Confronting History's Greatest Crisis:
The Crucial 21st Century Role of Nuclear Power
Remarks by John Ritch
Director General, World Nuclear Association
"Forum in Berlin"
Berlin, 2 December 2004
Ladies and gentlemen, I am honoured to speak to this distinguished group on an urgent challenge that I believe must rise to the top of the policy agenda of every great nation.
My topic is the relationship between the energy we produce to power modern society and the need to preserve our global environment.
I speak to you not as an expert on nuclear technology but as a liberal internationalist who became convinced of the indispensable value of nuclear technology in meeting a rising global environmental danger that is fast becoming the greatest crisis in human history.
Reconciling energy and the environment is a challenge technically. But the challenge is even greater politically - because nations, like people, exhibit human weakness and human foibles.
The prime example is my own country, which remains in a state of psychological denial about the dangers of global warming. Sadly, this national mentality is fostered by a President who encourages an ethic of personal selfishness rather than acting to assume national responsibility and to the lead the world by positive example.
Germany, meanwhile, is displaying human failings of another kind. Although a solid majority of Germans favours action to preserve the environment, your political system has handed the control of policy to those who use dogma in place of reason and ideology in place of scientific fact.
While America refuses to face the problem, Germany deals foolishly with the solution.
Our world today desperately needs better leadership from both nations. By this I do not mean posturing and rhetoric. I mean clear-minded analysis and strong, cooperative multinational action to achieve a long-range global environmental strategy.
In many discussions, nuclear power is spoken of as an energy option - and certainly this is legitimate. From a national perspective, nuclear power offers clean air, price predictability, long-term affordability, and energy independence.
But tonight I am going to talk about nuclear power from a global perspective, and not as an energy option but rather as an environmental necessity.
A Global Crisis Without Precedent
Our world today is struggling to cope with two monumental imperatives:
- The first, resulting from an explosive growth in global population, is to meet an unprecedented level of human need and aspiration.
- The second is the urgent need for drastic action to preserve our biosphere.
In all history, humankind has never faced a greater challenge than to reconcile these two imperatives.
Today, as matters stand, we are failing to meet this challenge. On our present course, scientists predict that human activity - primarily through the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas - is releasing greenhouse gases at a rate that will cause global warming to reach a point, sometime in this century, of irreversibility.
At that point, we will have unleashed, with no further possibility of mitigation, forces of climate change that will produce an unfolding catastrophe of flood, famine, pestilence, violent weather, and massive dislocation and human suffering that could reach a truly Biblical scale.
It is my thesis that humankind has at its disposal a marvellous tool called nuclear technology that will be indispensable if this challenge is to be met.
Today we have some 440 nuclear power reactors, generating one-sixth of the world's electricity cleanly and without greenhouse gases. I submit that our world will need thousands of nuclear reactors - something on the order of six to ten thousand in this century.
And indeed thousands will be built. By mid-century, we can anticipate that China and India will build as many as 300 reactors each - on trajectories that could see each nation exceed 1,000 reactors in the lifetime of a child born today.
But the principal question, as I will seek to describe, is whether we will build enough.
Dimensions of the Global Environmental Crisis
For many environmentalists, any such prescription will still seem shocking if not sacrilegious. But if organised environmentalists have not yet embraced nuclear power, they have offered clear warning of the global 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 now melting from Africa to Alaska.
- They have warned that the ongoing melting of the Arctic iceberg and Greenland's huge icesheet could entirely disrupt the Atlantic Gulf Stream, bringing an end to its benign delivery of warm air and water to Western Europe - eventually leaving the British Isles and much of continental Europe with climates as cold and severe as Iceland's is today.
- They have warned that the melting Greenland icesheet alone holds the potential to raise world sea levels by 7 meters, that the melting ice of Antarctica holds another 7 meters of potential sea level, and that while this melting could take a few centuries, it could within this century submerge thousands of islands worldwide, begin to threaten or swamp major coastal cities like New York and London, and inundate coastal countries like Bangladesh.
- They have warned that our elimination of the Amazon rain forests and other vegetation is reducing the biosphere's ability to absorb greenhouse gases, thereby accelerating the greenhouse build-up and intensifying global warming.
- They have warned that global warming is also 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.
