Remarks by John RitchDirector General, World Nuclear AssociationNEI Fuel Cycle ConferenceSan Francisco2 April 2001
I appreciate the NEI's request to be with you this morning to offer a "global perspective." This invitation is flattering but slightly optimistic insofar as I have been a part of the nuclear industry for less than three months , much of which has been given to packing out of Vienna after seven years and getting settled in London.
A while back, someone coined the term "globaloney," referring to the tendency of sweeping visions, however elegantly phrased, to show up under examination as being largely content-free. But in discussing the world in which the nuclear industry finds itself today, I see little risk of succumbing to globaloney. Some very large, striking and ominous facts lie clearly before us , facts that, taken together, show unequivocally that Mankind is heading, at full speed, toward a crisis in this Century like no other in known history.
A Global Crisis Without Precedent
This crisis is a result of the combined forces of population, economic growth, and energy consumption and their inexorably debilitating effect on the biosphere. I will not belabor the statistics; you have heard them before:
We do not view this future through a glass darkly. For those willing to see them, the trends are as clear and well defined as a bright summer day. The problem is one of grasping, and acting upon, the reality that faces us. Governments and citizens alike are in a collective state of denial.
I am reminded of Barbara Tuchman's book The Proud Tower, where she described the euphoric crowds that gathered in the capitals of Europe in August 1914 to send the boys off to war. Absolute catastrophe lay ahead , foreseeable catastrophe , and people were unwilling to see it. Four years later, Europe lay in ruin and a deadly swath had been cut across much of civilization.
If we fail , as we are now failing , to surmount the crisis we face today, the damage will be less confined and not so easily repaired.
Those in the nuclear industry know that these ominous trends call for far greater use of the technology we possess. But even we have difficulty grasping the urgency of the peril facing our societies. In a way, the Kyoto goals may have beguiled us. In one sense, those goals seem stringent , so much so that the Bush Administration has rejected them as too painful for Americans to endure. Yet these goals were really designed to constitute only the most modest first step on a path that will be truly arduous if the mountain is to be climbed.
Focus on these basics. A widely-accepted goal of climate control is to stabilize the build-up of greenhouse gases at double the pre-industrial level , about 550 parts per million. But even this highly ambitious goal has not been identified as "safe" , it is a level associated with projections of global temperature increase ranging from 1.5 to 4.5 degrees centigrade, as compared to the 20 th Century when temperature rose by 0.6 degrees.
Keep in mind that the average global temperature is now only 5 degrees centigrade higher than it was in the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago. We are thus talking about a risk , even if we constrain greenhouse gas emissions , that temperatures could rise still further by nearly that much. In other words, even our most stringent efforts may still be inadequate to prevent melting icecaps, rising sea levels, and drastically shifting weather patterns with consequences from which no country will be safe.
Global warming is not theory but fact. The polar icecap is thinning by the year, and just last month we learned from climate scientists that the snows of Kilimanjaro , made famous by Ernest Hemingway , will disappear forever in 20 years.
Constraining the accumulation of greenhouse gases to a doubling is not an environmentalist's ideal, which we can discount as being alarmist or utopian. The goal of stopping greenhouse gases at a doubling has been chosen solely because it is the one goal that meets a test I call "conceivable feasibility": it might avoid catastrophic effect and it might be achieved , but only if Mankind makes enormous changes in energy consumption. In short, very dramatic change might , but just might, bring us in under the wire.
How dramatic must the change in energy consumption be? It is not, as the Kyoto targets might imply, a matter of cutting emissions back by 5 or 15 percent in the developed world. The challenge must be viewed holistically and dynamically, and is far more demanding.
Human activity today is producing over 6 billion tonnes , 6 billion tonnes , of carbon emissions each year, which translates into more than 100 pounds a day of carbon dioxide for each American. This emissions rate is not declining in America; nor is it declining in most countries of the world , quite the contrary. Despite Kyoto and all the talk surrounding it, worldwide carbon emissions are rapidly expanding, at a rate projected to reach ten billion tonnes a year within 20 years and to continue to rise in the absence of fundamental change in human activity.
Arithmetic tells us that stabilizing greenhouse gases at double the pre-industrial level will entail meeting two ambitious goals in sequence. First, over the next 50 years, we must capture this rapid rise and return emissions to current levels. Then, over the second fifty years, we must cut worldwide emissions to half of current levels.
