countries and other stakeholders to see where they're collectively making progress towards meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement and where they're not. It's like taking an inventory. It means looking at everything related to where the world stands on climate action and support, identifying the gaps and working together to agree on solution pathways to 2030 and beyond. So the stock take has also provided an opportunity to inform the UNFCCC process and the climate community about nuclear energy's contribution to climate change, as well as some of the challenges, opportunities and areas for action, but it equally provides us an opportunity for a sort of a self-assessment and reflection on some of those issues, where are the successes, where are the gaps, where are their opportunities. And those two aims, informing the wider community and self-reflection are what I think today's event, sorry, in which our outstanding panel will discuss nuclear energy's role in mitigation and adaptation, as well as the contribution to broader aspects of sustainable development from a range of perspectives and experiences. So please allow me to just briefly introduce our panelists. First we have Daniel Vestlin, the State Secretary to the Minister of Climate and Environment in Sweden. Then we have Lindsay Walter, the Director of International Policy in the Climate and Energy Program at Third Way. Then Mr. Enobot Agboror from the African Nuclear Commission. And then at the far end of the panel, Kirstie Goken from Terra Praxis. We're also expecting another speaker, but we'll see. Before I hand over to our panelists, I want to also just briefly mention one way, one direct way in which the IAEA has been trying to contribute to the stock take and ensure nuclear is reflected adequately in that. So earlier this year, in March, we were invited by the chairs of the UNFCCC's subsidiary bodies to provide input and we responded to a set of around 20 guiding questions to highlight nuclear energy's contribution to mitigation and adaptation, but considering policy, finance, technology and innovation along with economic aspects and other cross-cutting issues. And our input is actually synthesised in a publication, which we have some copies that everyone should feel welcome to take. And the key messages that we try to convey to the UNFCCC and the broader community through this is that firstly, and I mean all my panels, I think our panelists will talk more about this, is that firstly nuclear energy is already contributing significantly to climate change mitigation and adaptation and supporting broader aspects of sustainable development. As you know, nuclear energy is the second largest source of low carbon electricity and the nuclear sector is also well-prepared to adapt to a changing climate and we heard that at several events yesterday. And this is also being recognised by many of our member states. So many countries are already including nuclear energy in their national climate change strategies, in their NDCs and in their longer-term strategies as well. The second message that we tried to take to the UNFCCC and the stock take was that further action is needed to fully capitalise on nuclear's potential to support mitigation and resilience, including more coherent policy, regulatory and infrastructure and other measures to mobilise and direct finance. In conjunction with continuing efforts to integrate advances in climate science and forecasting in power plant design, siting and operations. And the third message was more about making the broader community aware of how the agency itself is supporting this and we're working with many partners to assist our member states as they respond to climate change with nuclear energy and by supporting existing and new nuclear programmes around the world, catalyzing innovation and building capacity in sustainable energy planning for all of our member states. And we're also working with many countries to increase the robustness and climate resilience of their nuclear power plants. So from these broad messages, I'm now very much looking forward to hearing the perspectives and experiences of our panellists as they deep dive on some of their own experiences on progress, challenges and opportunities and what's needed to fully capitalise on nuclear energy's potential. So I think the way we'll organise this session is that each speaker will make an opening statement and then we'll turn to some moderated Q&A. So first I would like to invite Stake Secretary Westlin to take the floor. I think you're mic'd up so you, yeah. Fine. I can feel it even. Okay, so let me just give you a little bit of introduction to what we've done in Sweden over and a little bit of our plans for the future. Sweden is in the stage of entering deep decarbonisation, which becomes quite obvious when we start looking at what we have to do. Reducing the emissions, that's one thing. You can work with energy efficiency or you can put up some windmills to dilute your fossil electricity. Now eliminating emissions, that's another story. Then you need a plan for each and every sector, for each and every activity for how to get rid of fossil fuels in that sector or activity. That's something completely different. Reductions can be made rather easily for the first 10 or 20%, maybe even possible to reduce by 50 or 80%, but going all the way to zero is very difficult. That needs a plan and that plan has to be made quite some time ahead. This was not on our mind when we expanded nuclear power between 1972 and 1985. We built 12 reactors, so we commissioned 12 reactors in those 13 years. We had, at the peak of our construction pace, we had one reactor per one million people under construction and that was in a country that was much poorer than most of the countries in the world today. The immediate effect of the commissioning of these 12 reactors was that we reduced power sector emissions quite significantly. It led to the national emissions reducing 30%. From the peak that we had in 1971 somewhere, we dropped by 30% overnight, basically not overnight, but over 12 years when we started the reactors. That was obviously because we stopped burning oil for electricity production and made decarbonized electricity. Then these emissions have continued downwards and that has been made possible by electrifying homes, heating, industry, step by step. For example, we replaced all the oil heating for heat pumps some 20 years ago in a 10-year period which had a significant effect on Swedish emissions. Remember though that climate was a side effect of the nuclear program. It was never the plan to reduce emissions. That was not the top of the agenda of the agenda in 1965 when the first investment decision was made. Rather, we were looking at energy independence and economic growth. That was the drivers behind this nuclear program. By accident, we happened to reduce our emissions by 30%, which by many standards is rather impressive even for programs aiming at reducing emissions. Now, to go forward, we see that electrification has to continue. We've done the easy part. We've done electricity. We've