World Nuclear Association

Nuclear Power as a Global Imperative: Presenting the Case for Public Policy

John Ritch
Director General, World Nuclear Association

Closing Session
Third Annual Summer Institute of the World Nuclear University

Co-hosted by the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI),
Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Company (KHNP), and
Korea Nuclear Society (KNS)

Daejon, South Korea
24 August 2007

Dear colleagues and WNU Fellows:

Last month, I greeted this new class of WNU Fellows by saying that we were proud to have you here and we hoped you were equally proud to be here. This morning I would simply say that we are proud of you - as individuals and as a newly created family of young professionals. You have fulfilled our highest expectations in responding to the opportunity we sought to provide. I thank you and I applaud you for giving back to the Summer Institute the same level of motivation that we brought to the task of creating it.

In past years, WNU Chancellor Hans Blix and I have spoken at the Summer Institute's graduation in the evening. This year we are offering our graduation remarks in the morning. This will offer benefit for all concerned. Hans and I will catch you early in the day while you are still fresh and alert. And you in turn will be able to enjoy a graduation ceremony tonight that is free of speech-making. This will liberate you to focus your full energy on the higher pursuits of music, conversation, food, drink and dance.

This morning Hans and I will speak with a kind of division of labor. I will concentrate again, as I did in my remarks at the beginning of this Summer Institute, on the human and environmental imperatives that compel the worldwide use of nuclear power and that summon you, as future leaders in the nuclear world, to make the case for this technology in the ongoing debate over public policy. Hans will discuss the critical geopolitical dimensions of energy, including the dangerous consequences of the rising competition for fossil fuel and the further dangers arising from the failure of several leading nations to fulfill their responsibilities to pursue nuclear disarmament with serious intent.

In designing the Summer Institute's agenda, our main goal was to deepen your understanding of the essential value of nuclear technology in our modern world - and to strengthen your ability to explain that reality to your fellow citizens, who need the leadership we hope you will provide.

Each of you will find your own way of presenting this topic to your fellow citizens. And I have no doubt that some of you will find ways that are more creative and persuasive than mine.

The Case for Nuclear Power

This morning I will offer my own approach to the topic - my own way of understanding it and trying to explain it to others. In some of this, you will find a repetition of points and pictures that I offered to you six weeks ago. I ask your indulgence because I believe that these facts about the human condition describe a true global emergency. I hope you will incorporate them into your own way of thinking and into your efforts to motivate others.

To me, the case for nuclear power is best made using three premises that together comprise an argument of compelling force.

First, the nations of our world, as different as they may be, have in common a vast demand for energy. This collective demand is growing rapidly, both to meet basic human need on an unprecedented scale and to fulfill human aspirations. The world will use more energy in the next 50 years than in all previous history combined.
Second, our current methods of producing energy cannot be sustained. In the longer term, we face limits on fossil fuel supply. But even sooner, we face catastrophic environmental consequences threatening to all civilization. We can reconcile the imperatives of human need and environmental preservation only by means of a worldwide clean-energy revolution. And we have little time to achieve it.
Third, nuclear power represents by far the most capable clean-energy technology available to humankind. It is capable of being deployed and expanded on a vast global scale, and the arguments against so employing this indispensable asset are suffused with myth and misinformation that must be confronted and rebutted in the interest of the sound energy and environmental policies our world so urgently needs.

The Human Dimensions of the Environmental Crisis

Let us turn first to the global energy demand that is at the root of the crisis and look at the human realities that give rise to it. Here I will restate some basic truths that I presented six weeks ago. However familiar they may be, these realities are no less shocking in their significance. They underscore the compelling human dimensions of the global crisis we face.

This crisis, it bears emphasis, originates not in human evil, but in human success: humanity's accumulating, accelerating success in acquiring, disseminating, and applying science-based knowledge. It is this success - taking form in agriculture, industry, commerce, and medicine - that has spawned the growth in human population and the gathering threat to our environment.

