Remarks by John Ritch Director General, World Nuclear Association
Second International Youth Nuclear Congress Daejeon, Korea 16 April 2002
Let me begin by offering congratulations to the Executive Committee, to the sponsors, and to our Korean hosts for your efforts in creating this Second International Youth Nuclear Conference.
Korea is certainly an ideal setting for this conference, for no country could better symbolise the aspirations of people everywhere to embrace modern technology to lift their standard of living. In the last 50 years Koreans have lived through a national transformation that has few parallels in world history.
But in achieving that success, the Korean people have also come face to face with a stark principle that must now govern our entire planet:
To be successful, economic development must not only meet human need. It must do so while protecting and preserving our earthly environment. To be successful, economic development must be sustainable.
The principle of sustainability is not simply an invention of idealistic environmentalists. Rather, it is a practical global imperative that must be the guiding premise of any rational Business Plan for Planet Earth.
To ignore this principle is to invite disaster, not in some long-distant future but in the lifetimes of people now living. The very nature of the world we leave to our children and their children will be determined in the years just ahead by our success , or failure , in applying the principle of sustainability.
Shifting to sustainable economies requires changes in technology and in patterns of human behaviour. But no aspect of achieving sustainability is more fundamental than producing clean energy on a vast and unprecedented scale for a growing world population.
Under no realistic scenario can that challenge be met without a central role for nuclear energy, and an enormous worldwide growth in the industry that provides it.
Your Congress this week, and the sophistication of your technical agenda, offers encouraging evidence that a new generation is prepared to supply the intellectual intensity and technological know-how to fulfil that vision.
Although the wonders of nuclear energy are not yet fully appreciated by the general public, the potential for what nuclear technology can offer our 21 st century world is almost unlimited.
Indeed, without a great stretch of the imagination, it is already possible to envisage a future in which nuclear power is providing both clean electricity and hydrogen fuel to produce a worldwide clean-energy revolution.
Beyond that, it quite easy to imagine that nuclear energy will eventually prove critical in providing three essentials to the world: not just electricity and hydrogen, but also clean water through desalination.
Your Conference this week will feature many highly sophisticated papers. But let me offer some plain mathematics of the kind often done on the back of an envelope.
I offer these numbers not by way of a prediction, but in order to display an "order of magnitude" about the potential contribution of nuclear energy to a 21 st century when people and nations will look with ever increasing urgency to the valuable technology of which you, in this Conference, are the future custodians.
These figures , obviously on the extreme edge , project the construction of one one-gigawatt reactor per day for the next fifty years , the capacity that would be needed to meet anticipated global energy need with a fully clean, nuclear-powered economy.
These figures incorporate a factor not yet well understood, even by those environmentalists who are most enthusiastic about the potential for a so-called "hydrogen economy". Many tend to believe that hydrogen will somehow be available like rain from the sky. But the stunning fact is that in an economy in which hydrogen fuel cells are the basis of transport, the energy needed to produce hydrogen may well exceed the energy needed even for a greatly expanded worldwide use of electricity.
The nuclear-hydrogen connection represents an enormous potential need for clean nuclear power.
Imagine, for the sake of argument, that these figures are overly optimistic by a factor of five. Even then, the world would be building more than 70 nuclear power reactors a year for the next 50 years.
In years past, the nuclear industry has defended itself with a plea to "keep the nuclear option open". The time is nearing when we can offer a stronger vision , of nuclear power as part of a global clean-energy future. We represent a technology whose ultimate message is that pollution is not a necessary fact of life.
At the World Nuclear Association, our goal is to prepare for , and to hasten the arrival of , a future in which nuclear energy plays a sharply expanding global role.
To help explain the relationship among the different global nuclear organisations, I find it useful to describe a "division of labour" involving a "triad" of responsibilities:
Among the members of this triad, I am pleased to report that there is strong compatibility and a will to cooperate. Neither the IAEA nor WANO is engaged in commerce or public advocacy, and each has welcomed the advent of the World Nuclear Association as an effective global counterpart acting to perform those functions with energy and enthusiasm.
I am gratified that notable former leaders of the IAEA and WANO have agreed to serve together as co-chairmen of the WNA Board of Advisers.
The World Nuclear Association's essential goal is to build and support a global nuclear community of enterprises, large and small, encompassing all countries where nuclear power (or fuel) is being produced , and extending even into countries where nuclear power production is still in the planning stage.
In the past year, WNA membership has grown by 50% and our geographical scope has broadened from 16 to nearly 30 countries. Our membership now represents over 90% of the non-generation side of the nuclear industry worldwide and about 60% of global nuclear generation , figures that are growing almost by the day.
Our goal in the days ahead is to achieve a membership that represents the entire global industry in all dimensions of the nuclear fuel cycle, including generation.