- And, in their starkest and most dire warning, they have told us that the average global temperature rise in this century will be from 2 to 6 degrees Centigrade, and that somewhere in the vicinity of 2.6 degrees above current levels global warming will become irreversible. This will occur as a series of "positive feedback" mechanisms combines to take inexorable effect:
- Loss of Arctic ice will decrease the Earth's reflectivity, increasing the absorption of solar heat
- Higher temperature will cause greater evaporation, and the added atmospheric water vapour will intensify the greenhouse effect
- Soil in a warming environment will lose capacity to absorb carbon dioxide
- The warming of oceans and thawing of the northern tundra will release massive volumes of methane, the most potent greenhouse gas, from both sea and land
- Forests dying from drier air will convert from carbon consumers into carbon emitters
- And lastly, to cap things off, human behaviour will provide its own positive feedback as hotter temperatures cause increased worldwide use of air conditioning, thereby intensifying energy consumption and fossil emissions.
This is a powerful message of global crisis.
Sceptics, cynics, curmudgeons - and, ironically, many conservatives - may wish to ignore it, leaving us to note that the term conservatism has lost all meaning if it does not connote a desire to preserve our world's most precious assets and to maintain the very foundations of our society.
For my own part, I find the environmentalist case compelling, profoundly alarming and a clear summons to public action.
We need nothing less than a decisive strategic response on a global level. A serious response must go far beyond the meagre provisions of the Kyoto protocol, which calls for only tiny reductions in the industrial countries and none at all in the developing countries, where greenhouse emissions are growing most rapidly.
The 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 toward 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 CO 2 emissions continues to rise inexorably and so too does the atmospheric build-up of these heat-trapping gases.
The global rate of emissions is now 25 billion metric tonnes a year, or 800 tonnes of CO 2 per second.
In the United States, the American lifestyle is emitting 54 kilograms of CO 2 per person per day. In Germany, the daily rate is 28 kilos for each German citizen - an amount equal to his or her body weight two or three times per week.
While neither Americans nor Germans show serious sign of slackening in these emissions rates, people in the developing world are beginning to rise toward our catastrophic pace.
By the end of this decade, China will have surpassed America as an emitter of greenhouse gases, and India is not far behind.
The effect of this growing accumulation of greenhouse gases can be extrapolated from what climate scientists have learned about the Earth's past.
Using ice-core techniques that provide data going back 400,000 years and even more, scientists have learned three key facts:
- First, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have fluctuated between 200 and 300 parts-per-million.
- Second, atmospheric temperature has fluctuated within a range of about 15 degrees.
- Third and crucially, these fluctuations of temperature and greenhouse gas concentrations have occurred in almost perfect correlation.
The relationship between heat-trapping gases and global temperature is unmistakable.
In the past two centuries, however, human activity in the industrial age has created a change. At a rate that is quite sudden in terms of geological time, CO2 concentrations have risen well above any pre-industrial level of 275 parts-per-million.
Today's level of 350 parts-per-million, while unprecedented, 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 sharply thereafter.
Scientists see no way that we can halt this rise at anything less than double the pre-industrial level. But even this would require draconian measures.
To stabilise greenhouse gases - even at a dangerously higher concentration of 550 parts-per-million - will require that we find a way, within the next 50 years, to cut daily global emissions by at least 50%.
Since developing countries such as China and India will inevitably emit far more greenhouse gases, preserving the biosphere will require that the already industrialised countries must cut emissions by 75% - and also lead in disseminating clean-energy technology worldwide.
Nuclear Energy in a Future of Radical Change
This is a challenge of terrifying proportion. It faces us with a choice of stark simplicity, which can be described - without overstatement - as the most important choice in human history. Our choice is between two futures of radical change.
Either we will achieve radical transformation in the global economy - or we will experience a radical alteration in the global environment, a radical upsurge in human suffering, and a radical transformation in life as we know it.
Unless we make that choice soon, we will lose the option to choose. We will have chosen, by default, a radically changing and destructive environment that is beyond our control.
If we are to control our destiny, the question before us is this: 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 to the same unambiguous 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
- Its waste can be securely managed over the long-term.
Challenges Met in Preparing for a Nuclear Century
Eventually, I believe, our world will come to recognise its profound debt to the scientists and diplomats of the past 50 years whose efforts have laid the foundations for an era in which the power of the atom will be indispensable to human welfare:
First, we are meeting the challenge of proliferation.
