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Welcome and Presentation of the WNA Award: 32nd Annual WNA Symposium 

 

John Ritch
Director General, World Nuclear Association

Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre
London
7 September 2006

Ladies and gentlemen, I join our Chairman in offering you a warm welcome.

No question in our world today is more fundamental than whether we can reconcile an inexorably growing world economy - and all the human need and human aspiration it represents - with the equally powerful imperative of global environmental preservation.

Our best Earth scientists now warn with ever increasing alarm that a failure to meet this challenge will jeopardize all civilization.

Fortunately, although belatedly, the governments of our nations are acting, in growing numbers, to embrace one essential principle: that any sound strategy must rely on a vastly expanded use of nuclear power.

In the 20th century, nuclear weapons posed an existential danger to all humanity. In the 21st century, it is increasingly clear that we must employ nuclear technology constructively if civilization is to prosper and prevail.

You in the enterprises of the nuclear industry - and nuclear professionals in governments and the IAEA as well - are the stewards of a technology in which all humankind now has a major stake. Much depends on your success, and we at the WNA go to work every day with that purpose in mind.

When we began the World Nuclear Association six and a half years ago, we had a double vocation. First, we aimed to build a truly global association of all enterprises engaged in the business of nuclear energy. Second, we sought to contribute value on the transnational level by filling important gaps in the overall support system for nuclear power.

Today, we are close to our goal of representing the entire nuclear industry. On our second goal - of representing it well - we will remain a work in progress.

Our most fundamental work occurs in WNA Working Groups comprised of member-company experts. Of these twelve groups now operating, four go back to the years of the Uranium Institute, and eight were created since the advent of the WNA.

One WNA work product has a long pedigree. Today, we issued the latest biennial Market Report, the newest in a series that continues to provide valuable projections of the world nuclear fuel market.

A constantly changing WNA product is our website, which has become the world's leading information resource on the global nuclear industry. We receive a hit on a WNA information paper once every 6 seconds around the clock. Ian Hore-Lacy continues to earn our thanks as the workhorse behind this achievement.

Eight months ago we launched World Nuclear News - a free-of-charge, web-based news service covering all developments relevant to nuclear power. Our aim was to provide one-stop shopping for global nuclear news.

For subscribers, WNN transmits daily and weekly emails, providing summaries and links to full stories that appear on the WNN website. Already six thousand users have chosen to receive these emails, most on a daily basis. If you are not among them, please visit the WNN site to subscribe.

I want to summarize where we stand in building the WNU partnership.

We inaugurated the WNU in 2003 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower's Atoms-for-Peace initiative. Our goal was to build internationalism in nuclear education and to inspire leadership and vision in the nuclear profession. We established the WNU as a unique partnership linking industry, academia, and government.

Our concept was to develop valuable, innovative activities while drawing particularly upon the skills and resources of four main global nuclear organizations we call "founding supporters". These are the WNA and WANO in the private sector and the IAEA and NEA in the public sector. The idea was that each organization would contribute in accord with its own purposes and capabilities.

Our inaugural ceremony four years ago was attended by the heads of all four founding supporters, along with leaders from industry and representatives of top academic and research institutions in 25 countries.

To plan and administer WNU activities, we formed the WNU Coordinating Centre, and began to staff it with secondees from governments and companies in key nuclear countries. This was not simply a matter of obtaining resources cost-free. Secondees were needed because they embody a decision by national nuclear establishments to commit to the WNU and because they provide effective operational linkage to nuclear institutions in those countries.

It has taken time, but we now have strong representation from France, the United States, Russia, South Korea and Canada. Additional secondments from other key countries have been promised.

WNA's contribution has been to provide leadership, a logistical base, and financial resources from voluntary member contributions. Meanwhile, the IAEA has played an essential role by supplying experts to WNU events and, equally important, by supporting the participation of representatives from developing nations who might not otherwise benefit. The other two founding supporters, NEA and WANO, have also contributed top experts to WNU events.