Viewed through history's eye, this success has come in a sudden burst. Through virtually all of the 50,000 years since humans first appeared, world population never exceeded 10 million.

Then, at some point within the last 2,000 years, something happened. To take a phrase from nuclear science, human inventiveness reached critical mass, and advance led to advance at increasing speed.

Within the last 2,000 years - as shown here - these gains in knowledge brought enlightenment and prosperity to hundreds of millions of people. But the surge of world population also carried a consequence. Before, humanity's effect on our Earth's ecosystems was like a flea on a camel - wholly inconsequential.

But in just the 200 years we call the Industrial Age - the time frame pictured in this slide - humanity became an influence on Earth's fundamental mechanisms. Now this impact - this anthropogenic impact - threatens to destroy the very environmental conditions that enabled human success.

This map sequence illustrates humanity's growth over the past two millennia. Note that it took 50,000 years for population to reach one billion, a little more than a century to reach two billion, 33 years to reach three billion, 14 years to reach four billion, 13 years to reach five billion, 12 years to reach six billion. Today we are at 6.6 billion people, with 9 billion projected by the year 2050.

Viewing this population through an economic lens serves to describe the human condition. What we find is a world of extremes.

At one end of the scale are the OECD countries, where global prosperity is centred. These wealthy nations represent a mere one-sixth of humanity. At the other end are the world's poorest. Here an equal number of people - 1.1 billion - live in destitution with constant hunger, no clean water, the death of a child every 3 seconds, and virtually no income or prospect of improvement.

Back at the wealthier end of the spectrum, if we add the 300 million semi-prosperous population of the former Soviet bloc, we find that 1.4 billion of the world's people - just over 20% - account for 80% of global economic consumption. This means that 80% of the world's people subsist on 20% of world production of goods and services.

The 80% of humanity in the poor and developing world continues to increase. The rate is 20,000 per day. Think of it as the birth of a new city of 6 million people once each month. Our world's problem is not shrinking; it is worsening by the day.

The poorest 1.1 billion people are categorized as being in "extreme" poverty. Another 1.6 billion are classified as being in "moderate" poverty - just a small step above abject misery. They have little sanitation and virtually no money. They survive amidst pollution and disease.

The energy dimension of poverty is fundamental. Poverty correlates so closely to the absence of electricity that access to electricity is the best single barometer to gauge a person's standard of living. In today's world of 6.6 billion, a full 2 billion people have no electricity, and 2 billion more have only limited access. In other words, just 40% of the world's people can easily switch on the lights.

Numbers on the same scale apply to clean water. Today, world water tables are falling under the demands of expanding human consumption. As this crisis emerges, we can expect the growing shortage of potable water to produce thirst, disease, and water wars - in other words, a deadly combination of human suffering and human strife. As a remedy, we have one available tool: large-scale desalination of seawater, an energy-intensive process that will compound global energy demand.

Finally, we have the great mass of humanity positioned between poverty and prosperity. This population, poised for advance, will be the engine of our world's future economic development.

In terms of future energy use, the human condition divides us into three categories: those with energy access who will continue to use it, those with none who desperately need it, and those poised in between, whose drive for economic advance is producing an expanded use of energy and, with it, an intensified outpouring of greenhouse emissions.

The environmental impact of this central group cannot be overstated. Soon greenhouse emissions from developing nations will equal the emissions from the countries we now call developed. After that, emissions from the developing world will be the major driver of global climate change.

This single fact underscores the magnitude, the urgency, and the nature of the challenge we face. It should make clear to all but the most committed ideologue that, while energy conservation, windmills, and solar panels may help, we cannot hope to rely on such measures alone to meet our world's expanding appetite for more energy.

The Ominous Dynamics of Climate Change

Let us now turn to the second premise of the case for nuclear power, by looking out the effects of those emissions if we fail to achieve a global clean-energy revolution.