done heating, which was, well, it was, we had to spend a lot of effort on doing that, but still that was the easy part. Now the tough part is electrifying the rest of the industry and electrifying transport. Through direct electrification, through power lines and batteries, or through indirect electrification, through hydrogen, ammonia, and electrofuels. Our power sector is already clean, so adding more clean electricity to the Swedish system doesn't really have a direct climate impact, but it allows electrification of industry and transport. Now, we, the government has set up a plan to double the energy, the electricity system to around 300 terawatt hours from today 150, 160. This will mean that the hydropower, which is around 50% of production today, will diminish to become one fourth. To get a system with that little fraction of hydropower stable and reliable and resilient, we need to add more dispatchable capacity. We will need more wind, but we will also need something dispatchable. I claim that there are three sources of energy that we can expand at a large scale, which are also fossil free, and that would be solar, it would be wind, and it would be nuclear. And only one of them is dispatchable. Actually nuclear is the only dispatchable source of energy that we can expand everywhere on a large scale. Some countries can build some hydro, some people can burn more biomass, but globally and also in Sweden, nuclear is the option for large scale expansion of dispatchable capacity. We have around 20 years to do this in order to reach our climate goals of being at the net zero level in 2045 and negative beyond that. So we've said that our vision is that we build at least two big units before 2035, or more smaller ones, and corresponding to 10 reactors in the mid-40s. To achieve this, we have to change the discussion on energy. For 40 years since we've been discussing whether you like blue plants or pink plants. It's not going to be about that anymore. Now it's going to be how the system can be expanded to twice its size and still physically works. People will have to learn Kirchhoff's name, because we're going to have to obey Kirchhoff's laws this time. Cheap abundant electricity was taken for granted in Swedish policy debate for many decades until we suddenly realized electricity wasn't cheap anymore, and it might not even be there when we need it. And that's when the discussion changed and we started talking physics. We're leveling the playing field over these 40 years. People have intentionally put up barriers in legislation towards one of the power sources. This is changing now. We're allowing more sites for nuclear. We are allowing applications for anywhere in the country, whereas today, until January the 1st, when the law has changed, only three sites are allowed, also only 10 reactors are allowed. This has also changed. We can build more reactors in any site. We're looking at the back-end system, which is designed for the current fleet of reactors. Now we have to look at new reactors, more reactors, longer times to see how it's going to be changing. We're making the licensing process more efficient. We're preparing new municipalities and counties for hosting nuclear power. And we're looking at how to share risks between the government, the people, and the people building the plants. The other thing Sweden is doing is together with 14 other countries trying to shift the European Union position on nuclear power. We need a level playing field also in Europe. This means that we have to change the definition as such of energy. In Europe, there are only two kinds of energy. It's either fossil or it's renewable. Those are the only kinds of energy that exists by definition. One is that the word renewable is used both when we talk about solar, wind, tidal, bio, hydro. And it's used when you mean not fossil. So by confusing the meaning of the word, legislation excludes nuclear. It might seem deliberate. Anyway, nuclear power can be built fast. That has been shown in a number of countries. We can do it again. It can be a powerful tool for climate action and it has been, though it might not have been deliberate. And I think we are fit to do this again if we get together and start working. Thank you. Thank you for those remarks. Now I'd like to give the floor to Ms. Volta, please. Great. Thanks, Hal. So I work for a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., called Third Way that has been a long-time champion for nuclear energy. Actually around a decade ago, we were noticing this emerging market in the United States around advanced nuclear companies. And we put together the very first map showing who these companies were, where they were in North America, and showing that there was this emerging industry in advanced nuclear and handed that to then Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz at the time and said, look, this is an emerging field. These are potential technologies that can help us not only with climate but with our energy security goals. And there's a real role for the government to support the innovation and demonstration of these new nuclear projects. So our team has been doing work on nuclear energy policy in Washington, D.C., for quite some time. And we work with a whole host of different clean energy technologies. Nuclear is only one of them. Only from this climate angle where can nuclear play a role in reducing emissions? Around two years ago, we expanded our operations into Europe, doing some work with our Carbon for Europe initiative at the EU level and with member states in the U.K. And a lot of the work that we do is help provide research and analysis for countries to show what technologies are needed to meet their climate goals, how much and what time frames. And I oversee a team that does energy systems analysis for both the U.S. and the EU really outlining where nuclear energy can play a role and spreading out a host of different scenarios showing what it will actually take to get to net zero. So it's exciting to have an opportunity to speak in this IAEA Pavilion panel today in order to share a little bit more about where nuclear energy can play a role in meeting our climate goals, what the body of scientific evidence is really saying around that. And also to enter this discussion of how it's treated in these global documents and reports that play a very important role in setting expectations and standards for where nuclear is needed. And both the IPCC reports and the global stock take and getting an opportunity to dive a little bit deeper into those. So I'll hand it back to you, Hal. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Eno, would you like to share a few remarks from your perspective? Thank you. I'm representing the African Commission on Nuclear Energy, AFCORN. Our organization is the intergovernmental African organization that is mandated to promote the peaceful applications of nuclear energy in Africa. And nuclear power is one of those applications. I will start with a historical sort of perspective. When nuclear power was first entering the public domain, say the civilian domain in the 1950s. The main concern was proliferation. In the early days there was a lot of excitement about nuclear when you looked at the potential of the technology, the physics of how it operated, the energy density of nuclear fuel. But politics usually wins in battles like this. The fear of proliferation took over. And I would say that there was a concerted effort around the world to frame nuclear power as a dangerous, exotic technology that was not right for everybody, only a few responsible countries could operate nuclear power. And this narrative lasted for more than half a century. We were taught about this in school. So the greatest challenge that I think nuclear power is facing even today is the raising public awareness about the truth of nuclear power. It has taken the climate change emergency to wake people up, to force people to recognize that net zero is not going to happen without nuclear power. I was interested in what the colleague from Sweden said about Sweden achieving net zero in the short term. That's probably at the national level. At the global level, net zero is not going to happen one without nuclear power and two without the active involvement of Africa. Today 80% of the world's population with zero access to electricity lives in Africa. We're talking about almost 700 million people having no electricity, which means we will continue to burn biofuels and fossil fuels and all kinds of things. So Africa's problem is everyone's problem if we want to save the climate, because the climate does not respect national boundaries. It's everywhere. And I think that nuclear power has a bright future and the European Union recently admitted that when they included nuclear power in the sustainable energy taxonomy. I would say that nuclear power does not only contribute to sustainable development, which means that we develop in a way that does not put future generations at risk because of our activities. But I think that nuclear power is also more sustainable than the other candidates. And I use sustainable in the sense of the lifespan of a nuclear power plant. A nuclear power plant, on average, with today's technology would last anything from 60 to 80 years. If you go for gas or solar or wind, you have to bend them and replace them every 15 or 20 years. What are you going to do with all those panels or wind turbines? If we talk about hydro, there's an issue with water resources. It's been predicted that in the next 20, 30 years, maybe water will become an issue almost as urgent as climate change is today. So nuclear power is important, not only in terms of the fact that it has a low carbon footprint. Also in terms of the fact that we will, the technology to desalinate sea water, which is where our drinking water is going to come in the future, is very energy intensive. And we will need nuclear power to desalinate the water for our populations in the future. I think I can stop now. I can continue for one hour because it's my pet topic, but we will speak some more during the Q&A. Thank you for those excellent opening remarks. You've touched on many topics that we're definitely going to be coming back to in the discussion. But before we do, I'd like to hear also from Kirstie. Thank you very much. And OK, I'm going to start with the bad news. So emissions are rising, coal is booming. We're not making progress on our climate and energy goals. And part of the reason for that is because of what my dear colleague here had to say, which is that energy demand is rising and is not yet being met. Almost 700 million people lack access to electricity at all in the world, which is shocking. And that's actually projected in mainstream modeling to increase, go above a billion people as the population increases, which is just unacceptable. And half of the people in the world today lack access to enough electricity. There's many countries which still don't have full modern energy services available to everybody, reliable, affordable, and certainly not clean. And that's the reason that coal is booming and coal is expanding because there is no other way today of meeting that energy demand at the scale that's required, at the costs that are required. And within the space limits that we have in many population dense countries that can't build tens of thousands of acres of wind and solar to meet those energy needs. So the fundamental lesson here for us globally is that climate strategies that do not have climate justice at their heart will fail and are failing. So the question is, where will the energy come from? And so as a sort of an environmentalist and humanitarian, the way that I came to nuclear energy was really understanding the sort of the opportunity to create civilization scale energy with a tiny environmental footprint. And the environmental benefits, the biodiversity benefits, the habitat benefits, the overall lifecycle analysis benefits that you also referred to that are now being validated by entities, finally, by entities like the United Nations, UNECE, by the IPCC, and by other very credible, authoritative organizations that absolutely do inform policymakers and investors. And for that reason, are very influential, are becoming more science-based and more evidence-based. But there's another important shift that I see happening. And I've been coming to COP, unfortunately, since 2015, when I hosted a press conference at COP21 in Paris for four very famous climate scientists, none of whom had been to COP before, incredibly. James Hansen, for example, was amongst them. And they came to COP because nuclear energy had been excluded from the climate talks up until that point. And they came to give a call to action to say, we cannot address climate change and our global energy challenges without nuclear. We cannot get to zero with renewables alone. And the press conference was so shocking at the time, the media coverage reached 800 million people from that one-hour-long press conference. And that, together with the work that Nuclear for Climate did and the IAEA did, and there was many organizations at that time that were beginning to make the case for nuclear energy. And here we are at COP28, and we're finding that nuclear energy has a much larger footprint. 