The global regime founded on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty - the NPT - constitutes one of the great diplomatic achievements in history.
No treaty regime could ever erase the danger of illicit nuclear activity. But it is fundamental to recognise that the challenges posed by North Korea, Iraq and Iran do not arise from the civil use of nuclear energy to produce electricity - either in those countries or elsewhere.
These challenges arise from geo-political conflict, from the ubiquitous availability of nuclear knowledge, and from the ability of any large, well-funded regime to pursue such aims if it chooses and if it is not persuaded or thwarted from doing so.
Such problems will exist regardless of how many nuclear reactors we use to make clean energy to power our economies. To use a mathematical term, the danger of illicit weapons activity exists as an independent variable.
We must meet those challenges to global security where they arise. But what is important is that we have separated that danger from the peaceful use of nuclear energy. We have done so by building - on the foundations of the NPT - a regime of ever-stronger IAEA safeguards.
These safeguards fulfil the pertinent goal, which is to ensure that valuable use of nuclear technology does not abet the illicit production of nuclear weapons.
Indeed, I would assert even more: that the existence of a world safeguards system to monitor peaceful nuclear activity - a global system that now consists of reporting obligations that are backed by sensors and inspection teams - actually strengthens our ability to detect illicit activity where it may be occurring.
In short, peaceful nuclear activity - and our system to monitor it - actually provides us with an invaluable global network to detect illegal activity.
Second, we have met the challenge of safety with a combination of technological advance and an ever-improving nuclear safety culture that draws on some 12,000 reactor-years of practical experience.
This global safety culture relies on high standards established by the IAEA and reinforced by the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO).
While the NPT represents a great achievement in inter-governmental diplomacy, the creation of WANO represents an extraordinary achievement in private-sector diplomacy.
This global organisation was created in response to the unique accident that occurred at Chernobyl in 1986, and WANO's initial goal was to ensure that such a reactor would never be built or operated again. This goal has been accomplished.
But WANO's larger aim was to foster a pervasive global nuclear safety culture by carrying knowledge and experience across international borders. Today WANO's network of technical exchange and peer review encompasses every power reactor worldwide.
Reinforced by WANO, nuclear power is by far the world's safest major source of energy, both for plant workers and for the environment. While thousands die each year from the production and transport of coal, oil and natural gas and while millions die from the toxic effects of fossil emissions, nuclear power plants continue to operate cleanly without emissions and with multiple safety systems that support a policy of "defence in depth" against human or mechanical error.
In the near future, nuclear safety systems will become even stronger as advanced reactors using "passive" design features add still another layer of protection against even the remotest possibilities of risk.
To assure safe transport, today's industry uses highly engineered containers able to withstand enormous impact. To date, more than 20,000 containers of spent fuel and high-level waste have been shipped safely over a total distance of 20 million miles.
During the transport of these and other radioactive substances - for nuclear power, research and medicine - there has never been a seriously harmful radioactive release.
As potential targets of terrorism, nuclear reactors - and used fuel facilities - are robust structures of heavily reinforced concrete and steel that are far, far less vulnerable than chemical factories or most key elements of modern infrastructure. In military parlance, nuclear is a far less lucrative target.
Since 9/11, state-of-the-art computer modelling shows that a similar assault against U.S. nuclear facilities - even under extreme worst-case assumptions - would result in no release of radionuclides. Such facilities represent a standard of impregnability that can be attained by any reactor built in the 21st century.
As to cost, steady reductions are carrying us toward a future in which nuclear power will emerge as a clear winner on the field of affordability.
Today nuclear is the cheapest clean-energy source, and in many locales such as the USA nuclear power has lower operational costs than carbon fuels.
Even more important, in the years ahead, nuclear power's higher capital costs will fall steadily - as simplified and standardised reactor designs allow for greater speed and efficiency in reactor construction.
Meanwhile, fossil costs - particularly for gas and oil - will rise as shortages engender price spikes and energy insecurity.
All of this will occur even without any consideration of environmental effects. Once governments begin to introduce serious emissions penalties - whether through emissions trading or carbon taxes - the balance will tilt even faster. Nuclear power will easily dominate any market that imposes a real price for environmental damage.