To put it graphically, today the curve for greenhouse gas emissions is heading almost straight up. In order to have hope of avoiding climate catastrophe in the lifetime of children born today, we must manage , even while world population expands and develops , to pull the curve back, first to current levels, and eventually to half of current levels of global emissions.
This is a challenge of such monumental proportions that few have yet grasped it. With population and energy consumption growing rapidly in the developing world, what this entails for the already-industrialized countries is a cut in carbon emissions, in the decades just head, of something on the order of 60-70% , at which point our children would still be well above the world average in per-capita emissions.
Mankind thus faces a future in which radical change is not just a speculative possibility. Radical change is absolutely inevitable. Either we will engineer a radical change in current patterns of energy consumption; or we will experience radical changes in the biosphere , changes that may sweep away, in a short span of history, the relatively stable earthly environment that gave rise to civilization as we know it.
In trying to face this problem today, many of our societies are severely handicapped because so few , individuals or organizations , are exhibiting both a full understanding of the severity of the problem and an equally strong grasp of the measures available to deal with it.
As a general rule, on the political left we find those most concerned about the problem but also those most prone to impose ideological preconceptions on the search for a solution. Fantasies, and even conspiracy theories, abound concerning the supposed capabilities of wind, solar, and other renewables , which do indeed offer promise, but only limited promise. On the right, we find more hard-nosed practicality as to the means of energy supply, but a strong resistance to accepting that the climate problem genuinely exists, and that true conservatism should require that we face it boldly.
Whereas the right tends toward fantasy about the problem and the left toward fantasy about the solution, what we desperately need is a merging of the strengths of left and right today: seriousness about the problem and seriousness about the solution.
We will learn, soon enough, whether Humankind is capable of such collective wisdom. To use television parlance, we are now entering a phase of history that can be called "prime time."
As colleagues in the nuclear industry, we share a common belief that nuclear power , with its capacity for large-scale, climate-friendly electricity generation , should now be summoned to play a central role to meet Humankind's energy needs safely. For us, two relevant questions arise:
The Nuclear Industry Worldwide
The Brightening U.S. Prospect
Looking at the world industry region-by-region, a good starting point is America , not only because the United States has the largest nuclear establishment, generating 30% of the world?s nuclear electricity, but also because American trends so strongly affect the world. Just as 20 years of U.S. stagnation in nuclear plant construction have sent strong negative signals worldwide, an American nuclear resurgence now would embolden and invigorate the industry everywhere.
Here, as Joe Colvin so enjoys telling us, all signs are positive. Ironically, this optimistic prospect can be traced to the very market deregulation that was supposed to have sounded the nuclear industry's death knell. Instead, deregulation led to a transformation in operational and corporate behavior. The leading index, of course, is capacity factor. Last year this synonym for efficiency stood at 90% as against 54% in 1980 , a steady rise that has equated, during a period of supposed stagnation, to the construction of dozens of new reactors without a single pound of concrete being poured.
Increased efficiency has coincided with even stronger safety performance and a streamlining in regulatory oversight. Perhaps even more important, consolidated ownership has changed the calculus of nuclear decision-making by yielding economies of scale and by focusing corporate strategy on the key components necessary for a decision on "new build." For all of these components ? operational cost, construction cost, cost of competitive sources , the vectors are now pointing positively.
A decision on "new build" also faces far less uncertainty in the process of approval. With 3 different reactor plans having received generic NRC endorsement, licensing a new reactor will no longer be subject to legal challenge regarding the safety of design. Before construction begins, utilities will be able to obtain a single NRC license both to construct and to operate.
Still another favorable component is public and political psychology. In the U.S., as in many countries, the nuclear industry has faced a paradox , that policymakers, in the face of a rather small body of strongly anti-nuclear opinion, have perceived public opposition to be overwhelming, and have acted accordingly. The California energy debacle has reshuffled this stacked deck , precipitating strong pro-nuclear statements from respected voices like the CEO's of Sun Microsystems and Intel, shifting pubic opinion toward even greater open-mindedness regarding nuclear, and emboldening policymakers to speak more realistically about available energy options. The California crisis is reverberating nationally and internationally, reopening energy debate everywhere.