The WNU flagship has been the Summer Institute, which began successfully in Idaho in 2005 and had a repeated success in Sweden in 2006.

This year, Korea hosted the third Summer Institute - for 102 WNU Fellows from 35 countries. A six-week Summer Institute is a major production, and the entire Korean nuclear establishment joined to provide warm hospitality. Our Korean friends truly went all out, and we thank them for their enthusiasm and generosity.

Once again, the Summer Institute gained high ratings from all who participated - both the WNU Fellows and also some 50 senior nuclear professionals who arrived from all over the world to guide and instruct. These dozens of in-kind contributions were essential, as was the IAEA support that once again ensured the participation of developing countries.

Because of the overwhelming enthusiasm expressed by WNU Fellows and their parent organizations, we see the WNU Summer Institute as having established itself as a new institution in the world nuclear community. Already it has spawned a global network of some 275 former WNU Fellows, some of whom held their first reunion here in London two days ago.

We foresee that this network of young professionals will continue to grow, becoming the equivalent of an international nuclear fraternity and sorority combined.

Looking forward, we have several efforts underway to broaden the scope of WNU activities. This morning I will mention only two - one that just began, the other still a concept.

The first, which we launched this summer in Beijing, is a one-week orientation course on operations, trends and issues in today's global nuclear industry. In this pilot effort, Tsinghua University acted as host, and the WNU Coordinating Centre orchestrated the availability of nine expert teachers. In addition, at Chinese request, four top vendors - Areva, Westinghouse, GE-Hitachi and AECL - made presentations on project and engineering management.

The 200 Chinese attendees came from Chinese industry, government and academia. Their response was highly positive, and led to an immediate Chinese request for a repeat next year. Meanwhile, plans are afoot to take this road-show to Brazil and Argentina early next year and then to other venues in North America and Europe and throughout Asia.

This picture from Beijing shows three key WNU assets. One is young Chinese students and professionals eager to learn. Second is our publication "Nuclear English". The third is Steve Kidd, who did an excellent job in launching this WNU programme.

If you here today have a venue for such a WNU event and wish to host one, please let us know. If you produce the audience, WNU will supply the programme.

Another WNU programme is still a concept only: the International Nuclear Executive Seminar.

Our members have often suggested the need for a programme designed for executives in, or on the threshold of, positions of nuclear leadership. We hope, with your help, to design this Seminar to fill that need.

Top leaders in our industry are generally from one of two categories: either long-time nuclear professionals who have come up through the ranks or successful executives newly recruited from careers outside the industry. Our goal is a programme, perhaps one-week long, to stimulate and strengthen the capabilities of both.

Properly designed to mix expert presentations and candid peer discussion, this seminar will emphasize a full global perspective on matters affecting the future of nuclear power:

Like the Summer Institute, but at a senior level, we would like to see the Executive Seminar spawn an international network of nuclear leaders who have assimilated this global perspective. Please help us design an event that you yourself would wish to attend.

The WNU is still at an early stage. But this partnership has already demonstrated its potential to weave together the needs and capabilities of industry, government and academia to produce international cooperation that strengthens the nuclear profession.

We see the WNU as a complement to the work and responsibilities of all of its founding supporters - the IAEA, the NEA, WANO, and certainly as a valuable complement to WNA.

As the global nuclear renaissance accelerates, our world will ever more in need of the educational cooperation, the international perspective, the professional esprit, and the nuclear leadership that this unique global partnership can help to foster.

For myself, and also on behalf of Adrian Collings, who each year does a splendid job of orchestrating the Symposium programme, I again offer you a cordial welcome - as we now proceed to the presentation of the WNA Award.

Ladies and gentlemen, this Award ceremony represents to me both a welcome task and an easy one.

It is welcome because both of this year's recipients are men whom I regard as friends, and for whom I feel affection and real admiration. Each is a man of great personal charm who has managed to combine an instinct for privacy with a career of historic public service. Each man also married a terrific woman, and is the much the better for it.