Clean coal, if it proves technically feasible, may be needed to meet our energy needs, but will almost certainly be far costlier than nuclear power.
Finally, as to waste, nuclear power has made enormous progress, both technically and politically.
The irony that some environmentalists oppose nuclear energy is compounded when they oppose it using the argument that waste is the insoluble problem of nuclear power.
In truth, waste is the greatest comparative asset of nuclear power - precisely because the volume is tiny and, unlike the waste from fossil fuel, it can be safely managed without harm to people or the environment.
The volume is indeed remarkably small. Consider that the entire quantity of high-level waste produced annually from producing one-sixth of the world's electricity would fit into a structure two stories high built on a basketball court.
Future progress in advanced technologies of partition & transmutation may someday reduce this volume still further and also shorten the decay-life of spent fuel.
But, even with current technology, an overwhelming scientific consensus supports the use of geological repositories as a feasible, affordable and eminently safe means of disposing of nuclear waste.
The governing principle is both simple and sound: to establish multiple barriers of substance and distance, so that even worst-case scenarios result in a harmless long-term dilution of the deposited materials into the natural levels of radioactivity present in the Earth itself.
The creation of such repositories is now under way in Sweden, Finland, and the United States, and similar steps can be expected in Russia and elsewhere as these acts of leadership become widely emulated.
Recognising Nuclear Power as an Essential Clean-Energy Asset
In sum, what are often called the "public concerns" about nuclear power - on matters ranging from operational safety to nuclear waste - are not well grounded in fact. Indeed, common perceptions are often quite close to being the opposite of the truth.
Among those political Greens who continue to voice these concerns as a kind of religious mantra, we can distinguish three categories of belief:
- The first consists of environmentalists who have simply not been exposed to accurate information on nuclear realities.
- The second comprises those who have heard such truths but are so morally self-righteous that they prefer their ideological dogmas to scientific fact. They are beyond learning.
- Those in the third group are rational but exhibit political opportunism and moral cowardice. They have actually recognised the fundamental necessity of nuclear power for sustainable development. But, for reasons of peer pressure and political expediency, they refuse to say publicly what they know and what they even concede privately.
The first category might be named the innocents, the second the zealots, and the third the opportunists and moral weaklings.
Here in Germany, I would say confidently that your Green Party leader, Mr. Joschka Fischer, does not fall into categories one or two. He is neither an innocent nor a zealot. He is a well-informed politician who knows the value of nuclear power but declines to say so.
It is easy to recognise Herr Fischer's predicament. Anti-nuclearism is a keystone of Green belief - an article of faith. To challenge that basic tenant of his own party's platform would threaten upheaval and revolt. Nonetheless, as matters stand, history is preparing to award Herr Fischer a harsh verdict. How else can history judge a man who continues to guide the policy of great nation, and to influence the larger world, in a direction he knows to be fundamentally wrong - simply to maintain his place in politics?
Herr Fischer must face questions of two kinds: practical and moral.
- First, as a matter of practicality, how could Germany conceivably meet its emission reduction obligations under Kyoto and later agreements if it abandons nuclear power, which now supplies nearly 30% of German electricity? Given the serious limitations of renewable energy, would not a nuclear phase-out inevitably leave Germany with the choice between increasing its emissions by using even more fossil fuel or else importing electricity from neighbours such as France? Since France produces 78% of its electricity using nuclear power, thereby achieving 40% lower per capita emissions than Germany, would it not be the height of absurdity and hypocrisy to move Germany away from nuclear energy only to import it from France?
- Second, as a matter of morality, does not Herr Fischer feel an obligation to provide genuine leadership to the environmental movement rather than simply standing before his followers and recycling the dogmas of the past? Does he not recognise the immensely valuable role played by environmental leaders like James Lovelock, author of the Gaia theory, who have used their credentials in a conscientious effort to harness the political dynamism of the environmental movement and direct it toward realistic goals?
I submit that Germany's foreign minister could now perform the greatest service of his entire career by affirming the value of nuclear power, whatever the political consequences. The world desperately needs such acts of leadership, and Herr Fischer might find himself surprised to learn that many would deem him a hero for declaring the truth.
I state with admiration that the world's environmentalists have performed many valuable services. But here in Germany and elsewhere 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.