The WNA serves its global membership through a secretariat based in London, and we are also beginning to establish small offices regionally. Throughout the year, our corporate members collaborate through working groups on industry economics, trade, waste management, transport, decommissioning and nuclear fuel production. In September the annual World Nuclear Association Symposium in London is a major industry event that many of you have attended or, I am sure, will attend in the future.
Beyond fostering a global nuclear community among our members, the WNA works on their common behalf by promoting public understanding of nuclear power.
It has become clear that unless the industry acts with self-assertion, we run the risk that global public policy will incorporate the dogmas of those so-called environmentalists whose views are shaped by ideology and myth rather than by science and fact. To defend the industry from such risk by championing improved understanding of nuclear power is both an act of enlightened self-interest and a public responsibility.
Much of such work is done by companies, associations and societies at the national level. The WNA's aim is to support such efforts , and to supplement them , by providing information and advocacy at the trans -national level.
In advocacy, we have two main targets:
Historically, these somewhat arbitrary ratings have taken it as a blind assumption that nuclear is unethical and have thus stigmatised our industry on the basis of nothing more than ignorance and mythology.
The UN negotiations on climate and development are of particular relevance to nuclear power. Here we have responded to the request from a large group of industry CEO's by establishing what we call the 'Strategy Group on Sustainable Development'. This Strategy Group is now coordinating industry action vis-à-vis the Kyoto negotiations and the forthcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development.
Our principal adversaries are anti-nuclear environmentalists operating from a base in environmental ministries , even in many countries that have strong policies favouring nuclear power. Because these ministries have dominated the staffing of national delegations, we continue to face the serious danger that well-positioned minorities , collaborating together at the multilateral level , will hijack these major global negotiations, right under the noses of their pro-nuclear governments.
A central aim of anti-nuclear forces is to deny that nuclear energy is sustainable. To counter this with maximum impact, we aim to orchestrate presentations from all corners of the world , including China, India, South Africa, and Brazil , to deliver the rebuttal message that nuclear energy has already been embraced as a sustainable development technology in the strategies of many key developing countries representing much of world population.
In assessing where we stand today in the public policy debate, it is important to step back and view this moment in historical context.
The Kyoto Protocol represents one small step toward global action on the environment. But as its limited goals and faltering success underscore quite vividly, our governmental institutions are only just beginning to respond to the great global challenges that now demand a dominant role for nuclear power.
We can understand this more clearly perhaps when we see that world politics are in the early stages of a profound transformation that began just a few years ago.
Before that, for almost a half-century, the world was consumed in a great geopolitical struggle that dominated the passions and priorities of people everywhere , absorbing resources in vast quantity and shaping all political thought and action. In that era, even broad global issues of human need and economic development were viewed through a Cold War prism.
One of the great positive consequences of the end of the Cold War is that the world has refocused , and begun to comprehend that some of the most critical questions of human history, far from being behind us, have been dangerously neglected and are now pressing upon us with an urgency that intensifies by the day.
These challenges are embodied in a few harsh and deeply unsettling facts that are now beginning, just beginning , to be recognized as the dominant realities of geopolitics, realities from which no country can escape:
From these facts come two very concise messages: that mankind is in desperate need of vast amounts of energy, and that this energy must be clean.
As the WNA works to advance these messages, we place particular emphasis on our website.
We are glad to be told that it constitutes the most comprehensive and accessible source of information on the entire global nuclear industry.
The WNA website now receives , from all around the world , over 100,000 hits per month, heavily concentrated on a wide variety of information briefs that we constantly expand and update.
Our website also has a second homepage, for those who enjoy multimedia technology.
As a weapon in the expanding debate, we have introduced on our website a feature we call the AutoEssay.
Entitled Why Tomorrow's World Needs Nuclear Energy, the AutoEssay is a tool of education and persuasion, which presents the case for nuclear energy in a concise but comprehensive form. The presentation places nuclear energy in a global context and answers many common concerns. It takes only about 12 minutes to view and can be watched on a computer screen or projected on a screen.
In the near future, we will make the AutoEssay available on our website in some 22 languages. We see this as a small act of constructive "globalisation" in taking the case for nuclear energy to the public.
As a next step, we will soon distribute the AutoEssay on CD's and mini-CD's , again in more than 20 languages. We anticipate producing these CD's in large quantity as an aid to our nuclear partners around the world.
I spoke earlier about a global future in which nuclear power becomes the primary energy source not only for electricity production but also for producing both hydrogen fuel and clean water.
Far from being an idealistic fantasy, I believe that vision constitutes the essence of realism. For nuclear power now stands as an indispensable tool if humankind is to master its own destiny.
To each of you here who is member of the Young Nuclear Generation, I extend my congratulations on your wise and visionary career choice, and I wish you well in this conference.
Although many in the general public may not yet appreciate it, you have entered a remarkable growth industry , one in which you will enjoy enormous opportunity, not only for professional advancement but also for achieving the profound satisfaction of providing a benefit to humankind on which the very future of civilisation now depends.