22 countries have signed a pledge to triple the role of nuclear energy, which is an increased ambition at last. Good, excellent, well done, everybody. But we're also seeing another important shift, which is the role of large industrial energy users at this point in this decade, trying to figure out how they're going to meet their decarbonization goals. And I'm talking about global technology companies like Microsoft and Google. I'm talking about the oil and gas companies and chemicals and steel. And they're looking at their commitments that they have to meet in 2030, which is just seven years from now, and beginning to have a sort of business, investment, cycle, decision-making process, evaluating their options to decarbonize their business critical energy services. And what those real energy users are finding is that they need nuclear energy. And they need nuclear energy because they need energy services, heat and power and steam and hydrogen, emissions-free that can be delivered at with the same cost and performance that fossil fuels are currently supplying those business critical energy services, matching the site footprint of those activities. And there's only one way to do that, and that's with nuclear energy. Now, this is really important because this suggests that finally, we're moving from a hypothetical, abstract, scenario-based discussion led by entities that have no role in implementation. And okay, so here we have Daniel's a policymaker and you do have a role in setting policy. Very important, of course, thank you. But actually having skin in the game actually sort of needing to ensure that those business critical energy services are available to run your data centers and power your refineries and power your aluminum smelters and so on. And that's when we're seeing very important shifts happening and that is going to drive a new conversation around nuclear energy, including the much needed reforms in the way that we deliver nuclear energy. That means licensing, citing, financing, and standing up manufacturing supply chains to actually deliver those plants cost-effectively and at scale. And critically, that I think represents a really important opportunity for us also to really think hard about how we're going to deliver it into markets that don't currently have mature regulatory capability, such as African countries that have said that they're very interested in having those technologies. The question is, how do we deliver? And I'm personally really excited to sort of see that shift happening and that new conversation happening. And I want to congratulate the IAEA for having a leadership role in bringing us to this point. First of all, for those, again, excellent opening remarks from all of our panelists. I actually want to pose a question to you first, Secretary Westley. Picking up on something that Kirstie mentioned. We know that, I mean, for what you've told us, Sweden is already starting its race to net zero in a good place. You've mostly decarbonized electricity to a large extent with hydro and nuclear. But to reach net zero, we also, as Kirstie mentioned, need to decarbonize other sectors, so industry, transportation. And I know, I mean, Sweden has a lot of heavy industry. So how do you see nuclear power potentially playing a role in helping your country deal with some of these harder to obey activities? And also, what are you hearing from your industry about its potential contribution? Well, basically, this is a climate action. It's a two step decarbonization. It's a two step solution, right? First step is to decarbonize electricity. Second step, electrify everything. Now, you can't really reach all the way by doing that, but it's pretty good proxy for what has to be done. Cement will be tough, so we need to do CCS on the actual fossil emissions from cement that we cannot avoid. That's progressing. The problem they have is supply of electricity. Steel, you need hydrogen, so that's some kind of indirect electrification where you produce hydrogen from electricity. Progressing well, they have delivered fossil free steel in Sweden. We used it to build a house in the south and we have trucks and mines produced from fossil free steel. Needs to be ramped up. What's the problem? More electricity. So the first step was easy to clean up electricity. The second one should also be easy, but you need to plan for the expansion of the electricity system. The debate we had was about adding power production. We did that. We added 14,000 megawatts of wind power, but we cannot really increase consumption anyway because the grid operator cannot give access to the grid only because there is electricity. There also has to be robustness, resilience, reactive power. We need to be able to start the grid after a blackout. All of these things has to be in place and it's not so simple, it shows. There are no examples actually in the world of systems built only on weather dependent production. You need something dispatchable and that the only dispatchable option we have, which is fossil free and we can expand is nuclear power. So I think I answered the question, right? Yeah, thank you. Next question I wanna address to Lindsay. I mean, one thing that is not, I mean, we've all seen that the stock take itself relies heavily on the most recent assessment report from the IPCC and it includes some perspectives about the role of nuclear in the future in various scenarios. So can you tell us a bit more about this, how nuclear is treated by the IPCC? And maybe then is this consistent with how it's being treated in the stock take? Yeah, I'm happy to. And I think this gets to something that Eno said in his opening remarks around the politics of nuclear energy and how that results in its framing in some of these big international documents. So if you look at the IPCC's sixth assessment report and in particular the working group three report on mitigation and you do a deep dive into it, which I know everyone in this room has definitely done, you can see what it is across all of the scenarios looked at in the IPCC, what the deployment of nuclear might need to look like. And it says on average, you need around a 90% increase of nuclear energy by 2050. It has a pretty large inter-cortile ranges from 15 to 295%, but the consensus is very clear. If you dive deep into these reports, you have to go to table TS.2, you can quote me on that and dive into the details and it sure enough shows the need for nuclear energy as part of the solution. Yet most of what policymakers look at is the summary for policymakers or the synthesis reports because no one actually wants to read these giant working group reports because they really are quite long. And if you look at what makes it from the working group report into the summary for policymakers, it is essentially an erasure of the role of nuclear energy and what ends up in these final summary for policymakers. So if you actually look at what's in the IPCC report, there is very little if any mention of nuclear energy. It's mentioned one time in a table that shows different tech options and how much emissions they can reduce by price. And it's mentioned in a paragraph acknowledging the high upfront cost of nuclear energy. There is nothing in the summary for policymakers for the IPCC report that shows what the energy mix actually needs to look like across scenarios by 2050. It doesn't show what energy demand will look like by 2050. And as someone who works with energy modelers all the time, that's one of the first results that you show. Every single time everyone wants to know what is the table for primary energy? Like if you're gonna release an energy study, that's the one thing that you show. And that doesn't exist at all in these reports. So if you look at how the treatment of other technologies is handled, for example, carbon capture and storage and other politically loaded clean energy technology, that actually is pretty well represented in the summary for policymakers in the IPCC report. So it's really this treatment and handling of nuclear