Nuclear Energy in the 21st Century:
A Global Perspective

Remarks by John Ritch
Director General, World Nuclear Association

Adam Smith Institute International Energy Symposium

London, 15 March 2004

Distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen:

In my three years here in London as head of the WNA, nothing has been starker to me than the disparity between British national energy policy and the realities I see unfolding in the world beyond.

When I arrived, BNFL and British Energy seemed poised to play central roles in a global nuclear renaissance. Three years later, this prospect - in the British dimension - has faded severely.

This I attribute not to any fundamental failure within those companies, whatever their deficiencies might be - nor to any fundamental flaw in the extraordinarily valuable nuclear technology they represent, which holds a prominent place in energy planning in most of the world's major countries.

Rather, I attribute this decline to the continuation of a confused and - I would be so blunt as to say - craven government policy that has contrived to ensure their weakness as potential instruments of British world leadership.

British policy has been shaped by timidity from within, responding to fantasy from without.

Britain's political leaders have performed admirably in embracing strategic goals for clean energy. But where the government has failed - and to a degree fast approaching the tragic - is in its inability to come to terms with how those goals might realistically be achieved.

Instead, the government has adhered to the conventional wisdoms espoused by organised environmentalism, where blind ideological conviction far outweighs scientific truth.

In so doing, the British government is manifesting a profound negligence with regard to retaining, in the decades ahead, the degree of energy independence that would afford the British people a necessary defence against severe supply interruptions and price spikes that could wreak havoc across this great land.

Last Wednesday's drama on BBC-2 was a valuable journalistic effort to alert the British people to what may lie in store.

Let me state plainly a fundamental truth that should be at the heart of the national energy policy - and environmental policy - and global development policy - of any great nation:

In the century ahead, nuclear energy will be nothing less than indispensable if we are to meet the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced - which is to cope with our world's vast and expanding human needs without destroying the very Earthly environment that enabled our civilization to evolve.

Our planet's fragile biosphere is now at risk, and history has reached a momentous point where the fate of humanity hinges on whether we can summon the will and the ingenuity to produce clean energy on a massive global scale - a scale our nations cannot realistically hope to attain without an expansive use of nuclear power.

To fail in this is to invite real and unmitigated catastrophe - for people everywhere and for our global environment.

Today there are some 440 nuclear power reactors, generating one-sixth of the world's electricity. With global energy demand steadily rising, a clean-energy future will require thousands - ideally, at least 5,000 by mid-century, producing not only electricity but also hydrogen and clean water - if we are to mount a concerted strategy to avert environmental catastrophe.

Dimensions of the Global Environmental Crisis

For many environmentalists, any such projection will still seem shocking if not sacrilegious - a violation of basic assumptions in the environmentalist faith.

But if organised environmentalists have not yet embraced nuclear power, they are acutely aware - and have helped to build awareness - of the crisis we truly face:

They have warned cogently of the enormous consequences - human and environmental - of our world's unprecedented explosion in human numbers.
They have warned compassionately that, of today's 6 billion people, more than half live in dire conditions - and that we must urgently find new ways to meet these needs without jeopardising the global environment.
They have warned alarmingly that expanding populations are quickly depleting the world's precious supplies of fresh water, lowering water tables so drastically that, within 25 years, half the world's people could be without reliable access to potable water - unless we can somehow achieve large-scale desalination of water from our oceans and seas.
They have warned that we face new energy needs in the rising global demand for food and housing and basic services, and they have warned of the dire consequences - through pollution and global warming - if those needs are met by continued use of fossil fuel.
They have warned that stark evidence of global warming is already all around us: that the hottest years in recorded history have occurred in the past decade, that weather catastrophes are on the rise, and that icecaps and glaciers are melting from Africa to Alaska.
They have warned that global warming could, in this century, raise sea levels by as much as 20 feet, flooding thousands of islands and coastal cities worldwide and inundating countries like Bangladesh.
They have warned that the ongoing melting of the Arctic iceberg and Greenland's huge icesheet could entirely disrupt the Atlantic Gulf Stream, bringing to an end the benign delivery of warm air and water to Western Europe, and thereby leaving Britain - and even much of continental Europe - with climates as cold and severe as Lapland's.
They have warned that global warming is also greatly accelerating the worldwide loss of biodiversity, so much so that, within the next 50 years alone, a full one-fourth of all species on our planet - I repeat, a full one-fourth of all species within the next 50 years - will be lost to extinction, never to appear on Earth again.

