I’ve witnessed many moments in my years as an environmental advocate, but few have felt as consequential as what I experienced today in Paris. Standing in the same room as World Bank President Ajay Banga and IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi signed this historical Memorandum of Understanding, I felt the tectonic plates of global energy policy shift beneath my feet.

This was more than a signing ceremony. It was a global reckoning: a recognition by one of the world’s most powerful development banks that nuclear energy is not a threat to climate action, but one of its most critical enablers.

As the head of an organisation advocating for conservation in a country that has banned nuclear energy, I watched with a mix of vindication and frustration. While the World Bank and IAEA step up to support nuclear deployment in developing nations, my own country, Australia, remains caught in a decades-old ideological impasse.

Not long ago, I also saw nuclear as a relic: expensive, slow, and politically fraught. But years spent in international forums from Paris to Dubai to Washington, meeting scientists, policymakers and financiers, transformed my view. Today, I believe nuclear must be central to any credible decarbonisation strategy. Still, belief isn’t enough and deployment demands structural reform.

As Banga and Grossi made clear, electricity demand in developing countries will more than double by 2035. Factories, hospitals, schools and AI-powered systems all rely on stable power. The question is no longer if we need more energy; it’s how we produce it without cooking the planet.

That’s what makes this agreement revolutionary. For decades, the World Bank avoided nuclear investment, influenced by political sensitivities and outdated environmental orthodoxy. Grossi called today’s shift a ‘return to realism’, a realism we desperately need.

Nuclear provides reliable baseload power, supports grid stability, enables variable renewables, creates high-skilled jobs, and can scale fast enough to meet the urgency of the climate crisis. But the real barrier isn’t technological. It’s financial.

This is the insight that resonated most in today’s discussions: nuclear isn’t being held back by science but by economics. Projects are high-risk and capital-intensive. The timelines are long, and the political risks daunting. No amount of idealism can override the hard realities of financing.

Stanford’s Dr Stephen Comello puts it bluntly: ‘Nuclear projects are too risky for the private sector alone. That’s what slows scaling.’ Investors need risk-sharing structures before they can commit. And that’s where this new partnership matters most.

Bankability is the litmus test. If a project can’t attract capital, it won’t be built. Too often, nuclear doesn’t clear that bar, not because of safety issues, but because of unresolved financial risk. We’ve seen the consequences: Vogtle in Georgia ballooned from $14 billion to over $35 billion. Hinkley Point C in the UK has locked consumers into decades of high-cost electricity. The problem wasn’t the reactors, it was the financial architecture.

Comello identifies six critical investor concerns: commercialisation, revenue certainty, infrastructure readiness, policy stability, financial regulation, and reputational risk. If even one remains unaddressed, capital dries up. When all six are uncertain – as they often are in nuclear – no investor can justify the exposure.

But there are successful models. South Korea’s standardised programme delivered the UAE’s Barakah project largely on time and on budget. France built 56 reactors in 15 years during the 1970s and 80s. The key was standardisation and repeatability, what Comello calls the ‘orderbook model’, which drives down costs by 10-15 per cent with each doubling of capacity.

Even Vogtle’s Unit 4 was completed in half the time of Unit 3. When you apply the right economic model, success becomes not only possible, but repeatable.

That’s why today’s agreement is more than symbolic. It targets three critical enablers of nuclear bankability: building internal nuclear knowledge at the World Bank, extending the lifespan of existing reactors, and accelerating small modular reactor (SMR) deployment.

SMRs are especially promising. Their smaller footprint and flexible design make them ideal for countries needing clean baseload power without the capital burden of large-scale plants. But, as Grossi said, ‘Financing remains a roadblock.’ Today’s handshake begins the work of clearing that path.

We already have the tools. Regulated asset-base frameworks, contracts-for-difference, government-backed insurance for cost overruns, and build-own-transfer models have all succeeded in infrastructure sectors. It’s time to adapt these to nuclear.

And developing nations are leading the way. While 31 countries currently operate nuclear plants, more than 30 others, mostly in the Global South, are working with the IAEA to safely launch nuclear programs. They are not burdened by the ideological debates paralysing countries like Australia.

They understand a fundamental truth: the energy transition will fail without dispatchable, reliable, zero-emission power. Nuclear doesn’t compete with renewables; it enables them.

As I flew to Paris from Australia, the irony wasn’t lost on me. My own country continues to debate yesterday’s questions while our allies and trading partners forge ahead. Canada, Poland, Romania and the US are backing SMRs. Financial institutions are preparing to invest. The world is moving and we are standing still.

This is no longer about ideology. It’s about pragmatism, technology diversity, and the courage to act. I came to nuclear advocacy through environmentalism. I am not driven by nostalgia or politics, but by the clear-eyed urgency of climate reality.

The handshake I witnessed today between Banga and Grossi was not just a gesture between two institutions. It was a handshake between nuclear energy and its financial future.

Because in the end, this is not just about energy; it’s about trust. And trust, I’ve come to realise, is the true fuel of any successful energy transition. Today, that trust was renewed.

Cristina Talacko, CEO, Coalition for Conservation