energy that's incredibly problematic. And I pull some of this from work that Dr. Karl Hausger has been doing at the World Resources Institute. He recently released a deep dive as an expert reviewer for these reports. So I'm happy to kind of share some of his research. But this leads me to what this means for the global stock take because the IPCC is an input and a big part of what comes out in the global stock take. The global stock take has zero mention, not one mention of nuclear energy in the report. Like literally go through it. I mean, I know you all want to read a giant report, but not a single mention of nuclear energy. It mentions carbon capture and storage once. It calls it a option with, I forget if it's like significant obstacles or something like that, an option with a lot of challenges, something like this. And it pulls directly from some language that was in the IPCC reports about what is necessary to meet this net zero target. And it substitutes out what previously had said an electricity system that emits zero carbon and the use of CCS, it replaces those bullet points with something that says renewable energy only, which I guess gets a bit to what you were saying, Daniel, about what is the definition of renewable? How is that treated differently? Traditionally, it's viewed as not nuclear. So this is pretty concerning if you're looking at, these are the documents that people point to. And the sad part is people will tell me, oh, well, Lindsay, nuclear energy is not included in these reports. And they are, you just have to read the wonky version and the full technical reports. And if you're sticking to the summaries, it's just not good enough. So as we look to be a global community and have some sort of consensus in getting nuclear out of this politically loaded world and into the spotlight, there's still a lot of work that needs to be done in the science communication of what it's gonna take to get to net zero and the role of nuclear within that. Thanks, Hal. Thank you, thanks. So I might come back with some more questions on that in a moment, but I also wanna ask, you know, to elaborate a bit on one of the points he made, so you talked about the world can't achieve net zero without Africa, but Africa has other important development priorities, as you said, ensuring access to clean energy, which then has a whole lot of other benefits for health, for development. So what I wanna, I'd be interested to hear you talk, elaborate a bit more on what role do you think nuclear energy can play specifically in the, let's say, I call it sustainable development, but the development, the industrialization in Africa, while at the same time promoting climate change and achieving other environmental goals. So really like focusing on that industrialization, development, and access issues. You cannot have industry without energy. Even the industrial revolution was driven by energy. Every major, let's say, quantum leap in development in human history has been driven by energy. Africa has the lowest level of industrialization in the world today, and 90% of Africa's industry is in one country in South Africa. So what we need in Africa is like a martial plan. How can nuclear energy resolve this problem? Recently, we faced geopolitical and other challenges that affected the supply chain of almost everything, including technology. We had the COVID pandemic, Africa suffered greatly because Africa produces mainly primary commodities, not end products, all are end products. So large percentage of African end products come from overseas. So then we had the Ukraine war, which also affected supply chains and Africa suffered. So when we're talking about bringing energy to industrialize African economies and to engender socioeconomic development, I believe that nuclear power is the best choice. In terms of guaranteeing our energy security, if you build a nuclear power plant today, you know that your grandchildren will have access to electricity. There's a high level of political risk in Africa. If you build a gas plant or solar plant or a wind plant, you have to change it in 15, 20 years. You don't know what kind of politics will be around. You have to rely on producing fuel, buying gas or making solar panels or wind turbines or all of these things constantly. If you have nuclear power, then you're more independent because, and it's cheaper in the long run for African countries. In South Africa, where my office is, South Africa has coal, gas, solar, nuclear. The cost of nuclear in South Africa, which has two nuclear power plants which have already paid back the capital investment. Kuberg is now almost 40 years old. The cost of electricity to the consumer of nuclear electricity from Kuberg is about 99 rounds per megawatt hour. That is five dollars. The cost of solar is 2,000 round per megawatt hour. You're talking about a hundred dollars. The cost of gas is about 440 rounds. Gas is five times. So in the long term, nuclear is cheaper. So, Afghan is advocating nuclear power as the central pillar in Africa's energy transition towards addressing the energy poverty in Africa and bringing industrial and socioeconomic development to the continent. If I did not complete the answer, let me know which part I should speak more about. No, I think you've completed the answer. Maybe I'll come back to you also, and maybe my next question for Kirstie would perhaps also pick up on some of these points that I might ask you the similar question also. So I'm gonna put you on the spot, Kirstie. What do you think of the two biggest obstacles facing nuclear energy or realizing the potential of nuclear energy for climate mitigation? There's many obstacles, but... Oh, that's a good one, you know. Pick two, pick your top two obstacles. We need to do a redress them. That's the second part of my question, yeah. Yeah, thanks. So I think there's an interaction between the product design and the licensing pathway, and you can't really separate the two. You need to design for a commercially viable licensing pathway, and then you need to have a sort of regulatory response that is appropriate to the product and the oversight that is required for that product. So maybe that's a little abstract, but essentially what we're interested in are heat boxes that can be manufactured, high-volume manufacturing of heat boxes, and one of the big challenges, so there's cost and licensing, let's say those are the two, just to give you a good, simple answer, cost and licensing. And those are two very much limiting factors for the sort of speed and scale that we need to achieve. And I wanna, if I may, I'm just gonna pick up a little bit on what I've heard from the panel here, and the importance of the influence that these IPCC reports and so on have, and really how they're just never interrogated for feasibility. And they either misrepresent, underrepresent, or exclude nuclear energy, and that is also true in mainstream energy systems modeling conducted by the International Energy Agency, DNV, BP, they're all at it, they all grossly underestimate or misrepresent or exclude nuclear energy from those, from that