This is a powerful message of global crisis.

Sceptics, cynics, curmudgeons - and, ironically, many conservatives - may wish to ignore it. For my own part, far from disparaging these concerns, I find the environmentalist case compelling, profoundly alarming and a clear summons to public action.

So too does the Chief UK Science Adviser, Sir David King, whose activism in this regard reflects both his personal merit and also the value of having such a position in the British government.

By its sheer magnitude and severity, the global environmental crisis will not allow us the luxury of political posturing or fuzzy thinking. We must discard preconceptions and ideology, assess our options carefully and build - with clear logic and determination - a feasible, science-based plan for collective action.

The Urgent Necessity of a Decisive Strategic Response

Let us state the case - both the problem and the logic of its solution - in the clearest possible terms:

In the next 50 years, as global population grows from 6 to 9 billion, human need will multiply - and, in the absence of dramatic measures, so too will human misery.

As nations try to meet this need, the rate of world energy consumption will double or even triple, and - in just this narrow 50-year period alone - humankind will use more energy than in all previous history combined.

Today, despite much rhetoric and diplomacy, the global rate of CO₂ emissions - now 25 billion tonnes a year, or 800 tonnes a second - continues to rise inexorably and so too does the atmospheric build-up of these heat-trapping gases.

The implications of this unprecedented accumulation can be found in the Earth's history over the last 400,000 years, which shows CO₂ levels fluctuating between 200 and 300 parts-per-million and atmospheric temperature fluctuating - by about 15 degrees Centigrade - in almost perfect correlation.

Now, however, human activity in the industrial age has suddenly - in geological time - raised CO₂ concentrations to well above any pre-industrial level.

Today's level of 350 parts-per-million might in itself sound less than alarming. What is undeniably alarming, however, is the projected level. Unless we achieve prompt and drastic global action to curb greenhouse emissions, atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ will reach double the pre-industrial level by the middle of the 21st century and will continue to rise thereafter.

To stabilise greenhouse gases - even at a dangerously higher level - scientists calculate that daily global emissions must be cut, within the next 50 years, by at least 50%.

Since developing countries such as China and India will inevitably emit far more greenhouse gases, the already industrialised countries must, if we are to preserve the biosphere, cut emissions by 75% - and also lead in disseminating clean-energy technology worldwide.

The Crucial Contribution of Nuclear Energy

We face a future of radical change. Either we will achieve radical transformation in the global economy or we will experience a radical upsurge in human suffering and a radical alteration in the global environment.

How are we to accomplish a massive worldwide shift to clean energy technologies?

Authoritative projections by the International Energy Agency (in the public sector) and the World Energy Council (in the private sector) point unambiguously to the same conclusion - that our need for clean energy on a colossal scale cannot conceivably be met without a sharply increased use of nuclear power.

In fact, nuclear power is the quintessential sustainable development technology:

Its fuel will be available for multiple centuries, its safety record is superior among major energy sources, its consumption causes virtually no pollution, its use preserves precious fossil resources for future generations, its costs are competitive and declining, and its waste can be securely managed over the long-term.

The world's environmentalists have performed many valuable services. But they can provide their fellow citizens no greater service now than to discard the fiction that conservation, solar panels and windmills alone can meet human needs.

Sustainability requires nuclear energy; and the path of sound environmentalism today is to embrace, fight for - and finance - a future in which nuclear power and "new renewables" function as clean-energy partners in a transformed global economy.

For affirmation of this principle, environmentalists need look no farther than to Professor James Lovelock, one of our world's truly pre-eminent leaders in the development of global environmental consciousness.

Hydrogen: Distributing the Clean-Energy Benefits of Nuclear Power

Achieving consensus on the value of a nuclear-renewables partnership is all the more vital because another atomic marvel - the ability to unite hydrogen and oxygen to make electricity - is about to transform our world and lift our prospects for a clean-energy future.

Hydrogen offers a means, for the first time in history, to store enormous quantities of electricity - for use, on demand, in cleanly powered transportation and in the full range of traditional electrical uses for home and industry.

But hydrogen's environmental value depends on making it cleanly - using the clean primary energy that only nuclear power can provide on a vast scale.

Hydrogen provides the bridge by which nuclear power can contribute not just to base-load electricity but to the entire spectrum of energy use.

