Clubturgot.com reports the press release summarizing this in-depth study on an essential subject.
After a year of work, assisted by Deloitte, AF2I is publishing the results of an in-depth study on the conditions for integrating civil nuclear power into ESG investment policies. This collective work, which began in 2024, draws on the contributions of around thirty institutional investors, experts and stakeholders in the sector. It aims to clarify a sector that is often misunderstood and undervalued in sustainable investment policies.
The Af2i dossier has three objectives: to understand a complex sector; to identify the alignment of the civil nuclear industry with climate objectives; and to define the conditions for responsible financing for the sector.
As early as 2022, in view of the difficulty of understanding both the sector and the many regulations in place, or in the process of being drawn up, and in view of the announcement made on February 10 2022 by President Emmanuel Macron (“We must resume the great adventure of civil nuclear power in France”) concerning the decision to build six EPR2 reactors, institutional investors had to address the issue of their participation in the financing of these plants.
The purpose of this dossier is to provide Af2i members, and more broadly all those involved in financing this sector, with the clearest possible information on the civil nuclear industry and its constraints, in conjunction with the objectives of sustainable growth and the energy transition, as well as the views of various stakeholders.
Three points are worth remembering:
– The role of nuclear power in the contemporary energy transition illustrates a central paradox: it is one of the safest low-carbon energy production technologies in the world from an industrial point of view, but it is still perceived as high-risk because of the potential severity of accidents and the lifetime of waste.
– Civil nuclear power is one of the most regulated industrial sectors in the world. Its regulation is based on a hierarchical architecture of standards and institutions, from the international level to their European and national variations. For the investor, it offers very good readability of risks and increased comparability of practices, while emphasizing that the assessment remains specific to each project and that the scope remains difficult to define in the absence of shared definitions and thresholds.
– In addition to the regulatory frameworks, index and data providers, as well as national and European sustainable finance labels, adopt divergent positions with regard to nuclear power. Management companies and institutional investors also sometimes have very contrasting positions with regard to nuclear power. Some continue to apply a strict exclusion, while others favor conditional integration, considering that nuclear power can be retained in portfolios if it meets high ESG requirements.
This dossier expresses Af2i’s raison d’être: that of a community of committed and responsible investors. Collaboration between all players in the financial sector is essential.
For more than two decades, Af2i members have been working to deepen and promote best practices in investment. Institutional investors have always supported the activities of companies in various ways. In some cases, this is the very purpose of the institutions, contributing to the security of their operations with, for example, insurance benefits, as well as that of their employees through provident schemes, pensions, etc. But, in all cases, institutional investors finance their activities, not only by holding listed or unlisted shares, but also by directly holding (or through funds) receivables from companies in the most diverse forms.
Deloitte comments: “Civil nuclear power crystallizes the tensions between positive climate impact, social perception and regulatory constraints. To overcome this ambiguity, it is imperative to provide investors with appropriate, robust and contextualized ESG analysis tools. This study aims precisely to create the conditions for a structured dialogue, based on transparency and accountability.”