As this debate intensifies, we should expect , and promote , increased public recognition that nuclear energy has gained in cost competitiveness even as the playing field remained sharply tilted against it. On a level field, each energy source would internalize its costs, just as all of the nuclear industry's costs , including insurance, decommissioning, and waste management and disposal , have been incorporated in the price of nuclear electricity. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry has been permitted to use the biosphere as a public dumpsite, with absolutely no attribution of cost for its continuing debilitation of human health and its overwhelming degradation of the global environment.
Europe: Stronger Than Supposed
But what of Europe? How true is the widespread assumption that Europe has become a stronghold of anti-nuclearism , and indeed that the "Chernobyl syndrome" has pointed Europe toward a nuclear phase-out?
In fact, Europe appears to be the nuclear world's Mark Twain. Not only have reports of the industry's death been greatly exaggerated; Europe's nuclear prospects are surprisingly strong. Europeans continue to use half the world's nuclear reactors to produce 30% of their electricity. They have closed no reactors for economic reasons, and only one for political reasons. Most important, the modest successes of Europe's nuclear-phobes may well prove to have been Pyrrhic victories.
In Western Europe, the core nuclear countries are France at 75% of electricity, Belgium at 58%, Sweden at 47%, Switzerland at 36%, Finland at 33%, Germany and Spain at 31%, and the UK at 29%. All of these countries are generating nuclear power at record or near-record levels, and with the exceptions of Germany and Sweden, anti-nuclear activity has not seriously impacted upon government policy. In general, the absence of new construction is attributable to adequate capacity. In the UK, where old plants will soon require replacement, British Energy has made clear that "new build" is a primary option and expects Downing Street's support once Prime Minister Blair has been reelected.
In assessing Germany, where "green" influence has seemed greatest, two points are salient. First, the decision to phase-out nuclear was solely a consequence of coalition politics, whereby an ideological party , nearly Luddite in its fervor and with only single-digit voter support , gained a temporary stranglehold on national energy and environmental policy. Second, this supposed decision has left the actual functioning of German nuclear plants entirely unaffected. Germany's 19 power reactors continue to function safely with world-leading capacity factors, and industry leaders have secured enough flexibility to meet near-term phase-out requirements through decommisionings already planned. Meanwhile, in the harsh light of public office, the Greens are losing public favor. Over the longer term, we have every reason to expect that Germany's nuclear phase-out decision will not survive the unfortunate political coalition that produced it.
Further reason for encouragement can be found on Europe's northern tier. Like Germany, Sweden experienced the political misfortune of seeing minority anti-nuclear opinion strongly magnified by the process of coalition building. The unfortunate result, after a prolonged struggle, was premature closure of one reactor at Barsebäck. But this sacrifice was not wholly in vain, for the surrounding debate saw Swedish anti-nuclearism strongly repudiated. Viewed broadly, nuclear power in Sweden retains strong public support.
Meanwhile, in both Sweden and Finland, progress continues toward the construction of permanent geological repositories acceptable to the surrounding communities. When this occurs, these repositories will represent a symbolic contribution to the world nuclear industry far exceeding their functional capacity. In a global context urgently in need of decisive action on the issue of nuclear waste, Scandinavian nations respected for moral authority and technological prowess will have said "yes" to permanent storage.
Finland's prime minister, Paavo Lipponen, has contributed additional leadership by speaking clearly about modern Europe's need for nuclear power. Explaining Finland's current plan to build a 5th reactor as having flowed from careful consideration of cost, environment, and energy independence and reliability, Lipponen summarized European anti-nuclearism as "economically absurd." I note with pride that Paavo Lipponen is a personal friend of many years , a quiet, highly intelligent man of plain words.
Turning east to Russia, outgoing Minatom Minister Adamov has articulated a bold nuclear power aspiration as part of a national strategy for power production and export earnings. Adamov's successor, Alexander Rumyantsev, can be expected to embrace Minatom's plan to double Russia's nuclear capacity over 20 years even while phasing out old reactors. For Russia, expanding nuclear production will release extra natural gas for profitable export, and Minatom itself will seek foreign earnings , not only from nuclear trade with Iran and India, which will give the Bush Administration heartburn, but also from accepting non-Russian spent nuclear fuel for long-term storage. Russia's storage plan, which foresees imports and reprocessing of 20,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel over 20 years, could solve repository issues for a number of other countries.
Elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, nuclear prospects appear equally solid. Czech and Slovenian authorities have faced down Austrian protests; Slovakia has two reactors under construction, Romania and the Czech Republic one each, and Ukraine four. Hungary and Bulgaria remain pro-nuclear, while heavily polluted Poland is weighing its options. Importantly, the Achilles heal of the world nuclear industry , Soviet RBMK's , have been shut-down or else refitted for continued operation under the watchful eyes of WANO and the IAEA.
