John RitchDirector General, World Nuclear AssociationDitchley Foundation Workshop "Nuclear Energy: Time to Move Ahead?"
Ditchley Conference Centre, UK, 23-24 June 2005
Colleagues, I appreciate the opportunity to help lead off our discussion, and I shall do so by trying to put our topic into a broad global context - a context that seems too often ignored in the British energy debate - and then make some specific points about the crucial decision now facing the British government and the British people.
The Global - and British - Environmental Imperative
First, we face a global emergency.
Between now and 2050, as world population grows from six to nine billion, world energy consumption will triple and humankind will consume more energy than the combined total used in all previous history. As a consequence of greenhouse emissions, we are hurtling headlong toward destabilization of the biosphere. It is now beyond rational doubt that humankind must confront, with a true sense of urgency, the imperative of achieving a global clean-energy revolution.
This much the British government has recognized publicly, and indeed the Prime Minister has been admirable in asserting the necessity that industrial countries achieve at least a 60% reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2050. In identifying and embracing the problem, Tony Blair has led the world.
As well he should: The science is now overwhelming that without reductions of that magnitude, we risk catastrophic climate change with the severest consequences for sea levels, species extinction, epidemic disease, drought and extreme weather events that could combine to disrupt all civilization.
Nor is your Prime Minster's world leadership solely an act of global statesmanship. He is seeking to protect Britain itself, where the consequences of global warming will be particularly severe. Even now you are experiencing violent storms and floods that will increasingly claim property and lives. The dangers on your horizon are far worse: an end to Gulf Stream warming, the onset of a harshly frigid climate throughout the British Isles, and eventually - with the full melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica - a forty-foot ocean rise that will inundate all of Britain's coastal cities.
Given the stakes, even if one questions the absoluteness of climate predictions, the precautionary principle should compel us toward sweeping actions of an emergency character. With the very biosphere at risk, these actions must be founded on hard, practical science - not on ideology and myth.
Second, humankind has taken little serious action.
The international community has barely begun to confront the challenge of achieving a clean-energy revolution.
Even if implemented, the Kyoto provisions are meagre, and few nations have taken serious steps to constrain emissions. A new visitor to planet Earth who was informed of the danger we face would have to find it very comical indeed to be told that the windmills of Germany, Denmark, and Britain represent even the beginning of a rational defence against the peril we know to exist.
Today, even as this conference proceeds, humankind is continuing to produce greenhouse gases at the rate of 900 tonnes per second, which translates into 25 billion tonnes per year.
In comprehending that it may be difficult for the biosphere to absorb this kind of assault, it gives a sense of proportion if one brings the magnitudes down to a human scale. If the Earth were the size of a soccer ball, the biosphere surrounding it would be little more than the thickness of a credit card. That is not nearly as capacious a waste bin as our economic behaviour assumes the skies above us to be.
Third, our public debate and our governments are still failing to provide clarity as to where a feasible solution may lie.
Every authoritative energy analysis points to an inescapable imperative: Humankind cannot conceivably achieve a global clean-energy revolution without a rapid expansion of nuclear power - to generate electricity, produce hydrogen for tomorrow's vehicles, and drive seawater desalination plants to meet a fast-emerging world water crisis.
This reality will require at least a ten-fold increase in nuclear energy during the 21st century. Today - in 30 countries representing 2/3 of humankind - we have 440 reactors producing 16 percent of global electricity. For an adequate nuclear contribution to electricity, hydrogen production, and desalination, we will need 5,000 reactors at a minimum.
Evidence of the dawning of this truth is all around us, and slowly but surely - despite much confusion, misinformation from entrenched nuclear opponents, and widespread government timidity - a global nuclear renaissance is gaining momentum.
China and India will lead the way - probably building some 250 reactors each by mid-century. Nuclear power is also on the drawing boards in new countries as diverse as Poland, Turkey, Indonesia and Vietnam. Italy, the one country actually to abandon the use of nuclear power, will surely come back to it.
Meanwhile, we can expect most of today's big users of nuclear power to intensify their use of it - with the exception of France, where nuclear power already accounts for 80% of electricity supply. The widespread recommitment to nuclear is happening in the USA, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Russia and Ukraine. And it will happen even where anti-nuclearism has gained a temporary ascendancy: Sweden and Holland have already emerged from anti-nuclear phases, and surely Germany's nuclear "phase out" will itself be phased out once the Red-Green coalition leaves power.
Such major developing countries as South Africa and Brazil are also beginning to make nuclear a much more prominent part of their energy strategies.
The question is not whether a nuclear renaissance will occur but whether all this will happen fast enough for nuclear energy to make the contribution it must make if we are achieve a global clean-energy revolution before the destructive vectors taking us toward catastrophic climate change become irreversible.
We are in a race that, at best, will be close-run.
Accelerating the Nuclear Renaissance: Prescription for Action
To accelerate the nuclear renaissance, I offer four elements of prescription, applicable in the UK and beyond:
1) Deliver Truth to the Public.
Number one, we need to get the truth out. And there is an important truth to be told, for the so-called "public concerns" about nuclear energy are commonly mischaracterized to the point of absurdity and prove, upon fair examination, to be unfounded:
To validate and give weight to these truths, and to facilitate the process of public dialogue and education, the British government could find value in establishing an expert, non-partisan panel to assess and report on the implications of beginning a new era of nuclear power generation in the United Kingdom.
