The International Energy Agency is planning a major push on nuclear energy at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland next month as calls get louder for the industry to find financing mechanisms that will support new build.

IEA director-general Fatih Birol told a livestreamed event from the agency’s headquarters in Paris that the report, commissioned six months ago, will show that costs of small modular reactors (SMRs) “may come down a bit faster than we assume”.

In compiling the report, the IEA requested “a lot of meetings and a lot of analysis” from all top SMR companies and discussed with them their cost assumptions and their technology.

“We are very conservative with our SMR cost-assumption trajectory, but when we talk with the companies, they are extremely rosy in terms of their expectation SMR cost decline,” Birol said.