In summary, a survey of the European nuclear landscape shows a nuclear prospect far stronger than commonly assumed. Anti-nuclear events in Sweden and Germany, rather than showing a trend, may well, by demonstrating the shortsightedness of environmentalist fantasies, produce a useful "inoculation effect." Nor is there a trend to be found in the noisy anti-nuclearism of Denmark and Austria, other than the tendency of small countries with windmills and hydropower to expound moral nonsense, even while importing nuclear-produced electricity. Italy, the one major European country to renounce nuclear energy, has paid a stiff price by becoming a heavy importer of France's nuclear electricity , an anomaly the Italians may decide to reconsider in the decade ahead.
Asia: Vast Climatic Import and Nuclear Aspirations Exceeding Resources
Turning finally to Asia, we see two historically significant characteristics affecting prospects for nuclear power in the 21 st Century.
First, we find little of the political opposition and none of the stagnation that has beset the industry in Europe and America. As between the two most advanced nuclear power producers, South Korea today has four reactors under construction and Japan three; and both continue to pursue national policies emphasizing energy reliability and independence. With current projects, Japan will draw almost even with France in reactor numbers, and South Korea will exceed Germany.
Meanwhile, China leads the world in "new build" with eight reactors under construction, while India has two. Other large countries like Indonesia and Vietnam are weighing nuclear power against the straightforward criterion of technical and economic feasibility.
Asia's second overarching characteristic is that it constitutes by far this Century's greatest growth market for energy , with all that projection entails in terms of economic opportunity and climate danger. For those concerned about climate change, China and India by themselves offer a clear point of reference. Together, these two countries alone represent 40% of the world's population and an even greater percentage of the expanded energy need projected for the 21 st Century. The two Asian giants are alike in having burgeoning energy needs, large-scale potential for climate-debilitating coal usage, and major nuclear power ambitions that are constrained principally by financial limitation.
For years, climate negotiations have struggled to find equitable limits for nations with disparate emissions levels. Not surprisingly, this search has degenerated into ideological battle. The effort to resolve this dispute must continue , but not at the expense of timely action.
The purpose of the Kyoto treaty is to affect decision-making, and in Asia decisions of vast importance are being made today. Any multinational process, regime or national policy designed to promote a global clean-energy future can thus be tested against a simple and revealing standard. How does it affect behavior on the ground in China and India in the next 20 years, There lies the crucible for our collective action to achieve a global economy built on clean energy.
The very highest policy priority should be accorded to all action , piecemeal if necessary , to avert the creation of a vast carbon-burning energy infrastructure in the major population centers of Asia.
Are Today's Institutions of Governance Adequate to the Challenge?
This brings us to the second question about "prime time": whether our current governmental institutions, national and multinational, are prepared to lead us at a historical juncture requiring both vision and action. Do we have institutions that will guide us in the 21 st Century to meet the clean-energy needs of both Man and Biosphere? I shall comment on four:
The IAEA
As to whether the IAEA has proven ready for prime time, my strong answer is "yes." The Agency's job is to patrol the playing field for world nuclear commerce , to ensure that this commerce is free of illicit activity and that reactor and related operations are subject to high standards of safety. Like any watchdog, the Agency cannot be responsible for every misdeed or mistake. But through rule-making and careful patrolling, it can establish a strong barrier of deterrence and a high likelihood that unsafe or illicit activity will be detected. In this, the Agency has distinguished itself in meeting world needs.
On safety, the IAEA's contribution has been the construction of a comprehensive world regime. In 1996, the International Convention on Safety went into effect; and two months from now this achievement will be complemented by entry-into-force of the Joint Convention on Safe Management of Spent Fuel and Radioactive Waste. Through these and measures on early notification and response, the Agency has set safety high standards for the global industry , and procedures to promote adherence. Meanwhile, the Agency offers a wealth of assistance and advice for countries in need of it.
The Agency's work on nuclear safety has been magnificently supplemented by the historic contribution of the World Association of Nuclear Operators. With a membership that includes operators of every commercial nuclear plant around the world, WANO is an exemplar of private-sector vision and responsibility , of which this industry can be justly proud. WANO underscores the nuclear industry's admirable, if unappreciated, record in promoting worker and public safety worldwide.