A starting point is to recognize just how narrow is the arena of Earthly life. When we look upward, either in the daylight or under the stars, it is a natural human instinct to think of the sky as an unlimited expanse.

In fact, our atmosphere represents little more than a thin coating on the Earth's surface. In full, the atmosphere extends reaches 350 miles high.

But most of the atmosphere - more than 99% of its molecules - is concentrated far lower, in the troposphere and stratosphere, no more than 30 miles high.

The biosphere is even narrower, just 12 miles in bandwidth.

Take an ordinary soccer ball and coat it with just a few layers of varnish. The thickness of that coating will represent the biosphere. If you apply several more coats, the thickness will equal the atmosphere above us, including the canopy of greenhouse gases. This thin shell of atmosphere is a very small rubbish bin indeed to hold the massive volumes of fossil waste we continue to spew into it.

Our current rate of global greenhouse emissions into this thin, life-nurturing envelope is 27 billion tonnes per year, which equates to 900 tonnes per second.

To recognize the thinness of life's arena is to appreciate its potential fragility. Assessing just how fragile is the work of the world's leading Earth scientists, who pool their knowledge through the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Earth scientists may never achieve the precise predictive powers of short-term weather forecasting. But they have reconstructed the interactive processes and great cycles that have governed conditions on our planet for millions of years.

They have achieved this historical record by gathering ice cores, tree rings, fossils, and deep sentiments in the world's lakes and oceans and by applying exquisitely sophisticated techniques of chemical and isotopic analysis.

The resulting database - and their understanding as to cause and effect - is now extensive enough to support elaborate computer modeling of how our biosphere has worked and how it may respond when Earth's most basic mechanisms are altered by human activity.

No mechanism is more fundamental to events on Earth's surface than the carbon cycle, the processes by which all carbon atoms on Earth circulate through our planet's living and non-living matter in land, water, and air. One such process is photosynthesis, whereby plants convert carbon dioxide to oxygen. The carbon cycle is fundamental to life.

Over the very long term, the carbon cycle is also integral to the great ebbs and flows by which the Earth has experienced, through hundreds of millennia, a fairly regular alternation between ice ages and what are called interglacial ages.

The stimulus for these great cycles is found in periodic changes in the angle of Earth's rotational axis and in the shape of our orbit around the sun.

Through millions of years, these changes have triggered great cycles between ice ages and interglacials. What Earth scientists have come to understand is that once an era of warming or cooling begins, the processes of the carbon cycle act to accentuate it.

This kind of "positive feedback" occurs, for example, in a cooling climate when cooler temperatures enable both the oceans and also Earth's soil to absorb more carbon. This greater carbon absorption, by drawing down the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, reduces the greenhouse effect and adds further to Earth's cooling.

For Earth science, it is now a fundamental principle that such positive feedback makes CO₂ and temperature mutually reinforcing, both on the way up and on the way down. Through the periodic ice ages and interglacials of the last 400,000 years, this phenomenon is especially well documented.

Indeed, during those cycles Earth's temperature has moved in almost perfect correlation with the level of CO₂.

It is this mechanism - the most fundamental of Earth systems - with which humanity is now tampering.

We can quantify this tampering in terms of atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. Over the past 400,000 years, this density has oscillated between 175 and 275 parts per million. When the Industrial Revolution began, the greenhouse concentration happened to be at the top of this range and could have been expected to fall gradually in the absence of human effect.

Instead, greenhouse density is racing upward and off history's chart. Today greenhouse density stands at an unprecedented 380 parts per million.

This density is growing at the rate of 2-3 ppm per year. Earth scientists believe that somewhere between 450-550 ppm the build-up of greenhouse gases will become irreversible, at least for thousands of years.

While the driver in this process is fossil fuel use, a large secondary factor is the drastic reduction in Earth's capacity for carbon absorption because so much of our planet's fertile surface - about half already - has been converted from forest to farmland to feed the expanding population that is producing those emissions. This in itself should give pause to those who argue that we can meet the world's voracious appetite for fuel by growing it on farmland.