The Coming Age of "Hydricity"
Achieving consensus on the need for a nuclear-renewables partnership is an essential first-step in a rational policy response to the environmental dangers we face.
But such consensus is even more crucial if we are to exploit still another atomic marvel - the ability to unite hydrogen and oxygen to make electricity - that now awaits us on the near horizon in our quest for a clean-energy future.
Amazingly, the futurist Jules Verne predicted the hydrogen economy in any uncanny forecast written in 1878.
"Yes, my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light.As long as the earth is inhabited, it will supply the wants of its inhabitants, and there will be no want of either light or heat as long as the production of the vegetable, mineral or animal kingdoms do not fail us."
What that visionary author could not recognise was that another power source would be needed if hydrogen and oxygen were to be exploited for their energy value. This is so because hydrogen is a delivery vehicle - not a source - of energy.
A hydrogen fuel cell closely resembles an electricity power plant. Each provides the means of delivering - in an electrical current - the energy drawn from another source.
In a hydrogen fuel cell, the original energy source is the one needed to create pure hydrogen by pulling it apart from its combination with oxygen or other chemical elements with which it unites in Nature. The fuel cell converts that original energy input into an energy output when hydrogen recombines with oxygen to yield electricity as the product and water as a by-product.
A hydrogen fuel cell represents a revolutionary innovation because it will produce electricity on demand and cleanly.
Hydrogen thus offers a means, for the first time in history, to store enormous quantities of electricity - for use, when needed, 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.
Renewables like solar and wind can help to produce hydrogen cleanly on a small scale. But only nuclear power offers clean primary energy on the vast scale a hydrogen economy will require.
In essence, hydrogen offers a means by which the clean primary energy of nuclear power can be stored. Thus, the advent of the hydrogen economy provides a bridge by which nuclear power can contribute not just to direct base-load electricity but also to transport and 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, in which nuclear power and renewables together provide clean primary energy to generate electricity and to store electricity - via hydrogen - for transport and a myriad of other uses.
The man often described as the father of the hydrogen fuel cell, the scientific pioneer Geoffrey Ballard, has referred to such a comprehensive system as "hydricity".
The vision of hydricity is exciting technologically - and can also inspire action diplomatically.
In global environmental diplomacy, our urgent 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.
Until now, China and India have refused to accept limitations that might hinder economic development, while the United States has refused to accept what have been perceived as debilitating limitations on an industrial economy that is already developed.
The emergence of a clear vision of a modern, technologically feasible clean-energy economy could break this logjam, stimulating nations to undertake the commitments that will accelerate our steps toward the vision's fulfilment.
As we look to this future, Germany is poised to provide technological leadership and to gain rich economic reward through the pioneering work of companies such as BMW in developing hydrogen-powered cars. Unfortunately, Germany's hydrogen leadership is compromised by an ideology that blocks realistic measures to produce massive quantities of hydrogen cleanly.
Without the burden of these dogmas, Germany could potentially lead the world - by technology and by example - into the age of hydricity.
An Expansive Nuclear Future
A future in which nuclear power plays a central role in producing electricity, hydrogen, and also clean water will not require a revolutionary change in the use of nuclear technology, but rather 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
- Today thirty-one nations representing 2/3 of humanity have nuclear power
- Important nations representing an additional half-billion people - including Turkey, Indonesia and Vietnam - are planning to use it for the first time
- Nations representing half of world population are building nuclear power plants, with more than 60 reactors under construction or specifically planned;
- The U.S. nuclear industry, owners of the world's largest nuclear fleet with 103 reactors nationwide, plans 50% growth over the next 20 years; and, as I pointed out stated earlier,
- Nuclear planners in the world's largest nations, China and India, envisage some 300 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?
The strength of this infrastructure of people and supporting institutions is fundamental because the nuclear industry is far less the purveyor of a commodity than of a technology - a technology able to convert a thimble-full of a common element called uranium into a vast amount of cleanly generated power.
Indeed, the greatest irony of nuclear power is that this environmental virtue - so much clean energy with so little commodity use or waste - contributes directly to its political weakness. The huge multiplier that works to transform so little uranium into so much energy works in reverse when it comes to political power.