On proliferation, the IAEA spent the entire 1990's developing, and then beginning to bring into force, expanded new authorities to equip the Agency with the information and site access needed to deter , or, if necessary, to detect , another clandestine nuclear program like Saddam Hussein's. The Agency did detect North Korea's efforts at deceit, and its new powers will be greater.
To strengthen the Agency in overseeing compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the U.S. and others have equipped the IAEA inspectorate with better detection technology and greater access to national intelligence. The technique of taking and analyzing so-called "swipes" has become enormously powerful, enabling Agency inspectors to detect activities like reprocessing or enrichment from tiny samples taken miles, and months, away from the site of activity. Just enough information about these techniques is publicly known to bolster their deterrence effect without helping malefactors defeat or elude them.
On the intelligence side, the systematic sharing of national intelligence with the IAEA's multinational inspectorate is an innovation that did not come easily. A significant part of my own time in Vienna over 7 years was devoted to persuading my colleagues in Langley that, in most cases, the best use of U.S. intelligence was to share it with a dedicated IAEA secretariat that was equipped with the authority to put it good use. Those were battles worth fighting, and international security and American security are both the better for it.
A worrisome weakness in the world's nonproliferation system is the failure of the United States to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. There is, between the NPT and the CTBT, a crucial connection that has not been well enough understood by Bush Administration officials who have derided the test ban as an unnecessary encroachment on American sovereignty and security. In the mid-1990's, two important steps , extending the NPT permanently and strengthening the IAEA's inspection powers vis-à-vis non-nuclear states , were based on a moral bargain: that, in exchange for these commitments by the non -weapon-states, the weapon-states would cease testing and accelerate their efforts at nuclear disarmament. American rejection of the CTBT has repudiated that bargain.
The repercussions can be found in the slow pace at which nations are now implementing the IAEA's new strengthened-safeguards system, which goes into effect on a country-by-country basis only when ratified. Why, they ask, should non-nuclear states accept greater intrusions in the name of non-proliferation when the United States is unwilling to abandon the option of further nuclear testing? The Bush Administration must recognize that its policy on the test ban has offered a convenient excuse to countries that do wish to accept more intense IAEA scrutiny.
The NPT , and the global IAEA inspection regime that supports it , constitute one of the great diplomatic and international security achievements in history. This achievement constitutes a critical foundation both for international security and for the world nuclear industry. Is it worth weakening that edifice to maintain an abstract U.S. right to resume nuclear testing?
While the NPT is a sterling achievement, it has yielded one great anomaly that must now be overcome. Three countries , India, Pakistan, and Israel , remain outside the NPT; and none of the three will join in the foreseeable future. How should they be handled?
This question holds far more than academic interest because India is poised to become the world's largest nation and its energy decisions as between coal and nuclear will have tremendous climate implications for the entire planet. For environmental reasons, we should wish to support India's fledgling nuclear power industry. Yet nuclear trade is currently blocked by policies , collectively embraced by the Nuclear Suppliers? Group ? that deny nuclear trade to non-NPT parties.
The world is left with a conundrum. One imperative is to maintain the NPT as an indispensable foundation for world nuclear commerce; the other is to support clean energy in India and also Pakistan. How can we manage nuclear commerce with India and Pakistan without appearing to bless non-NPT status , and even encouraging some countries to renounce their NPT commitments?
Some would regard even raising this question as a sacrilege that violates the sanctity of what is arguably history's most significant arms control agreement. But current circumstances, I believe, require creative diplomacy that converts pragmatic need into useful principle. Consider a new policy with these ingredients:
If applied successfully, such a policy would produce a combination of benign results. It would induce both India and Pakistan to take the constructive step of CTBT ratification that each is now resisting for lack of incentive; it would formally oblige India and Pakistan to adhere to non-proliferation trading norms; and it would open the way to environmentally valuable nuclear commerce with both of these populous developing countries , all without providing any incentive for backsliding on the part of existing NPT signatories. A country that abandoned its NPT commitment would find the door closed to future nuclear commerce. The time has come, I submit, for such a bold and innovative adjustment to the existing non-proliferation regime.
Before concluding on the IAEA, let me propose a new role for the Agency. Through its contributions on proliferation and safety, the IAEA has helped the world resolve two of the three traditional concerns about nuclear power. But in the area of waste management, the Agency's full potential has yet to be fully exploited.