modeling, and they do that generally on the basis that nuclear will be too complicated and expensive to really play a meaningful role. Now, our position is that the cost and the complexity of delivering nuclear energy actually are, that's a choice that we're making, and we can choose to design products that do not represent a risk to the environment or to people, and therefore can be licensed in a way that is much more fast and efficient and streamlined and predictable, and that could be deployed to a whole range of potential applications, and that actually, if you start to look at that potential for those technologies to be deployed to those applications, then it completely changes our prospects for decarbonizing because right now those scenarios that you see in the IPCC report and IEA and so on, they're assuming absolutely gigantic expansion of and deployments of wind and solar, for example. Now, the energy system is really large, and I guarantee you that not one of those energy systems scenarios has any assessment of the space that would be required for that large scale deployment of wind and solar, and I'll give you one example, which is if you wanted to hear in the UAE where AdNock, the big oil company, has an ambition to increase its production to five million barrels of oil per day by 2030, which is a kind of contradiction with their decarbonization goals, but okay, five million barrels of oil, that's 5% of global oil consumption, which is 100 million barrels of oil per day that we currently use. If you wanted to replace that oil production with hydrogen-based synthetic fuels made from solar PV, you would need 2,000 gigawatts of PV across 20,000 square kilometers of land. Okay, now, the UAE is big and sunny, but that is a lot of land and a gigantic amount of PV that you would have to build, which would not have a very long life, you'd have to replace it after 20 years. If you wanted to produce the same amount of synthetic fuels with nuclear, you would need about 100 gigawatts, by contrast, and 40 square kilometers of land, okay? So that's a tiny footprint and a relatively small build that you would need. So I think what's happening is two things. We're moving from the hypothetical to the practical in the discussion because you have organizations like Big Oil and Gas, like Microsoft, yesterday Microsoft published a nuclear policy paper, which was actually a very significant signal around their intent to do what they did with renewables which was to invest across the supply chain, which was to sign very significant power purchase agreements, which was actually to drive investment into that sector and to drive investment not only in the commercial, accelerating the commercialization of these technologies, but also to accelerating through digital capabilities. We're working with them on generative AI for licensing, for example, through digital capabilities to accelerate licensing processes, citing processes, all of the pre-development feasibility processes, as well as enabling confidence for investors to support the accelerated commercialization of those technologies and the investment in standing up the manufacturing supply chains that will make those products. That's a $2 trillion company. Watch this space, there's more coming. There's more coming from very large industrial energy users that want to see these products be available, that want these energy services to be available. And frankly, the credibility of these hypothetical scenarios that couldn't withstand even a little bit of interrogation for feasibility are going to become increasingly irrelevant unless they really start responding to the larger discourse that's emerging. Thank you for elaborating on those other issues as well. Apologies again for putting you on the spot with those named two big obstacles. No, no, I spent all day long thinking about that service. But what was interesting was that is that you didn't mention public perception. And I think that sort of maybe is reflective of what we've been seeing over the recent trends around the world in perceptions and acceptance about nuclear energy. And I want to actually ask Secretary Westlin about this perception and the extent to which the public understands and values the contribution of nuclear energy for climate and other goals in Sweden. And I mean, I'm interested in your reflections on this and maybe how the debate may have shifted over the last few years and what that means for nuclear's contribution going forward. Well, obviously, to be able to to have an ambitious nuclear program in the country, you need strong support. Otherwise, it's not going to be stable over time and you need something stable over time to get the investments in place. What we see over many countries, especially in Europe is that there is very strong support for nuclear power. In Sweden, I can't remember it has ever been this high. Even in Germany, there is a very strong support for nuclear power, especially among young people. We've seen it in Sweden, we see it in Finland, we see it in many countries. I think the discussion on climate is part of the reason for why young people care so much about nuclear power. And I think also that many young people do not have the luggage of the former discussions on nuclear power. Guess the proliferation issue. When I grew up, I was worried, really worried about the world ending 30 minutes from any given second because of nuclear war. I don't think my kids really care about that at all. I never heard them discuss it anyway. They never come to me and said, I'm really worried about this. I talk to my parents a lot about this. It's still scary, but I'm not thinking about it as much anymore. I think that has changed. What else? Did I answer the question? But if you have any other reflections, but that's okay. Good start. That's right. Then I might then try to squeeze in three more questions before we have to close this panel. So Lindsay, you talked about the scenarios in the IPCC report and Kirsty also picked up on some of the perhaps reality checking that needs to go in into some of that analysis. But your team itself is, from what I understand, doing scenario analysis, energy systems analysis focusing on US and EU. So, and I can imagine you try to account for some of these interactions that are maybe forgotten in some of the other work. So can you speak of what your own analysis is showing about the potential role of nuclear in net zero scenarios and its role perhaps within a system together with other low carbon options and perhaps the complementary contribution that you can make? Yeah, I'll start off by saying that to Kirsty's point, all models are wrong and some of them are useful. So even the research and analysis that we do should all be taken with a grain of salt and it's worthwhile seeing what the inputs and assumptions are going into these analyses. We work with a firm called Evolved Energy Research who developed their own net zero specific energy systems models that we have been using for quite a while now in the United States to advise US Congress on the impact of their policy decisions and pathways to net