Civil Nuclear Energy Program Development

1.1 Why Fuel Supply Strategy Matters for New Entrants

A functioning nuclear power program depends on a continuous, reliable supply of fuel over a reactor's operating life, typically 60 years or more. For states building a first nuclear program, the central strategic choice is not whether to secure fuel, but how: through the international commercial market and long-term supply contracts, through government-to-government arrangements tied to the reactor vendor, or through domestic enrichment capability.

International guidance and the experience of essentially all recent new-entrant states point toward the first two options. Domestic uranium enrichment or spent fuel reprocessing carries direct proliferation sensitivity, since the same centrifuge and reprocessing technologies that produce reactor-grade material can, with further processing, produce weapons-usable material. For this reason, this section treats reliance on international fuel-cycle services — not domestic enrichment — as the baseline recommendation for a new national program, consistent with IAEA guidance and the practice of states such as the UAE, Bangladesh, and Egypt.

1.2 The IAEA Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) Bank

The IAEA Board of Governors authorized the creation of an IAEA-owned LEU Bank in December 2010 as an assurance-of-supply mechanism of last resort. It became fully operational in 2019 as a physical reserve of 90 metric tons of low-enriched uranium hexafluoride, held at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant in Oskemen (Ust-Kamenogorsk), Kazakhstan — enough to fuel one full core load, or about three reloads, of a typical 1,000 MWe light-water reactor.

Other IAEA-approved assurance-of-supply mechanisms operate alongside the LEU Bank, including a Russian-held physical LEU reserve at the International Uranium Enrichment Centre in Angarsk, a UK guaranty covering enrichment services, and a separate United States LEU reserve. For a new entrant, the practical implication is that a credible fuel-supply strategy today can rest on a layered set of assurances — commercial contracts, vendor-country arrangements, and these backstop mechanisms — without any need to pursue enrichment domestically.

1.3 Bilateral Nuclear Cooperation Agreements: The U.S. "123 Agreement" Model

Because nuclear material, equipment, and technology are dual-use, most supplier states require a government-to-government legal framework before permitting significant nuclear trade. The best-documented example is the United States' Section 123 Agreement, named for Section 123 of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act of 1954. As of mid-2025 the United States maintained 26 such agreements covering roughly 50 countries plus the IAEA and Taiwan.

A 123 Agreement is a political and legal framework, not merely a commercial contract. Section 123 sets nine nonproliferation criteria that any agreement must meet, including a requirement that transferred material remain under IAEA safeguards in perpetuity, that non-nuclear-weapon-state partners maintain full-scope safeguards, and that transferred material, equipment, and technology never be used for any nuclear explosive or military purpose.

The 2009 U.S.–UAE agreement introduced what is commonly called the "gold standard": the UAE committed to forgo domestic enrichment and reprocessing entirely, on top of the standard nine criteria. This became a template some U.S. policymakers wanted applied universally, but it remains contested. Proponents argue it removes proliferation risk at the source and strengthens the international nonproliferation regime; critics — including within the U.S. nuclear industry and some members of Congress — argue that a rigid universal requirement could push prospective partner states toward less stringent suppliers such as Russia or China, reducing rather than increasing U.S. and international leverage over their programs. A national program's negotiators should expect this exact tension to shape negotiations with any Western supplier state, and should treat a voluntary renunciation of enrichment/reprocessing as a strong positive signal to the international community regardless of which supplier is ultimately chosen.

1.4 Practical Recommendations for a National Fuel-Supply Strategy

2.1 Why a Liability Framework Must Precede Operation

No commercial reactor vendor, insurer, or financing institution will proceed on a first nuclear power project without clarity on who is liable if a nuclear incident causes damage, how much compensation is available, and which country's courts and law will apply. International liability conventions exist precisely to answer these questions in advance, on predictable and internationally recognized terms, rather than leaving them to be litigated after an incident.

2.2 The Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage

The Vienna Convention, administered by the IAEA, harmonizes national law around several core principles that a new national nuclear liability law should mirror. A 1997 Protocol amended the Vienna Convention to raise minimum liability amounts and expand the categories of compensable damage, including certain environmental and economic losses, and extended the limitation period for personal injury and loss-of-life claims to 30 years.

A parallel regime, the Paris Convention on Third Party Liability in the Field of Nuclear Energy, is administered through the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency and largely mirrors the Vienna Convention's principles. A Joint Protocol links the two conventions so that a nuclear incident is not left in a legal gap between Vienna-Convention states and Paris-Convention states.

2.3 The Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC)

The CSC, which entered into force in 2015, adds a further layer: it establishes a minimum national compensation amount and creates a mechanism for additional compensation drawn from public funds contributed by all CSC Contracting Parties, should a national compensation amount prove insufficient. Distinctively, the CSC is open not only to states already party to the Vienna or Paris Conventions but to any state whose national legislation is consistent with the uniform rules set out in the CSC's own annex — a pathway relevant to a new entrant that wants to join the international liability regime without first joining Vienna or Paris.