With this bridge, it is now possible for the first time to envisage a thriving, large-scale, emissions-free industrial economy - with nuclear power and renewables providing clean primary energy for direct electricity and for electricity storage via hydrogen.

The man whom many have dubbed the father of the hydrogen-fuel cell, Geoffrey Ballard, describes this as an economy operating on "hydricity". As both a pioneer and a realist, Ballard was early to recognise the essential role of nuclear power, and he has been wise and forthright in saying so.

Hydricity is exciting technologically, and can also inspire action diplomatically. Our great need is for a comprehensive treaty regime in which all the nations of the world - developed and developing - undertake a binding commitment to use emissions trading as the driving economic incentive for a long-term evolution to a global clean energy economy.

Our failure thus far traces ultimately to the lack of a plausible vision as to how a collective commitment to deep emissions cuts might realistically be fulfilled.

The emergence of a technologically feasible, widely understood clean-energy vision could break this logjam, stimulating nations to undertake the commitments that will accelerate the vision's fulfilment.

An Expansive Nuclear Future

A future in which nuclear power plays a central role in supporting hydricity will not require a radical change - but only an acceleration - in current trends:

For four consecutive decades - including the 1990's - nuclear power has been the fastest growing major energy source in the world. And today:

Thirty-one nations representing 2/3 of humanity have nuclear power;
Important nations representing an additional half-billion people - including Indonesia and Vietnam - are planning to use it for the first time;
Nations representing half of world population are building nuclear power plants, with 30 reactors under construction and 34 more definitely planned;
The U.S. nuclear industry, owners of the world's largest nuclear fleet, plans 50% growth over the next 20 years; and
Nuclear planners in the world's largest nations, China and India, envisage at least 250 reactors in each country by mid-century - targets we must hope they will exceed if the biosphere is to be preserved.

The essential issue about nuclear power is not whether it will grow but how fast:

Will it grow fast enough to meet the world's urgent need for clean energy on a massive scale?
Will we further strengthen the global infrastructure of people and institutions to guide and promote its growth?

Transnational Support for the Global Nuclear Industry

The role of the World Nuclear Association is to promote positive answers to these essential questions.

In this role, we are part of the basic support structure for the global nuclear industry, a support structure composed of:

Intergovernmental organisations: the IAEA and the OECD's Nuclear Energy Agency; and
Private sector organisations: WANO and the WNA.

Among these four organisations, there is a clearly recognised division of labour and also a considerable degree of cooperation. Together, we serve to strengthen the technologies, standards, safety culture and skills associated with nuclear power - and to broaden public understanding of this invaluable technology.

Last year the four organisations began to collaborate on an exciting project that we believe will make an enormous contribution to global sustainable development.

Last September at the annual WNA conference here in London - with the heads of all four organisations in attendance - we inaugurated a new institution, called the World Nuclear University, which is designed to strengthen the educational foundations of the global nuclear industry for an expanding role in the 21st century.

The mission of the WNU is to:

Improve the quality of nuclear course work everywhere;
Build student interest and enrolment worldwide; and
Move toward a globalisation of standards and credentials in this increasingly global industry.

The essence of the WNU is a network of leading institutions of nuclear education and research in more than two dozen countries worldwide.

The WNU will not itself have a campus or a large faculty. Instead, using a small secretariat co-located with WNA and WANO in London, it will act as unifying force:

Coordinating cooperation within the WNU network of educational and research institutions; and
Acting as a link between them and the four global organisations that cooperated to found the WNU partnership.

We see the World Nuclear University as a powerful idea whose time has come, as we prepare for this nuclear century.

A Race between Education and Catastrophe

The great George Orwell described human life as a "race between education and catastrophe". This truth, which applies to individuals and to society as a whole, neatly summarises the precariousness of our human existence, and our tightrope walk over the abyss of self-destructive irrationality.

Today we as a civilization face the unprecedented danger of ruining the very biosphere that nurtured our growth as a species and as a social order. Yet we now have at hand the tools we need to avert that threat - and, instead of succumbing to our own excesses, to build an ever stronger and more successful civilization.

In all history, the race between education and catastrophe has never been more intense than that we are engaged in today.

Those of us in the nuclear industry have the opportunity and responsibility to contribute to victory for enlightenment and progress in the race against folly and catastrophe.

Nuclear Energy in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective

Nuclear Energy in the 21st Century:
A Global Perspective