zero. This is one of top of class energy systems models that you can have and we have only used it two years now in Europe. We released the first study in 2022 and then an updated version of the study in June of this year in 2023. And we do our best to try and address some of the challenges that Kirsty was highlighting. So we do a land use assessment as part of this analysis. We don't just let it deploy wind and solar unconstrained, we look at what the resource quality will be, where it can be placed and in this upcoming year we'll show on the backend what that means physically, mapping it out because I think when policymakers see it on a map overlaid in their country, it does begin to open your mind a bit to do we want that? Are we gonna have the social license to build that amount of wind and solar in these territories? We also will look at a whole range of costs for different technologies. One of the challenges with nuclear energy is no one really knows what the costs can look like. It depends so much on the financing, it depends so much on the location and competition with other resources. So we'll look at what is the deployment of nuclear at different costs. And one of the recent studies that we did for Europe shows that even at the higher costs where nuclear is at today, we're still seeing deployment of nuclear energy and net zero systems, systems that are still looking at LCOE which is an outdated way of measuring cost of nuclear as you mentioned. And you see it used not just in the power sector but in industrial processes and producing heat in producing low carbon hydrogen. These are applications where nuclear can be incredibly cost competitive and plays a role. So I love the conversation on energy systems modeling because it's my happy place of nerdy analysis but it is important to keep in mind that it can only tell you so much. And certainly if the models are wrong and then you're not even communicating what the models are saying in the reports, you've got a double layered issue of just complete failure in science communication. So I'm happy I have little cards with QR codes with me today to show the recent study that we did in Europe if anyone is interested in it. And we are open source with all of our inputs and all of our results as well, something that is also unique. If you try and figure out what these global analyses are doing, you can't find it, they're black boxes. So you don't know what's being done. And we do our best to be as transparent with everything in ours to build a little bit more of a good faith with the partners that we're working with. And if I could briefly comment on the public opinion piece. We did some polling with potential energy last year looking at opinion on nuclear energy in five different countries, Germany included. You see over 50% support for nuclear energy. But the other part that I found really encouraging is we looked at different cohorts of people and we look specifically at folks that self-identified as environmentalists and they were also more than 50%. So there is a lot of positive movement in the direction and public support for nuclear energy. And if anything, when I meet with EU policy makers, what I experience is they don't understand that. They think that their constituents are anti-nuclear and there's a real challenge in the loudest voices that are weighing in to some of the policy conversations versus what the reality is on the ground in these countries and what that public opinion is. Very good points. Yeah, thank you for that. You mentioned cost of nuclear and Kirsty also mentioned cost of nuclear. So I wanna pitch a question to you, Enno. It's related to cost. When you talk about cost, you need to talk about financing. So what does Africa need in terms of financing to be able to unlock the potential of nuclear energy? It's a very, it means a lot of things maybe that are needed, but if you have a few highlights that you wanna share, it'd be very interesting to hear. One of the main challenges that African countries are facing in the space of developing nuclear power is the cost. The cost per, see the cost for a thousand megawatt plant is could be north of $10 billion. Financial institutions are not keen to lend this money to African countries because the countries are poor, generally speaking, and there's a perception of political risk. Yet, nuclear power is the cheapest source of power for Africa in the long term. And also the international standard of developing nuclear power is the milestone's approach. And to a certain extent, the in-pro methodology. Most African countries, I say, 90% cannot develop these 19 infrastructure issues within 20 or 30 years because, as you said, the countries have other more pressing issues. Then, of course, there's the issue of proliferation. If you build the nuclear power plant, then you're giving yourself access to plutonium. You're giving yourself access to, let's say, enriched uranium. Low-enriched uranium is already a huge percentage of the energy you need to further enrich it to weapons-grade uranium. So we have to protect against financial barriers. We have to protect against proliferation barriers. We have to protect against barriers due to political risk perceptions. So what AFKON is advocating is a multilateral approach, whereby the nuclear power is not developed by individual countries. By countries grouping together to develop nuclear power, it immunizes the project from political risk. The project is not subject to the whims of any particular precedent. It immunizes the project from proliferation risk. You may recall that when the IAEA was being founded in the 1950s, there was this idea that all facilities producing fissile material will be owned and operated by the IAEA. That was the first manifestation of a multilateral approach. That did not happen because there were certain big countries that wanted to keep the option of going nuclear in the future. Fortunately, that has not happened. In the 70s, when the US was pushing against reprocessing when they came up with the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation Project, that was a kind of manifestation of multilateralism in a different way. In 2004, I contributed to a report that was commissioned by the then Director-General, El Barade, and this was trying to resurrect the idea of multilateralism in the development of the nuclear fuel cycle. So I believe that the only way that African countries can overcome the challenges and barriers in the way of developing nuclear power is to do it multilaterally. And if I may just chip into what the other said, because we've been sort of playing around with definitions, I want to share my own definitions of sustainability and renewability. My understanding of sustainable energy, sustainable power is the low carbon. And nuclear is one of them. But nuclear has the other advantage that it does not produce other emissions that are bad for the environment, the others do. Renewability, I think, is something that we should have a scale of renewability, because renewability is normally assigned to sources that use natural forces. The wind is always