The Trump administration is rescinding an Obama-era ban on the federal government providing financing for civilian nuclear energy projects abroad, the Washington Examiner has exclusively learned.
The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation is proposing this week to reverse a ban that prevents it from funding civil nuclear projects overseas. The agency will take 30 days of public comment on the proposed policy change.
“Access to affordable and reliable power is essential for developing countries to advance their economies,” Laura Allen, a spokeswoman for the DFC, told the Washington Examiner.
“This change would bring advances in technology and offer a zero-emission power source to the developing world while serving as an alternative to the predatory financing of authoritarian regimes.”
The move delivers on a longtime request from Senate Energy Committee Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, and her colleague Joe Manchin, the panel’s top Democrat, who argued that the prohibition “sends a harmful signal that American primacy in the civil nuclear sector is waning.”
“Nuclear energy technology can help meet the world’s clean energy needs,” Murkowski told the Washington Examiner in reaction to the policy change Tuesday.
“Our energy future is global, and steps like this DFC decision are crucial to meeting climate and energy leadership goals. Lifting this prohibition will simultaneously strengthen the U.S. economy while boosting international relations and global energy security.”
Murkowski said the policy shift would enable developing countries to have easier access to nuclear power, the most used zero-carbon energy source in the United States.
But nuclear power is struggling more broadly as more and more plants retire due to competition from cheaper natural gas and renewables.
The new policy is geared toward promoting smaller and cheaper advanced nuclear reactors under development in the U.S.
In April, a Trump administration working group released a strategy for reviving the U.S. nuclear industry that included a recommendation for the DFC to “fix legacy policies that disallow support for nuclear projects” to help compete against state-backed nuclear energy in China and Russia.
The report also emphasized the Trump administration’s support for research and development of smaller advanced nuclear reactors, an emerging technology that has bipartisan backing in Congress.
Forces inside the Trump administration, including in the National Security Council, had also long been pushing the DFC to lift the ban, but the agency was slow to act.
“How a team that professes energy dominance and nuclear energy revival could have taken this long to enact such a simple, no-brainer policy update truly boggles the mind,” a former Trump administration official told the Washington Examiner.
Nearly a decade ago, the Obama administration put in place a categorical exclusion on nuclear power plant projects at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the predecessor to the DFC, which was formed in December.
OPIC banned overseas nuclear investments in accordance with the World Bank’s lending guidelines, but the Obama administration in its early years also favored renewables over nuclear energy.
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