2) Negotiate a Comprehensive Long-Term Treaty.
Number two in my prescription list is a comprehensive post-Kyoto treaty on climate. It must include all major nations and yield a steady, long-term contraction in global emissions.
The key is an emissions-trading mechanism that yields efficiency in clean-energy investment and a net flow of investment from North to South - that is, from the high emitters in the developed countries to the still-low emitters in the developing world. Gradually, we will see - and this treaty can serve to encourage - a worldwide convergence in per capita emissions, which can expand slightly in the South and must shrink sharply in the North.
This treaty framework - known as "contraction and convergence" - may be visionary but it is far from utopian. The investment transfer brought about by a soundly constructed emissions trading regime will be the most cost-effective foreign aid in history if it prevents the globally destructive greenhouse emissions that will otherwise occur in the developing world.
3) Stimulate Investment - Temporarily.
Number three, we need government impetus - through only at the beginning - to help jump-start and accelerate nuclear new build.
The key aspects of this intervention require no taxpayer support - for what the market needs most are clear affirmations in government policy that are backed up by an efficient mechanism of licensing and approval. Additional government support - in the form of construction loan guarantees and early grants for site validation and first-of-a-kind engineering costs - can be rendered with little burden on national treasuries.
To reinforce national action, governments must also act on the inter-governmental level. They must guide the World Bank and other UN development organs to get behind the nuclear renaissance, ending the IAEA's isolation as the sole UN agency supporting nuclear technology as key instrument of sustainable development.
4) Fortify Nuclear Education.
My fourth prescription is to galvanize worldwide educational support for study in nuclear science and technology.
In many countries, a misapprehension that nuclear power is a sunset industry has left student enrolments far behind projected future needs for nuclear professionals. Recently, with help from the WNA and the IAEA, leading academic institutions in 25 countries formed a partnership called the World Nuclear University to facilitate cooperation and to build academic and professional standards for a globalizing profession.
These institutions now need a huge infusion of scholarship funds - from governments and philanthropies - for studies in the professions of nuclear science and technology.
Britain's Second Imperative: Economic Security
Let me now turn very briefly to the specifics of the UK.
Even if there were not the global environmental crisis that Prime Minister Blair has urged the world to confront, the case for nuclear power in Britain would be cogent in the extreme.
The technology is not only safe, reliable and affordable; it also provides the energy independence that Britain is perilously close to losing. Electricity is becoming an ever-greater sector in every modern economy, and if this nation comes to depend primarily on natural gas to generate it, Britons will have mortgaged their future to a very dangerous world.
Right now, the UK is just becoming a net importer of gas. But by 2020, with business as usual, Britain will be 80% dependent on gas to generate electricity while importing 90% of that gas - much of it from Russia, Algeria, and Qatar. Meanwhile, natural gas prices will come under an enormous pressure, driven upward by world economic growth led by China and India.
This will leave a double British vulnerability - to long pipelines and interruptions in supply that would darken much of the UK and to such wild price volatility as to bring the British people into the streets. The government that got them there would by then, of course, be long gone from power.
This decline into the path of national jeopardy is summed up very easily: In the next two decades, UK electricity security is projected to go from being the best in the G-8 to being the worst.
It is said that Britain cannot properly contemplate nuclear new-build until it resolves the issue of disposing of Britain's nuclear waste. But this argument, while convenient for those who favor obfuscation and indefinite delay, is simply hollow. A decision to act now to replace all existing UK nuclear generation with modern reactors would add only 10% to the UK nuclear waste burden over the next half century.
What the UK needs, at least as a starting point, is a decision to replace all existing nuclear generation with modern reactors of standardized design. Ideally, they would be identical - from one vendor. As it happens, British Nuclear Fuel, presently the world's second largest nuclear enterprise, now owns one of the world's best, in the form of the Westinghouse AP-1000 reactor design. It would seem a tragedy bordering on farce if, as is rumoured, Britain now sold off this asset just at the moment of its essential value as a key instrument of Britain's nuclear renaissance and the world's.
Financing for a British nuclear renaissance should come from the private sector, with government's role being confined to ensuring timely clearances and consents and some short-term pump-priming to get the financial community into the swing of things. But while reiterating that no subsidy for nuclear is needed over the long term, I would stress equally that private financing will come only in response to a clear and decisive affirmation of this government's policy aims.
The actions required by the British government are not really about nuclear power. This nation must now confront two historic questions that are converging:
In the formulation of these questions, the word "nuclear" does not appear. We can fully expect, however, that when the questions are posed in fair and thorough national debate, the word "nuclear" will appear prominently in the answer.
This, then, is the syllogism:
I find it painful to contemplate that the Blair government could lack the vision and courage to chart the necessary path, because failure to do so would head this nation into very dangerous territory in its direct national interests, while squandering an historic opportunity for international leadership as well as economic advantage.
That would be a sad plight indeed for a country that, 50 years ago, did so much as a world pioneer in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. I trust and hope that clarity about the consequences of inaction will galvanize this government to act.