Steps now under way in several individual countries may soon help to break the political and psychological logjam on permanent storage. But national storage is not a paradigm for a global solution that includes small countries. Every country is responsible for its own waste, legally and morally, but this obligation need not be exercised on its own territory. But for reasons of security, safety, efficiency and environment, national action by some should be supplemented by a multilateral approach using agreed-upon regional centers. With progress on storage now unfolding in several countries and with the nuclear industry poised on the eve of resurgence, the time has come for the appointment of an international commission, supported by the IAEA, to examine the modalities of such a global system for permanent storage.
The UN Climate Negotiations
As a star member of the UN system, the IAEA has been ready for prime time. What of the UN climate negotiations? The world is keenly aware of the impasse in The Hague and of President Bush's recent statements disparaging the Kyoto process. But where do matters stand? What have the participants created, where have they failed, what lies ahead?
Looking broadly , beyond the debris on the battlefield , I see two overall achievements to date. First, in a short span of years we have attained virtual world consensus on the existence of a severe problem requiring a global regime. The full severity of the looming climate catastrophe may not yet be widely appreciated. But climate change is now a preeminent and permanent fixture on the global agenda. Second, the elements of a sound regime have been widely accepted through agreement on the so-called flexibility devices , emissions trading, joint implementation, and the clean development mechanism.
The adoption of a market-based approach to reducing emissions worldwide was a remarkable innovation. The Kyoto architecture would necessarily set national goals that demand restraint. But rather than imposing country-by-country command-and-control regulation, the Kyoto system invites markets to allocate least-cost reductions , across international borders , to achieve those goals.
Nor was this system an abstract creation of diplomats. Rather it was a proven import from the American experience in curtailing emissions of sulfur dioxide. Perhaps the new American Administration would like the protocol better if it appreciated how strongly many Europeans resisted an approach so permissive for both the profit motive and capitalist forces. As matters stand, President Bush is threatening to walk away from a treaty that reflects successful American diplomacy in advancing the American free-market philosophy.
For all concerned, recognizing the significance of the flexibility mechanisms is integral to understanding the challenge we face. In regulating some pollutants nationally and internationally, it has been possible to legislate basic prohibitions or limits, and to supplement those with incentives and punishments. To prevent climate change, we must harness and redirect the entire world economy. Doing so will require a combination of steadily shrinking limits on emissions and the most sophisticated application of market incentives.
There is, in this endeavor, little room for ideology on any side. If the United States can be faulted for its current abdication of leadership, there is fault also to be laid at Europe's door , precisely for allowing ideology to color this crucial process. The Kyoto goals may lie in the province of environmental ministries, but the means for achieving those goals are profoundly economic, the province of ministries of commerce, industry, trade, and finance. What we saw in The Hague was an effort led by environmentalists in the European Union , in collaboration with NGO's and with other delegations led by environmental ministries , essentially to hijack the outcome by enforcing a narrow, unrealistic environmentalist ideology. This was a formula for failure.
One distortion was the effort to exclude nuclear as a technology relevant to the climate challenge. The extent of the environmentalists, misguided zeal , their sheer audacity , is underscored when one considers that most of the population in the world, and most of the economic power, is represented by governments that wish to see nuclear included in Kyoto as a safe means of producing clean energy.
Another distortion lay in European insistence that limits be placed on the use of the flexibility mechanisms , not because limits would help the climate but because limits would inflict more pain on the United States. Those words were not used, but the punitive motive was clear. The Kyoto challenge is simply too great to bear the burden of this kind of baggage.
My assessment on Kyoto would draw a distinction. Those who have labored so long to advance the Kyoto process have done the world an historic service; those who have tried to inflict upon it their ideological preconceptions have not. The Kyoto process has readied us for prime time; when these negotiations resume, we need to ensure that the delegations themselves , on all sides , are ready for prime time too.
Global Development Institutions
Although a sound Kyoto outcome should include incentives for nuclear power in the developing world, these incentives alone cannot bear the brunt of guiding the developing countries toward a clean energy future. A third question about our institutions of governance is whether our global and regional development agencies are currently geared to the task at hand , that of providing strong, targeted and cost-effective support for the large-scale production of clean energy.
