SMR VIRTUAL WORKING GROUP

The Howard Baker Forum and Atlantic Council Global Energy Center have created a virtual working group that will host two sessions on opportunities for government support for civil nuclear cooperation between the United States and Japan. The first session took place on July 18, 2020 and highlighted the roles of the U.S. and Japanese governments in nuclear cooperation, especially through initiatives like the U.S. Department of Energy’s Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) and Japan Atomic Energy Agency’s Nuclear Energy x Innovation Promotion (NEXIP).

The second of the two working group sessions will take place in October, and it will focus on opportunities to finance nuclear innovation. The discussions and findings of the workshops will be incorporated into an Atlantic Council issue brief that will identify greater opportunities for public- and private-sector nuclear energy cooperation between the United States and Japan.

For more information, please visit the Virtual Working Group’s webpage found here.

On October 7 the Howard Baker Forum and the Atlantic Council hosted the second virtual workshop on US and Japan civil nuclear cooperation: The role of financing institutions in supporting innovation.The October meeting convened key stakeholders from the public and private sectors in the US and Japan to discuss opportunities to finance nuclear innovation. Although there are strong frameworks for civil nuclear cooperation between the US and Japan, opportunities exist for both countries to accelerate the pace of development and intensify their collaborative efforts, especially on financing new civil nuclear projects. The audience heard keynote remarks from Kimberly Reed, President and Chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States and Tadashi Maeda, Governor of the Japan Bank for International Cooperation. The keynote remarks were followed by a panel discussion that included Dr. Joseph Lassiter, Senator John Heinz Professor of Management Practice in Environmental Management, Retired, from the Harvard Business School, Dr. Lara Pierpoint, Director of Technology Strategy at Exelon and Board Co-Chair of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, Richard Powell, Executive Director of ClearPath, Inc., and Wells Griffith, Managing Director and Senior Advisor to the CEO for Energy at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).

For more information, please visit the Virtual Working Group’s webpage found here.