The fossil industry is based on commodities - coal, oil, and gas - having a vast commercial value that translates into vast corporate wealth and power. Meanwhile, the nuclear fuel cycle produces a full one-sixth of world electricity, but gives rise to neither jobs nor wealth on a massive scale.
If nuclear energy had political influence commensurate with its genuine value in terms of health, environment or energy security, the argument over energy would have been over long ago.
Transnational Support for the Global Nuclear Industry
Nuclear energy is about knowledge, and about the people who have been educated and trained to use that knowledge.
On the world stage, four organisations operate to provide support and encouragement for the peaceful use of this knowledge.
Two components of this transnational support structure are Intergovernmental: the IAEA and the OECD's Nuclear Energy Agency. Two are in the private sector: WANO and the World Nuclear Association.
Among these four organisations, there is a clearly recognised division of labour and also a considerable degree of cooperation.
Last year the four organisations began to collaborate on an exciting project that we believe will make an enormous contribution to global sustainable development.
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.
An Idea Whose Time Has Come
The World Nuclear University is not a separate and distinct institution. Rather, it is a network of leading institutions of nuclear education and research in more than two-dozen countries worldwide.
The WNU network does not have - or need - a campus or large faculty. Instead, we use a small coordinating centre, co-located with WNA and WANO in London, to act as a unifying and animating force.
The WNU's mission is to:
- Improve the quality of nuclear course work everywhere
- Move toward a globalisation of standards and credentials in this increasingly global industry
- Build student interest and enrolment worldwide.
Among the special projects of the World Nuclear University is an annual Summer Institute, created to help develop and inspire a new generation of world leaders in the realm of nuclear science and technology.
The first annual WNU Summer Institute will be held in 2005, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy at the Idaho National Laboratory, the designated technology innovation centre for the American nuclear renaissance.
We see nuclear power - with a World Nuclear University to support it - as a powerful idea whose time has come.
A Realistic Disney Dream: "Out Friend, the Atom"
In closing, let me return to the broad view of our clean-energy challenge and to the question of the international leadership, vision and public education that will be necessary to meet it.
It is a fundamental irony of our age - and it is fast becoming a tragic irony - that so many citizens and organisations most concerned about the clean energy problem are fixated on myths, dogmas and sheer fantasies regarding the solution.
The irony is a dual one: first, because so many environmentalists continue to oppose this marvellous tool of environmentalism; and second, because nuclear technology of other kinds has come to pervade modern society as a matter of routine and without challenge.
Fifty years ago, even with the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fresh in mind, few would have predicted that such irrationality would so fully entrench itself in our political lives. Then, despite the recognised dangers of nuclear weapons, public opinion exhibited a pervasive optimism that enormous human benefit would come from exploring the full potential of nuclear science.
A Walt Disney book entitled Our Friend, the Atom - heralding a cornucopia of such benefits - could be found in classrooms across America and other nations as well. Nor was that optimism misplaced. For much of what was predicted - and even more - has come to pass.
Today, far more than most people realise, nuclear technology has become part of the everyday experience of any person in modern society, and this is increasingly so in developing nations.
In an ever-increasing variety, nuclear techniques are being developed in science, agricultural and industry, and they are being applied safely and harmlessly, while contributing immensely to technological progress, to environmental analysis, and to the high efficiencies that support modern economic prosperity.
While this widespread assimilation of nuclear technology has gone largely unnoticed and unchallenged in modern life, the question of nuclear energy for power production continues, at least in some countries, to be a cause of public agitation and political confusion - even as our Earth's rapidly emerging environmental crisis makes it ever more urgent that we employ nuclear power expansively and with serious clarity of purpose.
A Race Between Education and Catastrophe
On this question, democratic politics and public opinion remain strangely aligned. Many on the political right are comfortable with nuclear power but remain sceptical about environmental danger and global warming. Many on the political left are concerned about the environment but remain sceptical about nuclear power.
I am among those - in a constituency that is slowly but steadily growing - who support nuclear power precisely because of a deep concern about the environment. I submit to you that this constituency must grow rapidly if we are to meet human needs worldwide whole avoiding a global climate catastrophe.
George Orwell described human life as a "race between education and catastrophe". Today, with global environmental catastrophe a real and impending danger, all of humankind is in that race. We will need nuclear power if we are to win it.
Thank you.