Remarks by John RitchDirector General, World Nuclear Association
World Association of Nuclear OperatorsBiennial General Meeting"Nuclear Safety: Our Global Challenge"Berlin14 October 2003
Colleagues and friends:
Whatever you may think about Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California, he did one positive thing right away - by saying he wants Californians to drive cars with hydrogen so their environment can be clean.
Let us now hope that Governor Schwarzenegger will follow the logic of his convictions by leading Californians to think seriously about where that hydrogen will come from .
If they do, Californians will eventually focus on three facts:
Time will tell whether the actor who played the Terminator can be the man to lead his fellow citizens to say "Hasta la vista, baby" to the myths that have long thwarted rational energy policy in California and elsewhere. We shall see.
However it comes about, people everywhere must be encouraged to embrace the vision of a clean-energy future in which nuclear and renewables work together to produce electricity, hydrogen and potable water on a massive worldwide scale. Getting to that future has become an urgent global imperative.
Our climate experts warn that, to avoid catastrophic change, we must cut global CO 2 emissions by 50% by mid-century. And we must do so even as world population grows from 6 to 9 billion - and as developing countries use even more energy as they struggle to rise from poverty.
Thus far, our nations have done little to heed this ominous warning. The current rate of global emissions - now at 25 billion tonnes a year, or 800 tonnes a second - continues to rise by the day. We are allowing ourselves to be carried inexorably toward a future that could bring worldwide famine, flood and disease on a scale we cannot imagine or predict.
A major obstacle to rational action is the common belief that we must choose - between economic prosperity and environmental preservation.
The beauty of the nuclear-renewables-hydrogen nexus is that it offers, for the first time, a technologically feasible vision of how a modern industrial society can operate both prosperously and sustainably.
This vision has great implications for public policy. When people and politicians begin to believe that we can reconcile the objectives of prosperity and preservation, they will be far more likely to support the strict policy incentives needed to wean our economies from carbon and accelerate us into a clean-energy future.
This is true for the global climate talks as well. We need a global climate treaty that brings nations as disparate as America, China and India into a common regime involving strict emissions limits and rational economic incentives based on emissions trading. It is possible to envisage such an arrangement that brings benefits to all sides.
The key is that nations must believe that they can make it work technologically: they must first envisage that such a system can, in practice, yield a combination of lower emissions and increased prosperity.
This is why the diplomatic feasibility of a global climate regime depends on first achieving a technologically feasible vision for implementing it.
For the nuclear industry, the hydrogen connection offers not only a technological and commercial benefit but also a political one. People see fuel cells as green. When they learn that nuclear is needed to produce hydrogen, it can bestow new environmental lustre on our battle-scarred technology.
This past spring, I was invited by Geoffrey Ballard, the man often called "the father of the hydrogen fuel cell", to give a keynote address at the World Hydrogen Conference in Vancouver.
Seeing this as a good opportunity to foster the nuclear-hydrogen connection, I prepared extensively and delivered my best case for a nuclear-renewables-hydrogen future.
Later, Geoff Ballard told me that the response was favourable - that I'd gotten the job done because many people in the hydrogen world had not previously grasped the nuclear-hydrogen connection. I was encouraged.
But the comments I remember most came from two executives at one of America's biggest nuclear utilities, one that isn't yet a member of the WNA. "This was a breakthrough for the nuclear industry," one said. "Just the kind of thing we need to be doing," said the other.
I recorded these words because when I took the opportunity to invite their company to join the WNA, they responded "What's in it for us?"
Today, I hope to take just a few minutes of your time to outline an answer to that question.
Just over two years ago, on the 25th anniversary of the Uranium Institute, we set out to build on its foundations a truly global association of the nuclear industry.
We were keenly aware of the roles of the IAEA and WANO , and of what those organisations do not do.
To complement the work of those two organisations, we envisaged a valuable division of labour in which the WNA's purposes would be two-fold:
In these past two years, our institution-building efforts have been well rewarded. WNA membership has nearly doubled - from 60 companies in 16 countries to some 117 enterprises in 32 countries.
Today WNA members represent well over 90% of the non-generation side of the global industry and nearly 90% of non-U.S. generation.
As these numbers suggest, some key generators remain outside our membership. This is particularly so in the United States, where we are proud to have Exelon, Southern and Progress as members, but lack the fuller utility participation we aim for.
Our goal is universal membership worldwide.
In performing our first function - to serve the industry by fostering commercial and technical cooperation within it - we use a full spectrum of working groups covering all aspects of the fuel cycle:
The WNA' biennial Market Report - a product of the Nuclear Fuel Working Group - is a key tool of industry analysis.
Meanwhile, other WNA working groups serve as operationally-oriented think tanks:
In the past year, we started two new working groups that now represent key industry interests:
Zack warned that the industry is unprepared for its next accident - both as to how an event might be characterized and also as to how it might be presented to the public.
With experts from companies and from WANO and the IAEA, this new WNA group - under the chairmanship of Al Kupcis - has stimulated two processes:
Historically, ICRP standards have assumed that protecting humans would protect the environment. The ICRP is now considering whether to develop a new structure aimed at the environment per se.
Any such change could have enormous effect on industry operations - from mining to transport to waste management and decommissioning.
Previously, in such matters, the industry represented itself company by company - and not always with persuasive or positive effect. The ICRP's environmental review challenged us to develop a coherent industry response.
