Why this session matters to us
HLPF 2026 is the year the Forum puts SDG 7, affordable and clean energy, under in-depth review. The scoreboard it is reviewing against is the annual Tracking SDG 7: The Energy Progress Report, produced jointly by five custodian agencies (the IEA, IRENA, the UN Statistics Division, the World Bank and the WHO). Its 2025 edition counts 666 million people still without electricity, roughly 85% of them in sub-Saharan Africa, and international public financial flows to developing countries that have stopped climbing. The day before this event, at the ministerial opening, the Secretary-General named the mismatch directly: Africa holds about 60% of the world’s best solar potential and receives roughly 2% of clean energy investment.
Into that measurement gap walked a panel from the IAEA, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation, with a single, coordinated message: nuclear power is now a bankable option for developing countries, and the finance to build it is starting to move. The most interesting thing they asked for was not money. It was to be counted.
The ask buried in the closing remarks
The measurement request came at the very end, in the moderator’s summing-up, and it is the line that should interest anyone who watches how the UN keeps score.
Nuclear is not a headline SDG 7 indicator. The report tracks access, the renewables share, efficiency and international financial flows; it does not credit nuclear generation as progress toward the goal. To write it in would change what “clean energy” counts as, and therefore what a country gets scored for building. That is a bigger move than it sounds, and it was made in a room where the World Bank itself, on its own account, has not financed a nuclear project in decades.
The bankability case, and where the first dollar actually goes
The World Bank and the IAEA signed a memorandum of understanding in June 2025, the Bank’s first concrete step back toward nuclear after a long absence. Its Global Director for Energy was careful about why.
The revealing detail was where the Bank expects to lend first. Not a newcomer country, and not a new reactor, but the cheapest nuclear there is: keeping an existing plant running.
His model for new build is refinancing: put up the capital to get a plant operating, absorb the construction-era risk, then refinance at a lower cost once it is running above 90% availability, the way the Bank already handles large hydropower. And on the fear that keeps private lenders out, he was blunt about the only acceptable answer.
The IAEA framed its own contribution as de-risking through standards. Its Milestones Approach walks a country through 19 infrastructure issues across three phases, and issue number four is financing and funding; the agency argued that its safety, regulatory and environmental milestones are what let a development bank sign off. On the scale of money involved, the agency put its high-case scenario, in which global nuclear capacity more than doubles by 2050, at US$130 to US$160 billion of investment a year, far above recent levels, and beyond what public budgets can carry.
The readiness the pitch outran
The most honest voice on the panel was the Asian Development Bank’s, and it undercut the confidence of the room. Asked how the banks would coordinate, its energy adviser answered by naming how little any of them has actually done.
His list of what a developing country needs in place before nuclear is financeable was long: a stable, strong grid to put the reactor on; policies and regulations solid enough that lenders will move; and utilities that can actually pay. That last one is the quiet killer.
He put small modular reactors, the technology most of the pitch leans on, several years from being commercially viable, and he named the process risk that turns a good project bad: “A delay in the licensing of two, three years can kill financing for a project.” The one government on the panel, a Deputy Permanent Representative of the Philippines, described his country trying to engineer exactly that risk out, through national policy giving its first commercial nuclear plant priority dispatch, long-term contracting and automatic status as a project of national significance, all aimed at turning a first-of-its-kind build into, in his words, a “bankable asset.” It is a plan, not yet a plant.
What philanthropy is actually for here
The Rockefeller Foundation was the smallest chequebook in the room and said so. Its role, its Vice President for Power argued, is not to fund reactors but to move the money that can.
In May 2026 the foundation and Singapore’s Temasek Trust launched a Global Coalition for Nuclear Philanthropy on the premise that only 0.1% to 0.2% of climate philanthropy currently goes to nuclear, less than $2 of every $1,000. The ADB adviser’s response captured what the sector is short of: he asked, only half joking, for some of that grant money, because grant funding is exactly what is missing from the early, unbankable end of a nuclear programme.
The questions the panel could not fully take
Two interventions from the floor pushed against the “clean energy” frame the session was built on. The first came from the president of the Global Security Institute, who noted that the two states holding most of the world’s nuclear arsenals have not ratified the Geneva Convention protocol prohibiting attacks on civilian nuclear facilities, and that both have recently struck such facilities. His challenge was about leverage.
The IAEA answered on its safety mandate, citing its on-site presence at plants in conflict zones and its member-state resolutions against attacks on nuclear facilities, while the moderator conceded the treaty question sits outside the agency’s remit. The second intervention, from a civil-society delegate, asked who will fund the safeguards around clean-energy build-out at all, pointing at the water that data centres and cooling systems consume and contaminate. It was ruled mostly off-topic. Both questions were really the same one: a session about capital had little to say about the physical and political risks that capital does not price.
Our read
A session titled “unlocking capital for clean energy” was, in substance, a nuclear-finance pitch, and a coordinated one, from three development banks and a foundation that have just signed agreements to work together. The case is real: the World Bank is genuinely back in the sector, and the money exists. But on the panel’s own telling the first dollar goes to extending a plant that already exists, small modular reactors are years from viability, and the newcomers the pitch is aimed at need a grid, a regulator, a solvent utility and a licensing regime they mostly do not yet have. The delivery is a decade of groundwork away for most of the countries invoked.
Which is what makes the closing ask worth flagging. Requesting that nuclear be “explicitly reflected” in the Tracking SDG 7 report is a request to be scored for the ambition before the delivery. What the SDG 7 scoreboard counts is not a neutral bookkeeping choice; it shapes what gets financed and what a country is rewarded for reporting. The 666 million people that report currently counts are, overwhelmingly, in places this panel agreed are years from their first reactor. Watch whether the custodian agencies take up the ask, and whether the World Bank’s promised first approval, expected within a year, turns out to be new capacity or an old plant kept alive a little longer.
Why it matters for the SDGs
This is a fight over the meaning of SDG 7 (affordable and clean energy) and how it is measured, with SDG 17 underneath it, the means of implementation, the finance, and the multilateral-bank partnerships being assembled here, and a strong pull toward SDG 9 (industry and infrastructure), since the whole case rests on grids, regulators and industrial capacity a country must build first. If nuclear enters the SDG 7 tracking framework, it changes what clean-energy progress looks like on paper. If the enabling conditions the panel itself listed do not get built, the framework will keep measuring an access gap that a reactor a decade away does nothing to close.
Watch & read
- World Bank Group and IAEA formalise their nuclear-energy partnership (June 2025), the memorandum this event was taking stock of.
- Tracking SDG 7: The Energy Progress Report 2025, the custodian agencies’ scoreboard (666 million still without electricity) that the session asked to be counted in.
- The Rockefeller Foundation and Temasek Trust launch the Global Coalition for Nuclear Philanthropy (May 2026).
- The ministerial segment opens, the day before, where the Secretary-General named Africa’s 60%-of-solar, 2%-of-investment gap · The SDG 7 in-depth review · Full HLPF 2026 coverage.
Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase. The session date is inferred from the HLPF 2026 programme; the Philippine speaker is identified by role because the transcript’s rendering of the name could not be confirmed against the mission’s records. Investment and capacity figures are as the agencies and speakers reported them and were not independently verified.