A Global Crisis, a Crucial Profession:
The Indispensable Role of Nuclear Energy in the 21st Century
Remarks by John Ritch
Director General, World Nuclear Association
International Youth Nuclear Congress
Toronto, 10 May 2004
Distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen:
I thought it appropriate to begin these proceedings by trying to place - into broad and vivid perspective - the vital importance of the nuclear careers on which you have embarked.
It is my thesis that you have chosen wisely, and that in the decades ahead you will gain real reward - not just in the commercial marketplace, where you will find a steadily rising demand for your skills, but also in the realm of personal satisfaction, for you will provide a capability urgently needed by your fellow man.
Let me state plainly a fundamental truth that must be increasingly recognised - and incorporated - in the policies of nations and of the international community:
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 of reactors - 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. But if organised environmentalists have not yet embraced nuclear power, they 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, within this century, raise sea levels by as much as 20 feet, submerging thousands of islands worldwide, flooding major coastal cities like New York and London, 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 - thereby leaving the British Isles, and even much of continental Europe, with climates as cold and severe as Iceland's is today.
- They have warned that global warming is 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, I find the environmentalist case compelling, profoundly alarming and a clear summons to public 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.
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 daily 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.
An Expansive Nuclear Future
A future in which nuclear power plays a central role in producing electricity, hydrogen, and clean water 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.
- 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 transnational 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 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 coordinating centre co-located with WNA and WANO in London, it will act as unifying force:
- Fostering 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 applies equally to individuals and to society as a whole.
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. As young nuclear professionals, you are acquiring knowledge and skills that will equip you to have a profound effect on the outcome. Welcome to the race. I urge you to run it well, for much depends on it.