This combination of factors - an unceasing deluge of greenhouse gases and reduced capacity for carbon absorption - would in itself constitute a full-blown global emergency.

But this danger is not all. It is compounded by scientific concern that a powerful combination of feedback phenomena could accelerate the warming process and also create tipping points of enormous instability and sudden change. The result would be radical shifts in climate so violent as to disrupt whole populations.

When we list them, these positive feedback phenomena may sound dry and esoteric, but their collective potential is momentous.

First is reduced reflectivity. The loss of Artic, Greenland, Antarctic and other ice will reduce Earth's reflectivity. Meanwhile, in Siberia and Canada, snow covered land will be replaced by heat-absorbing boreal forests.
Second is a loss of cooling from algae in the sea. Warming seas, by stratifying, become less hospitable to algae, reducing their huge role as a CO₂ absorber and as a producer of protective clouds. The clouds result from the algae's release of the chemical DMS - dimethyl sulfide.
Third is the loss of cooling from tropical forests. As hotter temperatures destabilize the ecosystems of tropical forests, turning them to desert and scrub, they will cease to absorb CO₂ and to produce protective cloud-cover. The same land will instead become a heat-absorbing surface.
Fourth is methane release from thawing tundra. In Serbia and Alaska , thawing tundra will release massive amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas 24 times more potent than CO₂.
Finally, there will be a collective release of CO₂ from dying algae and forests, and from fires that will sweep across the vast plains of dried tundra.

While all five of these factors will intensify global warming, at least some negative feedback is also expected. For example, turbulent weather could help to roil the seas, preventing stratification and the loss of algae. And in a warmer climate, greater growth of moss on rocks could add to CO₂ absorption. But Earth scientists evaluate potential negative feedback as far weaker than the powerful effects of positive feedback.

It is the "locking-in" effect of positive feedback that yields the prediction by Earth science that global warming may become irreversible at a greenhouse density of about 500 ppm.

A wildcard for Earth scientists is what impact global warming may have on the great ocean currents that influence climate by transferring heat throughout our world. This flow is driven by wind and by disparities in water temperature and salinity. In particular, much investigation is focused on whether and when the flooding of the north Atlantic with fresh water from melting arctic ice could begin to blunt the Gulf Stream .

If this occurred, either suddenly or gradually, global warming could have the paradoxical effect of plunging temperatures in Europe and North America . But any such chilling effect from reduced heat transfer would be regional only. If and as London and Paris descended into the frigid climate of Lapland , an even sharper temperature rise would occur somewhere else. Inside the greenhouse, there is no escape.

The Gulf Stream question illustrates the unknowable in climate change. But what we do know is that the sharp rise in global temperature now projected has no precedent in human history, either in suddenness or in severity.

We know too that our best Earth scientists are now warning, as a matter of informed judgement and with ever increasing certainty, that greenhouse gas emissions, if continued at the present massive scale, will yield consequences that are - quite literally - apocalyptic: increasingly radical temperature changes, a worldwide upsurge in violent weather events, widespread drought, flooding, wildfires, famine, species extinction, rising sea levels, mass migration and epidemic disease that will leave no country untouched.

If the predictions from this science hold true, the combined effect - of greenhouse gas emissions and the compounding reverberations from positive feedback in our world's oceans, land and air - will be the deaths of not just millions but of billions of people, and the destruction of much of civilization on all continents.

The Crucial Premise for Action: The Necessity of Nuclear Power

Given the stakes, our response to this crisis must derive from a simple application of the precautionary principle and from simple logic.

Our starting point for action must be agreement on a basic premise that emerges from every authoritative analysis:

Humankind cannot conceivably achieve a global clean-energy revolution without a huge expansion of nuclear power - to generate electricity for traditional uses, to produce battery power and possibly hydrogen for tomorrow's vehicles, and to desalinate seawater in response to the world's rapidly emerging fresh-water crisis.