To underscore the need for their involvement, consider the scope of financial commitment required to meet development needs and the climate challenge. Over the next twenty years, the OECD projects a doubling of current world generating capacity of 3,000 GWe as well as the replacement of 600 GWe of obsolescent plants. A serious global effort that met only half of this need with nuclear power would entail the construction of some 2000 reactors over 20 years , or two reactors a week. This means a total investment of 2-4 trillion dollars, at a rate of 100-200 billion dollars a year. Most of this must occur in the developing world.
Ultimately, energy must pay for itself. But its production facilities can be financed; and to this end the great apparatus of international development institutions should be galvanized into a central role to help facilitate widespread use of the most cost-effective clean energy. This criterion would dictate an enormous role for nuclear power.
For that to occur will require a revolution in attitude and policy. For years, these organizations have adopted an anti-nuclear posture that has been assimilated into institutional doctrine , a phenomenon based on a combination of prejudice and fear. If the Kyoto process saw a negotiation captured briefly by ideology, the current development agencies represent an entrenchment of the same ideology.
The premises of that ideology must now be challenged and changed. Development institutions are no more than creatures of their member governments, and with the help of key governments we should aim to reorient these agencies to meeting the world's most pressing challenge with the most effective technologies at hand.
At present, my organization is preparing to relaunch itself as a true world nuclear association, with a wider membership that includes companies and agencies from all countries with nuclear power and also all countries considering nuclear power. With such a membership, we aim to fulfill a broader aspiration for public influence.
An early undertaking we wish to pursue , in partnership with the Nuclear Energy Institute , is a campaign of persuasion aimed at shifting the international development organizations, global and regional, into a posture of support for nuclear power. This will be no easy task. But the issue before us is one of global governance. At a time of urgent need, there is no room or excuse for major institutions that are skewed against rational public policy.
The American Administration
Finally, let me comment on the role of the Bush Administration and its readiness for the challenge of harnessing the world economy to reconcile energy and environmental imperatives. Here I acknowledge my partisan leanings as a lifelong Democrat. But as such I can claim to hold an uncommon expectation. For many months, I have held hope that a Bush Administration, wholly contrary to assumption, might actually prove to be greener , in effect, not in inclination , than the alternative.
At the center of this expectation is a conviction that nuclear power must be central to climate change strategy and that a Bush Administration would be far more likely to advance the industry's prospects. For the world industry, there could be no more significant single step than a positive American decision on Yucca Mountain, which, in combination with parallel progress in Scandinavia, would send a global message that nuclear power's supposedly "insoluble" problem was now resolved. By taking this step , and by supporting Senator's Domenici's package of proposals designed to bolster nuclear research, training and development , the Bush Administration could, by deed rather than rhetoric, take great strides in public policy with genuinely green consequences.
A larger dimension involves the broad context in which the nuclear industry operates , a dimension where prospects are murkier as to the new President's plans and policies. I refer to nuclear weapons issues and the challenge of climate change.
As to the former, the world nuclear industry benefits greatly from a public perception that nuclear arms issues are under sound and stable management. Here we see several causes for concern:
But by far the largest question surrounds President Bush's policy as it will emerge regarding climate change. The initial consequences of the President's recent decision on carbon dioxide have been detrimental to his own prestige at home and abroad , and also potentially detrimental to the nuclear industry. It will ill serve the nuclear industry if policies favorable to it are undertaken by an Administration perceived as indifferent to environmental concerns and willing to despoil the air and land to produce a kilowatt-hour. The industry will be better , and more justly , served if its interests are advanced in pursuit of an energy policy that is understood to be both realistic and green.
Despite recent developments, I hold hope for President Bush on the climate issue over the longer term. The Bush Administration will, I believe, be compelled by international and domestic opinion , and by the mounting scientific evidence , to pick up the pieces of the Kyoto process and "reinvent" the negotiation, incorporating the flexibility mechanisms already designed.
When that happens, the virtue of the Bush Administration will be that it can make the outcome "stick" in terms of American participation. No President but Nixon could have gone to China, and the trip to Kyoto will be even longer and more arduous than the journey to Beijing. It will entail not just revolution in American geopolitical attitudes, but in the very basics of the American economy.
If and when President Bush makes that journey, he will serve both the American people and the world community in which they live. Today the nuclear industry is poised to help Mankind solve a global crisis from which we cannot hide. My hope is that the President will not only support the industry directly, which he appears inclined to do, but that he will also bring American leadership to bear in meeting the global challenge that so urgently summons this industry to play an expanding and indispensable role.