For a national program, joining an international liability convention (Vienna, Paris/CSC-Annex route, or the CSC directly) is not merely a legal formality: it materially affects whether foreign reactor vendors, equipment suppliers, and insurers are willing to participate, since it caps and channels their potential exposure.

2.4 The Convention on Nuclear Safety (CNS)

Adopted in 1994 and in force since 1996, the CNS commits Contracting Parties operating land-based civil nuclear power plants to a set of fundamental safety principles. Its obligations span the legislative and regulatory framework, the establishment and independence of the regulatory body, and technical safety obligations covering siting, design, construction, and operation — as well as the availability of adequate financial and human resources, safety assessment and verification, quality assurance, and emergency preparedness.

The CNS's distinguishing feature is its peer review mechanism: each Contracting Party must prepare a National Report on how it is implementing its obligations, submit it for review by all other Contracting Parties, answer written questions from them, and participate in review meetings held roughly every three years at IAEA Headquarters in Vienna. The Convention has grown steadily; at the joint Eighth/Ninth Review Meeting, roughly 900 delegates from 82 Contracting Parties participated, and by the most recent (Tenth) Review Meeting in April 2026, membership had grown to 87 Contracting Parties, with Egypt, El Salvador, Iraq, Liberia, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe having joined since the prior cycle — evidence that CNS membership is now a normal, expected step even for states still building their first program.

A closely related instrument, the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management, extends the same fundamental-principles-plus-peer-review model to the back end of the fuel cycle.

2.5 Sequencing Recommendation

International precedent suggests liability and safety convention accession should occur early — alongside NPT/safeguards steps and well before construction contracts are finalized — because vendor states, financiers, and insurers will treat convention membership (or a credible domestic-law equivalent meeting CSC Annex standards) as a precondition for their own participation, not a step that can be deferred to the construction or commissioning phase.

3.1 The Scale of the Financing Challenge

A single large reactor project runs into the tens of billions of dollars and requires financing structures that can absorb construction timelines of a decade or more, first-of-a-kind cost risk, and (for a new entrant) the absence of a domestic track record that would otherwise reassure lenders. In practice, essentially every recent new-entrant nuclear project has been financed through one of a small number of recurring models, rather than ordinary project finance on the open capital markets.

3.2 Government-to-Government (Vendor State) Financing

In this model, the vendor state's government — not the vendor company alone — extends a sovereign or intergovernmental loan to the recipient state, often covering the large majority of project cost, sized and priced far more favorably than commercial terms. This has become the dominant model for new entrants working with Russia and China.

A defining feature of this model is that Russia and China are not bound by the OECD Arrangement on Officially Supported Export Credit, which sets minimum interest rates and maximum terms for OECD-member export credit agencies. This lets Russian and Chinese state financing offer longer maturities and lower rates than an OECD-bound competitor could match — a genuine commercial and strategic advantage that Western vendors and their governments have had to respond to with their own instruments.

3.3 Export Credit Agency (ECA) Financing

Where the OECD Arrangement does apply, export credit agencies of vendor-supplier states have become central to competitiveness. South Korea's KEXIM provided export credit backing the Barakah project in the UAE — widely cited as the most successful recent new-entrant program, having entered commercial operation across all four units between 2021 and 2024.

A near-universal condition of ECA financing to a new-entrant state is a sovereign guarantee: the recipient government, not merely the project company, must stand behind loan repayment. This was the structure underpinning U.S. Ex-Im Bank financing discussions for Poland's planned AP1000 units, where a sovereign guarantee from Warsaw underpins the financing.

3.4 Comparative Outcomes and Emerging Constraints

Case comparisons are instructive for a new entrant's planning. Barakah (UAE) is the clearest recent success story on cost and schedule, attributed by industry observers to strong government commitment, a single reliable vendor relationship, and disciplined project management — the same institutional-readiness factors emphasized throughout IAEA Milestones guidance, not financing structure alone. Hinkley Point C (UK), financed on a more conventional regulated-asset/private-investment basis, has experienced substantial delays and cost escalation, illustrating that financing model alone does not guarantee schedule discipline.

New African entrants (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria), still in IAEA Milestones Phase 2, illustrate the financing barrier facing smaller-grid, lower-credit-rating states: without a strong sovereign balance sheet, these states have had difficulty securing either ECA-backed or intergovernmental financing on workable terms, and are exploring alternative structures such as government-backed long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) that shift revenue-certainty risk rather than construction-cost risk. An emerging, structurally novel model uses long-term power purchase agreements from large creditworthy corporate offtakers (for example, technology companies seeking firm low-carbon power) as anchor credit support for a project, rather than relying solely on sovereign or vendor-state backing.