This brings us to the final premise in the case for nuclear power: its essentiality in any sound energy and environmental strategy and the consequent necessity to rebut myth-ridden arguments against it.

Under fair and dispassionate examination, nuclear power is indeed no less than the quintessential energy resource for sustainable development:

Its fuel will be readily available for multiple centuries
Its presence confers energy autonomy
Its safety record is superior among major energy sources
Its consumption causes virtually no pollution or greenhouse gases
Its use preserves fossil resources for future generations
Its capacities are scalable, from smaller reactors to large
Its costs are competitive and declining
Its waste can be secured over the long-term
Its operations are manageable in developed & developing nations.

Certainly renewables such as solar and wind and tidal and geothermal will have a role. So too must energy conservation and higher energy efficiency.

But none of these tools can alter the central fact that nuclear power offers the one available technological workhorse to energize a thriving economy without destructive environmental impact.

Recognition of this truth, and action based upon it, is now reflected in a worldwide nuclear renaissance that is gathering speed and momentum. The task we ask of you to accelerate it.

Answering Public Concerns with Clarity and Conviction

As to the "public concerns" so often cited in daily journalism, a fair assessment shows that not one poses a reasonable obstacle to a global expansion of nuclear power. Indeed, many common allegations are close to the opposite of the truth.

1) Proliferation. Nuclear proliferation, of course, remains a global concern, and much can be said about how best to deal with the few rogue nations that may seek atomic weapons by constructing facilities that can produce weapons-usable material. Our industry stands ready to work with the IAEA and national governments in exploring ways to curtail this risk.

But the essential truths are these:

Fundamentally, nuclear proliferation danger comes not from the existence of nuclear facilities, but from the intentions of those who possess them. The intent of an Iran or a North Korea is a geopolitical variable that is essentially independent of whether countries like Brazil, Canada, South Africa, or Australia develop additional nuclear fuel-cycle facilities. Where specific problems arise, the international community must develop specific responses.
Moreover, given the environmental dangers that beset our world today, there is no global security measure more urgent or important than the nuclear renaissance itself. Thus, the expansion of nuclear power must proceed in parallel with, and not be delayed by, ongoing efforts to strengthen the IAEA-led framework within which peaceful nuclear technology is employed. Whatever proliferation risk we face would be essentially unaffected even by a 20-fold increase in the global use of properly safeguarded nuclear reactors to produce clean energy.

2) Operational Safety. Second, our industry has met the challenge of operational safety through technological advance and a global nuclear safety culture that draws on nearly 13,000 reactor-years of practical experience.

Just as the NPT is a great feat in traditional diplomacy, the creation of WANO - with its network of safety cooperation encompassing every power reactor worldwide - represents an historic attainment in private-sector diplomacy.

Our industry should be enormously proud of WANO and spare no effort in supporting its work.

For the nuclear industry's greatest responsibility is to maintain and build on its already impressive record of nuclear safety.

3) Cost Reduction. On the cost front, the industry's steady reductions in both operational and capital costs are fast carrying us into a future in which nuclear power will emerge as a clear winner on the field of affordability.

These gains have occurred even without any consideration of environmental effects. Once governments begin to introduce serious emissions penalties - through emissions trading or carbon taxes - the balance will tilt even faster. Today nuclear power can easily dominate any market that imposes a real price for environmental damage.

4) Waste Management. As to waste, industry and government have the joint task of building public recognition that, contrary to common perception, waste is nuclear power's greatest comparative asset - precisely because the volume is minimal and can be safely managed without harm to people or the environment.

For its part, the industry has amassed an impressive record that includes:

Safe disposal of all low-level waste
Safe interim storage of all other end products from nearly a half century of nuclear power plant operations
Safe transport of radioactive waste, with more than 20,000 containers of high-level waste and used fuel having travelled a total distance of 20 million miles without any instance of a serious radioactive release.

