Nuclear Energy:
An Indispensable Human and Environmental Asset for the 21st Century
Remarks by
John Ritch
Director General, World Nuclear Association
3rd International Conference on High Temperature Reactor Technology
Graduate School of Nuclear Science and Engineering
North-West University
Potchefstroom, South Africa
2 October 2006
Ladies and gentlemen,
I am privileged to help inaugurate this important conference on High Temperature Reactor technology.
In organizing the event here in Potchefstroom you have achieved a perfect match of topic and location. HTR is a cutting-edge technology in the global nuclear renaissance; and South Africa is, for a combination of reasons, a world leader in that renaissance. In this nation's unmet human needs, in its determination to meet those needs by engineering environmentally sound technology, and in its aspiration to bring the benefits of this advanced technology to a wider African and world community, South Africa underscores, for all to see, why the global nuclear renaissance must succeed - and how it can succeed.
History's Greatest Challenge
Nuclear energy today represents nothing less than an indispensable asset if our world is to meet what must be recognized as the greatest challenge in human history. This challenge is not a conflict between people of different nationalities, ideologies, and religious beliefs. Rather, it is an existential conflict between humankind's current pattern of behaviour and the very planetary environment that enabled civilization to evolve.
In these early years of the 21st century, this new form of conflict has come increasingly to be recognized as nothing less than a global emergency - a crisis that will require, if catastrophe is to be averted, a worldwide transformation to clean forms of energy. This revolution - led by nuclear power, and using technology of which you and your colleagues are the world's custodians - must be achieved if humanity is to prosper and prevail.
It is time for nuclear professionals to speak with confidence, 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.
The fact of this global crisis should no longer be a matter of psychological or political denial. For our best Earth-system scientists now warn, 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 these predictions hold true, the combined effect would be the death of not just millions but of billions of people - and the destruction of much of civilization on all continents. Precisely because we face dangers that go far beyond what we can readily imagine, the spectre of global warming still remains, for many people, too nebulous to contemplate. But what is not nebulous is the human condition that lies behind global warming.
To help set this stage for this conference, I would like to present some facts that underscore the compelling human dimensions of the global crisis we face.
The Human Dimensions of the Environmental Crisis
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 6.4 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 6.4 billion, a full 2 billion people have no electricity, and 2 billion more have only limited access. In other words, fewer than 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 supplies 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. Just ten years from now, 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 expansive appetite for more energy.
Accelerating the Nuclear Renaissance
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, to produce hydrogen and battery power for tomorrow's vehicles, and to desalinate seawater in response to the world's rapidly emerging fresh-water crisis.
The widening recognition of this truth is now reflected in a worldwide nuclear renaissance that is gathering speed and momentum.
For the nuclear industry - from uranium miners to technology vendors to plant constructors - this expansive outlook offers a promising future. But for serious environmentalists, current projections can provide little comfort - not because nuclear energy is growing but because it is not yet growing fast enough to play its needed role in the clean-energy revolution our world so desperately needs.
In three distinct areas, governments must take decisive action to accelerate the nuclear renaissance.
1) Construct a Comprehensive Global Regime. The first necessity is to move beyond Kyoto to construct a truly comprehensive, long-term climate regime that yields strong political signals - and economic incentives - for a worldwide transformation to clean-energy technology.
To be both effective and politically feasible, any such treaty must include all major nations, developed and developing, and must embody some variation on the principle of "contraction and convergence".
"Contraction" means that the agreement must produce, over a span of decades, a global reduction in greenhouse emissions on the order of 60%. "Convergence" means that the agreement must adopt the principle of equal per-capita emission rights.
The principle of equal emission rights is far from utopian:
- First, as a matter of political reality, it is the only feasible principle for a global agreement.
- Second, the gap between actual emissions and emissions rights provides the potential for a dynamic international trading mechanism that will promote universal efficiency in clean-energy investment while producing a large net flow of such investment from North to South.
From a Northern perspective, this economic assistance will be the most cost-effective in history if it helps to prevent the globally destructive growth in greenhouse emissions that might otherwise occur in the developing world.
2) Elevate Nuclear Investment to a National and International Policy Priority. The second necessity is to shape national policies and international institutions to directly support nuclear investment.
Over the long-term, nuclear power is highly competitive - indeed, in most countries, it is the lowest-cost option, even without a tax on carbon. But two factors now weigh against nuclear investment: the short-term bias of deregulated energy markets and the fact that 21st century nuclear reactors have not been built in sufficient numbers to achieve economies of scale.
National governments must therefore act to incentivize immediate nuclear investments - not to subsidize long-term nuclear operations but simply to pump-prime these early phases of the nuclear renaissance, for reasons of environmental urgency as well as energy security.
A similar rationale applies, at the international level, among the global institutions we established a half-century ago to meet urgent developmental needs. Today it is a fundamental failing of the UN system that all of its major development institutions continue to embrace, or to be intimidated by, old-school anti-nuclear environmentalism. Governments must now direct the World Bank and the UN Development and Environment Programmes to act in pursuit of a clean-energy vision in which nuclear power holds a central role.
3) Preparing the Nuclear Profession for a Nuclear Century. A third imperative is to apply the concept of nuclear investment to the human level - by stimulating enrolments in the study of nuclear science and technology. The nuclear profession must be readied for a nuclear century.
To help point the way toward a globalizing nuclear profession, the World Nuclear Association has worked with the IAEA, WANO, and the NEA to create the new World Nuclear University. The WNU is a partnership in which these four global organizations cooperate together, and with leading institutions of nuclear learning, in activities to enhance nuclear education and leadership for the 21st century. The WNU partnership is supported by a small multinational secretariat in London composed of nuclear professionals seconded by key governments and nuclear enterprises.
The flagship of the partnership is the WNU Summer Institute, an annual 6-week event designed to educate and inspire an international group of young nuclear professionals who show promise as future leaders in the world of nuclear science and technology. There is now a network of some 166 former WNU Fellows in 40 countries, and that number will grow each year.
Meanwhile, the WNU project has begun to branch out, as the multinational team at the WNU Coordinating Centre works to develop other educational and leader-building programmes. In the process, the WNU will seek to build an international endowment for scholarships in nuclear technology. Establishing such scholarships should also be a national priority for governments around the world.
A Time of Peril, A Fateful Race
In closing, let me attach numbers to the challenge we face. 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. Indeed, it will not be adequate to meet the needs of a global clean-energy revolution even if we multiple nuclear generation by a factor of ten.
We must place ourselves on a trajectory for a 21st century nuclear industry that achieves the deployment of nothing less than 8,000-10,000 Gigawatts of nuclear power - a twenty-fold increase. To plan for anything less would be to invite environmental disaster.
The English historian H.G. Wells saw 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.
The conference that begins today is not only a technical meeting among scientists; it is also a vital contribution to victory in a fateful race that will determine the sustainability of humanity's future.