In his Sept. 25 keynote address to the Global Atomic Forum in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin took up the forum’s theme, “From a New Technological Paradigm to a New Worldview,” stressing the role of cooperation around nuclear energy as the key to the rapid technological growth of the nations of the Global South. “We help our partners make a genuine development leap, bring their economies to a whole new level of efficiency, and ultimately improve quality of life,” Putin stated. He also emphasized that it was urgent to create financial mechanisms to channel productive credit for such projects:
“I consider it essential to develop modern financing models for the construction of nuclear power plants and to involve international financial institutions and development banks in these undertakings.” He then alluded to the intense policy debate underway about this in the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization countries: “In this context, I would add that earlier this year, the New Development Bank established by the BRICS countries confirmed its readiness to finance nuclear projects, while at the end of last year, on Russia’s initiative, a BRICS coordination mechanism—the Nuclear Energy Platform—was established.”
Putin began his remarks by noting changing attitudes globally about nuclear energy. “Public attitudes are also steadily evolving, with nuclear energy increasingly recognized as an environmentally friendly technology that offers enormous opportunities. Clearly, there are fundamental reasons for this paradigm shift.… [One] critical factor is the emergence of a fundamentally new technological paradigm, the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence, and the consequent need for significant energy resources to process colossal amounts of data.”