Where major responsibility lies now is with governments. A strong scientific consensus favours deep geological repositories as a safe and affordable means of achieving long-term storage of nuclear waste and used nuclear fuel. It is the duty of governments - following the lead of Finland, Sweden, Russia, and the USA - to summon the political will to implement this crucial component of the nuclear fuel cycle.

5) A New Concern: Terrorism. A new public concern is terrorism, and here we must rely on facts, common sense and public education to overcome exaggerated concern.

The use of a radiological device in a modern city - often called a weapon of mass disruption - is clearly a security concern in many countries, and one not to be discounted. What can be said with some confidence is that, if such a device is ever used, the radiological material will almost surely - for simple reasons of availability - come from a source such as a hospital and not from the nuclear power industry.

As for the vulnerability of nuclear power plants, they are, by their very nature, among the most robust structures ever built. As repeated studies have shown, even a direct hit by a major airplane, which itself would require superlative piloting, would be unlikely to result in a seriously harmful radioactive release. Indeed, with a 21^st century nuclear reactor, the same can be said even if the reactor fell for some time into the hands of a team of people with malevolent intent. A modern nuclear power plant is simply not an effective instrument for raining destruction on a nearby populace.

Unfortunately, a terrorist seeking to achieve either slaughter or mayhem can find, in a modern industrial metropolis, what the military calls a target-rich environment. Fortunately, those of nefarious purpose will find nuclear power plants very low on the list of inviting targets.

6) New Red Herrings: Fuel, People, Key Equipment.

In addition to traditional public concerns - concerning proliferation, safety, cost, and waste - and the new concern about terrorism, a few additional questions have recently been introduced into the energy debate by opponents of nuclear energy purporting to be industry analysts.

A "red herring" is an idiomatic way of describing a phoney or diversionary issue, and I sometimes think that nuclear professionals are condemned to swim in a sea of these fish. Three new herrings have now appeared in our sea.

Each is an allegation that a robust nuclear renaissance simply cannot unfold because of systemic shortages - either of fuel, or of people, or of major reactor equipment such as reactor pressure vessels. In all three cases, nuclear opponents are taking a short-term industry concern about potential temporary bottlenecks and extrapolating it - either disingenuously or by misguided analysis - into an assertion of longer-term incapacity.

In fact, in none of these cases does the industry itself worry seriously for the longer-term. In each case - fuel, people, and key equipment - there is every reason to believe that market mechanisms will generate supply to meet demand:

Regarding nuclear fuel, the industry has full confidence that a combination of factors - new ore discoveries, new mining techniques, the introduction of the thorium fuel cycle, and the use of breeder reactors - will ensure ample and affordable nuclear fuel supplies into the distant future.
Regarding people, we need only recall that the education required for those who will operate a reactor can proceed contemporaneously with the reactor's construction. Thus, the industry can rely on that famous dictum from the American cinema classic Field of Dreams: "If you build it, they will come." In the movie, this requires an act of faith. In today's real-world case, we can be certain that a stream of new reactor builds around the world will register itself strongly in the educational and career choices of top young scientists and engineers everywhere.
Finally, as to key nuclear reactor equipment, anyone who believes that a demand for engineering and manufacturing services will long go unmet in today's globalized market, hasn't recently been to Asia . Japan's capabilities in this regard are already well know, and this Summer Institute has served as a showcase for Korea's. Recently I met with the chief engineer of India's biggest engineering company, a corporation with global reach. When I mentioned the alleged future shortage of reactor pressure vessels, my Indian friend simply smiled, and then went on to detail his own company's strategic plans to help fill this niche.

Let is be said that the nuclear renaissance will not be thwarted by a lack of fuel, personnel or equipment. The only essential and still doubtful ingredients are public will, vision and policy.

History's Greatest Challenge

My summary is this: If the history of humankind is a river, we have reached the white water.