there. The sun is always shining. Water is always falling. So you can say in terms of time, the primary source of that energy is a very long time. But when you look at the energy density of nuclear fuel, it is thousands of times more than the energy density of most of the other sources. So I think on a scale of renewability, nuclear energy, because everything is either launched as zero or renewable. But I think nuclear power should be at 60% on a scale of renewability. Thank you. No, thanks. I want to pose one final question then to Kirsty. Picking up on, I mean, you talked about sustainability and what, well, Enno mentioned sustainability and nuclear and climate being one of very important aspects of sustainability. But Kirsty, you also talked about other resource needs of different energy technologies and nuclear performance very well in terms of land requirements and also some other resources, critical minerals and so on. But maybe it also has a potential to contribute more broadly to sustainable development and the sustainable development goals of the UN, the 17 goals. Do you have any reflections on how nuclear can help achieve the SDGs? Beyond those ones, I mean, we talked a bit about the conflicts with land and water to some extent, but do you have any final remarks on sustainable development more broadly and nuclear's contribution to the SDGs? Just lost power? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, thank you for showcasing some of them up here. Oh, that's okay. I think we can see, thank you. So the short way of answering this is that nuclear energy is uniquely able to contribute to all 17 sustainable development goals. And that was confirmed through the analysis done by the UN ECE, the United Nations, the European Arm of the United Nations. And at Terra Praxis we published a report called Beautiful Nuclear, which outlines all the ways in which nuclear energy can contribute to delivering the sustainable development goals. And it's personally why I make the case from a humanitarian and environmental perspective for this technology to be expanded. And I would say that one other kind of key idea here for us is that the global energy infrastructure is very large and we have to decarbonize it very fast. I mentioned 100 million barrels of oil per day that we currently use, two terawatts of coal currently operating. To really sort of discuss our sustainable future, we need to really think about the end state that we want to create, which really means designing solutions that can actually be deployed to the full decarbonization of our existing energy infrastructure in the time scales that are needed and then also allowing for maybe a doubling or tripling of global energy infrastructure to meet rising global energy demand to contribute to the human and biodiversity sustainability. And nuclear energy is uniquely placed to meet those civilization scale requirements. And one of the important ways that it can do that is by enabling us to repurpose a lot of that existing infrastructure. And so for example, when at Terra Praxis, we were founded with a vision to figure out a way to completely repurpose the global coal fleet. So two terawatts of coal within 25 years. And we've been working on building a global consortium with Microsoft as our strategic partner to design a system that could actually be deployed to those 700 coal, sorry, 7,000 coal units around the world within that timeframe. And the reason that we care about repurposing that infrastructure is partly because it enables the socioeconomic benefits associated with those coal plants to be retained, which is super important, the supply of energy, which is super important for our wellbeing and our prosperity and those modern energy services that are absolutely fundamental to our quality of life and to our wellbeing and our security and our health. And also it enables the repurposing of existing assets which have already been built and we shouldn't be throwing them away. We shouldn't be expecting to completely rebuild everything from scratch with all of the resources that that would entail and importantly, all of the finance that that would entail and the sequencing of finance that that would entail, which is a completely unsustainable, frankly, way of thinking about how we solve the problem. Let's repurpose and part of that is repurposing the transmission. Now, if in the US, the 212 operating coal plants today were repurposed by co-locating small modular reactors with those coal plants to supply emissions-free steam into the existing power islands at those plants, the capacity factor of those coal plants today is about 50%. That means they're operating at about 50% of what they could potentially produce and they're burning coal. If you stopped burning coal and replaced the coal with emissions-free nuclear, you could almost double the capacity factor on those transmission lines, which would reduce, dramatically reduce, the amount of new transmission you have to build and the land use implications of that and the social implications of that and the resource and financing implications of that. And then you apply that strategy, which is what we're now doing to other large industrial facilities, which also are profoundly important for our quality of life. In African countries, we not only need to expand access to energy, we need to build resilience to the climate impacts that we're already experiencing and build schools and hospitals and factories and other industrial infrastructure that is profoundly important for our quality of life and our health and our security and our wellbeing. And that's going to require a lot of resources. So we should be intending to build that infrastructure as sustainably as possible using clean energy and using clean resources that are manufactured, steel and concrete and cement and glass and so on using emissions-free nuclear energy. So it's really, it actually makes me, I'm intending this to be a little bit of an optimistic end, because I think actually if we were really creative and thoughtful and intentional about how we deploy nuclear technologies and the steam and heat and power and hydrogen energy services that they could deliver cost-effectively at scale with a very small footprint, we could really be facing a very different kind of future than we currently expect. Thank you. Thank you. I think it's been, I think, a very fascinating discussion and we probably could go on for longer, but I've already, I think we've already taken more of your time than we were planning. So please join me in thanking our panelists for an excellent discussion again and so thank you. And I encourage you to have a look at some of the publications. Some of the topics that have been discussed today are covered by our publications. We have a publication looking at nuclear in IPCC mitigation scenarios that Lindsey talked about. As I said, we have a publication that synthesizes the agency's contribution to the stock take and we also have a publication looking at nuclear's contribution to climate resilience, ensuring a resilient energy system. So please help yourself and thank you.