John RitchDirector General, World Nuclear Association
Keynote Remarks" Nuclear Power: A Strategic Debate ": Seminar Hosted by the Institution of Electrical EngineersManchester
19 January 2006
Ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate the opportunity to participate in this seminar. You have timed it to coincide with the onset of one of the most important public debates in modern British history.
The question of whether Britain should build new nuclear power plants is not simply a matter of choosing to develop - or abandon - a certain energy technology, which clearly has had a contentious history. The issue is far more profound.
When your national energy debate ends sometime later this year, your nation will have answered the question of whether British public policy can, in the 21st century, mount a rational strategy to meet two fundamental national imperatives: environmental security and economic security.
Because I admire your country and countrymen, and indeed hold them in affection, I am saddened when I see that your national conversation on this topic often exhibits little more than a parochial perspective and a rehash of old myths, past episodes, and stale allegations. This myopia does injustice both to your own interests and to your needed role of world statesmanship.
The Global - and British - Environmental Imperative
So let me begin by placing the British debate in its broadest context.
We face nothing less than a global emergency unprecedented in all of human history.
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.
As your great Earth scientist James Lovelock has cogently informed us, it is now beyond rational doubt that humankind must, with a true sense of urgency, confront the imperative of achieving a global clean-energy revolution if we are to avert climate catastrophe.
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 disastrous consequences in rising 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, even in the lives of our grandchildren, a melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica that will so raise the oceans as to 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.
Despite this necessity, 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, humankind continues blithely on its path to destruction, producing greenhouse gases at the rate of 900 tonnes per second, which translates into more than 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.
Meanwhile, 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 and battery power for tomorrow's vehicles, and drive seawater desalination plants to meet a fast-emerging world water crisis.
This reality will require a twenty-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 in this century need 8,000 reactors at a minimum.
Do not doubt the feasibility of such numbers. In the single decade of the 1980's, France alone built 50 reactors. I am speaking now of a full century of nuclear construction by nations representing a collective population a hundred times greater than that of France. The question lies only in our wisdom and our collective will to act.
Evidence of the dawning of such fundamental 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 more than 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. Australia, the home of the world's largest uranium reserves, has begun its national debate. And 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 that nation escapes the lingering hold of the antique dogmas of the Red-Green coalition.
Looking to Latin America and Africa, such major developing countries as South Africa and Brazil are also beginning to make nuclear a much more prominent part of their energy strategies.
As we survey this full global scene, the essential question is not whether a nuclear renaissance will occur but whether it will happen fast enough for nuclear energy to make the contribution it must make if we are achieve a worldwide clean-energy revolution before the destructive vectors taking us toward catastrophic climate change become irreversible.
James Lovelock, no defeatist by nature, has already become a pessimist about our prospects. Humanity is in a race that, at best, will be close-run. If history is a river, we have entered the white water.
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. Indeed, they often prove, upon fair examination, to be not only unfounded but close to the opposite of the truth:
Because we live in a world where misinformation is often disguised as expertise, the essential truths about nuclear power require constant repetition and validation. To facilitate the process of public dialogue and education, the British government should consider empowering 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. Such a panel could give focus and weight to rational thinking at this critical juncture of national decision.
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 substantial but 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 in any case a worldwide convergence in per capita emissions, which can expand slightly in the South and must shrink sharply in the North. This treaty can help to encourage that convergence while constraining overall emissions in both North and South.
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 - though 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 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, the misperception that nuclear power is a sunset industry has left student enrolments far behind projected future needs for nuclear professionals. Two years ago, with support 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.
WNU headquarters is co-located with the WNA in London, and we hope to work with Richard Clegg of your new Dalton Institute to foster a role for Dalton within the WNU framework that will advance the aim of re-establishing Britain's role as a world centre of nuclear research and learning.
All such institutions - and the World Nuclear University as their umbrella - 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 - first, to long pipelines and interruptions in supply that would darken much of the UK; and, second, 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 marginally 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, until recently the world's second largest nuclear enterprise, now owns one of the world's best reactor vendors and, with it, one of the world's most promising reactor designs, the Westinghouse AP-1000. It seems a tragedy bordering on farce that Britain is now selling off this asset just at the moment of its essential value as a key instrument of Britain's nuclear renaissance and the world's. Fortunately, this mistake, while both grievous and silly, will not be fatal.
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:
First, how will Britain meet the 60% emissions reduction goal that the government has rightly set as an environmental obligation?
Second, are the British people prepared to see their entire economy became dependent on remote and potentially precarious supplies of energy?
In the formulation of these questions, the word "nuclear" does not appear. We can fully expect, however, that when these 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 your nation, having been challenged by Prime Minister Blair to tackle this question, could fail to muster the necessary vision - and could instead wander onto a path of peril and irresponsibility. 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.
Thus, I trust that a growing public alertness to the consequences of confusion and delay will, even though the hour is late, galvanize the clarity and conviction needed for a coherent national decision to resurrect the British nuclear industry and to reinvigorate the educational and professional cadre that this invaluable technology requires and deserves.
At stake are your own interests - economic and environmental - and those of a larger world that still depends on Britain's capacity for rationality and global leadership.