Mine is also an easy task because the names and achievements of Dr Mohamed Elbaradei and Dr James Lovelock are so well known that they hardly require introduction. Indeed, anything I could say about them would hardly add to this ceremony.

A few minutes ago, I spoke of the complementarity between the contributions of the WNA and the WNU. Complementarity is also a concept that applies to the contributions made by these two men:

Dr Mohamed Elbaradei has presided for a decade over a great UN organization that this year celebrated its 50 th anniversary. It was in 1953 that President Eisenhower gave impetus to the creation of a world atomic energy agency. But it took four years for the international community to come together in the design and ratification of the IAEA Statute.

In the ensuing fifty years, the Agency has become the foundation stone for the global use of nuclear energy. This is true not simply because the IAEA is the centerpiece of the international nuclear non-proliferation system as it works to deter and detect illicit activity. Equally important is the Agency's role on the positive side of nuclear technology, as it builds consensus for essential standards of safety and security, while working to bring the full benefit of nuclear technology to nations throughout the world.

It suffices to say that if the International Atomic Energy Agency did not exist we would have to create it. We have many benefactors to thank - from Eisenhower to Elbaradei - that this essential job has been done.

Two years ago, the Nobel committee awarded its Peace Prize to Mohamed Elbaradei and to the IAEA. Mohamed kindly invited me and my wife Christina to the ceremony, and I hope he will not mind if I share some pictures that Christina snapped as Mohamed became a Nobel Laureate.

This is the beautiful hall in Oslo where the Nobel ceremonies are held.

Here is Mohamed delivering his acceptance speech.

These are two people in the audience. On the left is the actress Salma Hayek. On the right is an even more impressive beauty, Mohamed's proud mom.

The World Nuclear Association Award for "Distinguished Contribution to the Peaceful Worldwide Use of Nuclear Energy" may not rank with the Nobel Prize. But we humbly offer it with great enthusiasm and appreciation.

I am now pleased to ask Mohamed to come forward to accept this award, which we present both to him and to the IAEA secretariat.

[Presentation and Elbaradei remarks]

I am now delighted to introduce the second recipient of the WNA Award.

As with Mohamed Elbaradei, Jim Lovelock requires little introduction. Indeed, in recent years he has became a legend in the nuclear industry for combining a keen scientific understanding of our world's environmental peril with a forthright advocacy of nuclear energy as essential to any realistic strategy to mitigate this danger.

Those who have not read James Lovelock's books have missed both an education and a treat. No reader need be intimated by Jim's scientific brilliance. For his talent includes literary grace that conveys his stunning insights with clarity and persuasive power.

For the benefit of WNA members, we have been in touch with Jim's publishers to arrange that some of his books are available for purchase here today. I cannot promise on Jim's behalf, but I think it might be possible later this morning to have a book personally inscribed.

The latest of Jim's books, The Revenge of Gaia, takes its title from the Earth systems theory which Jim famously conceived. Gaia, the Greek goddess of Earth, was the name he gave to his revolutionary concept that the Earth's complex systems can be understood as a unified self-regulating system - not an organism as such, but analogous to one.

Many years ago, when he first enunciated his theory, Jim's ideas were deemed eccentric if not worse. Now, as sometimes happens with visionaries, Jim's theory is regarded as a central and organizing concept by many of the world's leading Earth systems scientists.

Through all of this, Jim has remained the same: quiet in demeanor, brilliant in intellect, independent in spirit - and, as you will learn from his autobiography, a man of passionate romance as well.

Jim Lovelock, we humbly welcome the opportunity to honor you with the WNA Award.

[Presentation and Lovelock remarks]

Ladies and gentlemen, this ends our Award ceremony. We will now have a coffee break until 10:30. Thank you very kindly for your attention and participation.

For journalists who have questions, Drs Elbaradei and Lovelock will be available here on stage for the next few minutes during the coffee break.