The challenge we face has arisen from the untrammelled consequences of technological progress, and humanity must meet this challenge with an adroit technological response - and soon. Doing so will require every ounce of political will and human ingenuity we can muster through the combined forces of industry and government.

Let us attach numbers to the task of using nuclear power to full effect. Today nuclear energy is using 440 reactors to produce one-sixth of the world's electricity. From an environmental perspective, it will not be adequate if the nuclear industry simply doubles, or triples, or quadruples its capacity in this century.

We must place ourselves on a trajectory for a 21^st century nuclear industry that achieves the deployment of nothing less than 8,000-10,000 Gigawatts of nuclear power - a twenty-fold increase. To strive for anything less would be to invite environmental disaster.

Is this simply pie-in-the-sky? Recall this: In the 1980's, France alone started-up 42 major nuclear power reactors. From a standing start in the 1970's, France brought on-line, in a single decade, 1,000 Megawatts of nuclear power for every one-million of its citizens - enough to meet virtually all of the electricity needs of a modern industrial society for decades to come.

The projection on the screen simply spreads the same achievement - over the course of a full century - to a wider world that will not be starting from a standstill and that will need nuclear energy for transport and desalination as well as traditional electricity. If, in the public domain, we can achieve clarity about the dangers that beset us and galvanize leadership - national and international - to employ the tools at hand, success in this task lies within the wit and capacity of humankind.

What is pie-in-the-sky is to believe that humanity can avoid environmental calamity without clean-energy achievement on this scale.

In the early 1930's, recognizing an impending world threat of an entirely different kind, Winston Churchill called for British rearmament as the only hope of forestalling it. "Never," he said, "has an insurance so blessed and so fertile been procurable so cheaply." Today the same could be said of nuclear power.

Another great Englishman, the historian H.G. Wells, viewed life as "a race between education and catastrophe". Today this adage applies to all humankind. Our world is in dire peril, the race between education and catastrophe is underway, and we have no time to lose.

For those of us in the nuclear profession, history has bestowed both a solemn obligation and, on the other side of that coin, an inspiring opportunity.

This Summer Institute is, on one level, intended to be an enjoyable, career-building experience. But we also see it as a convocation of future leaders who today hold a monumental responsibility - to make a vital contribution to victory in a fateful race that will determine the sustainability of humanity's future.

It is time for nuclear professionals to speak with conviction, it is time for citizens everywhere to recognize that the nuclear industry represents a mature and immensely valuable technology, and it is time for political leaders to support the rapidly expanded use of this technology if we are to cope with a global emergency that has no borders. Your leadership will be needed if this fateful evolution in human behaviour is to occur.

Introduction of Chancellor Hans Blix

It is now my pleasure to introduce our Chancellor. Hans Blix has lived a life of achievement and historic contribution. During 16 years as head of the IAEA and then during 3 years as head of the UN's Iraq inspectorate, he performed with such a combination of integrity, values, vision, and leadership that he came, quite rightly and long before this service was over, to be widely recognized and esteemed as a world statesman. Most recently, this statesmanship showed itself again in his leadership of the distinguished international commission that produced landmark recommendations on global disarmament.

In these roles, Hans has made a strong contribution both to the institutions of world governance and to the supporting institutions that provide the indispensable framework for the constructive worldwide use of nuclear energy. It is quite fitting, and we are very proud, that he is the World Nuclear University's Chancellor.

Hans Blix offers you, as WNU Fellows, a role model in two respects: first, in his commitment and contribution to public service; and second, in his principled devotion to spreading important ideas that must be embraced into public policy. We hope that your participation in the Summer Institute will inspire you to emulate our Chancellor in both respects - as public servant and as public educator.

Hans Blix has demonstrated that one person's efforts can ripple into far-reaching effects, and we hope that you, as the third class of WNU Fellows, will go forth, individually and collectively, to create new ripples of your own. I am proud to introduce my friend, Hans Blix.