This year, using its new group, the WNA became the industry's interlocutor with the ICRP. Significantly, the ICRP has welcomed this innovation because it serves to consolidate the industry's scientific knowledge and to articulate a unified industry perspective.
I offer no predictions on the outcome of this process, which is ongoing. But I can tell you that the industry's interests are being well represented and that the articulation of our unified view has helped the ICRP to recognize that it must weigh any changes very carefully for their effect on the world's premier clean-energy technology.
The WNA's second role is to advance the industry's interests in the public policy debate at the transnational level.
Here our tools are information and coordination .
Today the WNA website is increasingly recognised as the best single source of information on the global nuclear industry.
The website's offerings range from dozens of well-researched information papers to a multimedia tutorial that we call the WNA "AutoEssay". Entitled "Why Tomorrow's World Needs Nuclear Energy", the AutoEssay is available, on the website and on mini-CD, in over 20 languages.
Recent website innovations include new domains on waste management and decommissioning - and on nuclear power plants worldwide - that contain information with a comprehensiveness available nowhere else.
From somewhere in the world - whether from one of our own members or from an interested member of the public - www.world-nuclear.org now receives a hit every few seconds.
Using our information products, we work selectively in educational efforts:
Our coordination roles are diverse:
Looking to the industry itself:
Looking outside the industry, we are coordinating industry efforts in the ongoing UN talks on climate change and sustainable development.
Here our battle has been uphill because the negotiations have been subject to a kind of double skewing - which gives undue weight to anti-nuclear countries and to anti-nuclear ministries even in pro-nuclear countries.
A year ago, in the WNA's Council of Advisers, we set out to do something about this.
We started with India, which carries tremendous influence in any international forum on the future of the developing world.
Today we lack time for the details. Let me summarise by saying that, due to this WNA initiative, the whole Indian government now speaks with a single unified voice to enunciate - in every relevant world forum - the clear principle that nuclear power is indispensable to sustainable development.
As you will appreciate, this is not a trivial phenomenon. On matters of sustainable development, India's voice outweighs that of almost any nation that might presume to tell the developing world how to develop.
The message that "Nuclear is Green and Sustainable" has particular impact when delivered by India's minister of the environment.
Some months ago, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, our Indian partners used this trump card to thwart a manoeuvre by EU environmentalists that would have formally stigmatised nuclear energy in this key UN institution.
Our aim now is to build on India's example to create a "Nuclear is Sustainable" coalition involving other key governments. We believe that we can eventually turn the tide in the climate negotiations - moving nuclear from a defensive position into full recognition as a powerful instrument of environmental preservation.
But even our first steps provide a powerful example that transnational partnership - in this case, partnership with our Indian members - can serve the interests of our entire industry worldwide.
Finally, we come to our coordinating role in creating the World Nuclear University, which we inaugurated at last month's WNA Symposium in London.
Over the years, the impending nuclear skills crisis in many countries has become like the proverbial weather. Everybody complains about it; nobody does anything about it. The WNU is a transnational partnership to do something about it.
Joining us in this enterprise as "founding supporters" are the IAEA, the NEA and WANO.
For those who did not attend, the Inaugural programme has been distributed here today. It lists the top institutions of nuclear learning, in over two-dozen countries, that form the WNU network. Still more have joined since the Inauguration.
The mission of the WNU is to strengthen nuclear education worldwide by:
This work began on the afternoon of the Inauguration, when we launched nine working groups to tackle a wide-ranging WNU agenda for cooperation.
The WNU will also provide an umbrella for ad hoc projects that can pool the intellectual resources of all of institutions involved, including the "founding supporters".
The WNU will not itself have a campus or a large faculty. Instead, it will use a small, highly professional secretariat - called the Core Faculty - to energise cooperation within the network on a wide variety of subjects.
In the near future, we anticipate WNU summer schools at participating institutions; and eventually we expect that interested institutions will be able to issue Master's Degrees that carry WNU-certification.
A key aim will be to integrate the academic with the practical. For example, Sig Berg and other WANO officials will be playing a prominent role in at least two of the WNU working groups - those on knowledge preservation and on the global nuclear safety culture.
For administrative efficiency and substantive synergy, the WNU headquarters will be co-located in London with the WNA in close proximity to the WANO Coordinating Centre.
We expect to assemble the Core Faculty using fully-paid secondments from key nuclear institutions around the world - so that staff salaries are not borne by the WNU budget. The small WNU budget will be used entirely for operations.
Your assessment of the WNU's role and value will depend on your outlook for our industry:
Under any assumption, we see the World Nuclear University as a powerful idea whose time has come.
In closing, I wish to say explicitly something that has been implicit throughout my remarks today.
After fifty years of operation, our industry stands on strong foundations. We represent an extremely valuable and evolving technology, and we have shaped a sound array of supporting institutions.
On the private sector side - in WANO, in the WNA and in the new WNU - we are still building.
We are not building empires. We are building small, highly cost-effective mechanisms to support this industry at a moment when all of the vectors of history point toward its rapid expansion in the century ahead.
All of the world's nuclear utilities have been persuaded to see value in their membership in WANO. I urge you to see similar value in your support for the WNA and WNU.
These organisations serve the interests of the entire global nuclear industry. Your universal support for them is a matter of fairness - in sharing the burden equitably - and it is a matter of effectiveness: With your full support, we can do this valuable work even better.
If you have not yet done so, I invite you to join us as partners.