[Read the full nuclear energy position paper]
Amid ongoing global debate over the role of nuclear power in climate policy — and in the year marking the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, whose consequences hit the Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia region particularly hard — the Climate Action Network Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia (CAN EECCA) has released a consolidated position on behalf of its members.
The process of developing the network’s position was facilitated by Svetlana Mogilyuk (Ecom, Kazakhstan), who stresses that choosing nuclear power runs counter to the fundamental principles of sustainable development.
“The position held by most member organizations is that nuclear power is, in fact, a poor solution for reducing climate impact. Why?
- First, it’s simply too slow a solution, when the action needed is far more urgent — many renewable energy technologies deliver results much faster.
- Second, it’s an extremely costly solution that demands enormous resources, diverting them from other efforts to reduce climate impact.”
Nuclear power is also inherently hazardous, Mogilyuk notes: the entire lifecycle — from raw material extraction through energy production — generates extremely dangerous waste. Even the physical structures of nuclear plants themselves become radioactive material over time, requiring enormous decommissioning costs to bring a site back to a safe state. And there is still no adequate solution for managing radioactive waste: in effect, the current generation is passing the burden of decommissioning and waste on to future ones — a direct violation of the core sustainable development principle of not degrading conditions, or imposing excessive costs, on generations to come.
“That is why most of our member organizations support a shared position: nuclear power should not be promoted as a solution for reducing climate impact.”
A dissenting view from Inga Zarafyan, Ecolur (Armenia)
“We’ve heard a wide range of expert opinions and data, and our position differs from the one set out in the published text in two key respects.
First, in our view, the text doesn’t reflect current data — it’s simply outdated. A climate network is supposed to represent a reasonably independent, expert-driven public voice, and the people behind this text are presenting it as exactly that kind of expert assessment.
Second, we’re not saying this without reason: the world is, in fact, moving toward nuclear power. I believe a climate network shouldn’t treat nuclear power as a climate solution — but we do need to recognize that it exists as a reality, and that it will continue to expand.”
On whether the position still holds up, a further perspective from Hanna Skryhan, an independent researcher in environmental policy and climate adaptation and an expert who contributed to the drafting of CAN EECCA’s nuclear energy position, 2026.
“Forty years after Chernobyl, the debate over nuclear power still tends to collapse into a familiar dichotomy — safety versus climate. As a researcher who grew up in Mogilev, Belarus, within the radioactive contamination zone, and as an expert who contributed to CAN EECCA’s nuclear position, I believe this framing misses something essential.
The real question is whether nuclear power can actually deliver what’s needed to address the climate crisis: fast, affordable, scalable emissions reductions. The data give a complicated, but ultimately fairly clear, answer.”
Skryhan notes that nuclear power does have genuinely low-carbon characteristics — roughly 12 grams of CO₂ per kilowatt-hour, comparable to wind power. But low emissions alone don’t make a technology a climate solution. Building new nuclear plants in Western countries now takes 15 to 20 years and costs several times more per unit of electricity than wind or solar. The climate window for action is the 2020s and 2030s; new nuclear capacity, by contrast, is coming online in the 2040s. That timing mismatch, she stresses, isn’t a technical footnote — it’s the central problem with treating nuclear power as an urgent climate solution.
She also points out that 97% of new reactor construction starts between 2020 and 2024 were in China and Russia. Countries touting a “nuclear renaissance,” she notes, are largely not the ones actually building new capacity. And the projects that are moving forward — mostly through Rosatom’s “build-own-operate” model — create exactly the kind of long-term geopolitical dependency that the energy transition is supposed to break: a 60-year technological lock-in, dependence on Russian fuel supply chains, and opaque financial terms.
For the Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia region, Skryhan says, these risks are far from abstract. Most countries in the region have small grid systems that were never designed to accommodate gigawatt-scale power units. Belarus has already experienced this firsthand — the integration of the Belarusian nuclear plant created structural imbalances in the national grid. Expanding nuclear power in the region, she argues, effectively locks in dependence on a single supplier, reproducing the very vulnerability it was meant to eliminate.
The occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Skryhan adds, has introduced a dimension no safety standard was designed to anticipate: civilian nuclear infrastructure used as a tool of military pressure. For countries near Russia, she says, this isn’t a hypothetical risk — it’s a current reality, tied to the largest nuclear plant in the region.
“CAN EECCA’s position reflects a shared concern among civil society organizations across the region,” Skryhan says. “The renewed interest in nuclear power, however understandable amid the climate crisis, doesn’t resolve the structural issues that make it an unreliable pillar of the energy transition. A sovereign, climate-safe energy future for the region requires an honest reckoning with these problems — and serious investment in alternatives that can actually be delivered at the scale and within the timeframe we need.”