3.5 Financing Recommendations

4.1 Framing the Back End of the Fuel Cycle Early

A national program's waste and spent fuel strategy should be defined in outline before construction begins, not after the first reactor is operating. This reflects both IAEA guidance and hard-won international experience: an operating reactor generates spent fuel from day one, and states that deferred a coherent back-end strategy have generally faced greater public and political difficulty resolving it later.

4.2 The Legal Framework: The Joint Convention

The Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management, in force since 2001, is the first legally binding international instrument addressing this issue on a global scale. It applies the same model used in the Convention on Nuclear Safety: Contracting Parties commit to fundamental safety principles covering the siting, design, construction, and operation of spent fuel and waste management facilities, and submit to a peer review process involving National Reports and periodic Review Meetings. IAEA leadership has stated plainly that all countries using nuclear technology bear a responsibility to establish and implement comprehensive radioactive waste management strategies with disposal, not indefinite storage, as the intended endpoint.

4.3 Standard Strategy Components

4.4 Case Study: Finland's Onkalo Repository

Finland is the first country to move from commitment to construction of a deep geological repository for spent nuclear fuel, at Onkalo in Olkiluoto, roughly 400–450 meters underground, using a disposal concept (copper canisters surrounded by bentonite clay in stable bedrock) developed jointly with Sweden. Several features of the Finnish experience are directly instructive for a new program's waste strategy.

Site selection was not decided on geological criteria alone; Posiva's approach shifted to requiring the acceptance of the host municipality's council, meaning the local community held an effective say in whether the facility would be sited there. Finland's safety regulator (STUK) participated directly and visibly in the process, which Finnish officials say gave the local community independent assurance beyond what the implementer alone could provide.

Independent researchers note the Finnish outcome also reflects specific national conditions — comparatively high public trust in institutions and technical expertise — and that public engagement on the substance of the waste-management choice was, by some academic accounts, more limited than the smooth outcome might suggest. Experts studying the case caution that replicating Onkalo's outcome elsewhere requires the underlying trust and institutional conditions, not just the same technical concept.

Other states are following a similar trajectory on different timelines: Sweden began construction of its own geological repository at Forsmark in 2025 after more than 40 years of research and consultation, and Canada selected the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation and the Township of Ignace as host communities in November 2024 following a consent-based siting process that had run for roughly 14 years.

4.5 Strategic Recommendations

5.1 Why This Is Treated as Core Infrastructure, Not Public Relations

The IAEA's Milestones Approach identifies stakeholder involvement as one of 19 discrete infrastructure issues a new entrant state must address — on the same list as legal framework, regulatory body, and financing, not as an optional communications add-on. IAEA leadership has stated that transparent, fact-based communication with the public not only supports the introduction and acceptance of a nuclear power program but also enhances safety and security directly, because an engaged and informed public and workforce reinforce a strong safety culture rather than merely tolerating the program.

5.2 The IAEA's Five Principles of Stakeholder Engagement

The IAEA's first guide-level publication on this subject, Stakeholder Engagement in Nuclear Programmes (Nuclear Energy Series No. NG-G-5.1), sets out five key principles for effective engagement across the full lifecycle of a nuclear facility — from uranium mining and reactor construction through operation and eventual decommissioning. IAEA officials involved in developing this guidance have noted there is no single engagement "recipe" that transfers unchanged between countries, since legal traditions, media environments, and public trust in institutions differ; the guide instead provides a common framework — stakeholder mapping, defined roles and responsibilities among nuclear-sector organizations, and stage-specific engagement approaches — that each state adapts to its own context.

5.3 Practical Lessons from Country Experience

A recurring theme across newcomer-country presentations to the IAEA (Poland, Vietnam, South Africa, and others) is that communication and public-involvement plans differ significantly by country context, and that the meaning of "transparency" itself can be understood differently across cultures and societies — a factor to consider explicitly when adapting international guidance domestically rather than importing another country's communications plan unchanged.

The Finnish experience demonstrates that a national safety regulator's direct, visible participation in public-facing engagement can matter as much as the volume of communication produced by the implementer or operator. UK stakeholder-engagement practitioners have emphasized the importance of openly acknowledging that not everyone will support nuclear power and directly answering objections, rather than treating public skepticism as something to be managed away through messaging alone.

Framing nuclear power within the broader national conversation about electricity generation, energy security, and economic growth — rather than discussing it as an isolated technical topic — has been identified by IAEA practitioners as a more durable basis for public understanding than nuclear-specific messaging alone.

5.4 Risks of Under-Investing in This Area

IAEA guidance and practitioner experience converge on a consistent warning: insufficient stakeholder engagement creates space for opposition, misinformation, and unaddressed public concern about safety and environmental impact, which in turn tends to produce project delays, cost increases, and difficulty securing durable public and political support — the same categories of risk (cost/schedule overrun, institutional capacity gaps) that arise elsewhere in program planning, reinforcing that public engagement is a program-risk-management function, not a discretionary add-on.

5.5 Recommendations for a National Communication Strategy