Remarks by John Ritch Director General, World Nuclear AssociationAll-Party Parliamentary Group on Nuclear Energy
Houses of Parliament London, 18 May 2004
Distinguished colleagues:
I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this significant group. I will say a brief word on three topics: why nuclear energy is important, what the WNA is and does, and where the UK fits in.
As to the significance of nuclear power, the plainest truth is that nuclear power is not simply an energy option. It is an environmental imperative.
In this century, we face a global crisis - a truly existential crisis, if you will - of colossal and unprecedented proportions. If we are to cope with it - without human and environmental disaster - we have no realistic strategy that does not involve a sharply expanded use of nuclear power worldwide.
In the next 50 years, as human numbers grow from 6 toward 9 billion, humankind will consume more energy than the cumulative total used in all previous history. Right now, we are producing carbon dioxide emissions at the rate of 25 billion tonnes a year - or 800 tonnes a second - and that rate is growing, not shrinking. Unless we can achieve a global transformation to clean energy - clean energy produced on a truly massive scale - the projections are clear and ominous.
Over the coming decades, global warming will produce rising sea levels - of as much as 20 feet in this century - and atmospheric turbulence that will yield massive human dislocation conjoined to famine, flooding and disease. For the UK, in addition to rising seawaters that could inundate London, there is the stark prospect that a shift in the benign flow of the Gulf Stream could leave the British Isles with a truly Siberian climate, essentially ending this nation's identity as we know it.
In the even shorter term - although it has gained little attention - we face an imminent global crisis produced not by pollution or emissions but by sheer human numbers. All over the world, water tables are falling sharply. Unless we can develop high-volume desalination of seawater, a full one-half the world's population will - with the next 20 years - face severe and devastating shortages of clean water. To avoid compounding our climate jeopardy, desalination must be achieved using clean energy.
This crisis is monumental, and it must be said starkly that our response thus far holds little promise that humankind has the wit or the will to come to terms with it through collective, coherent action.
There is a way forward - a way to reconcile human prosperity and environmental stability. That path involves a global treaty regime that goes far beyond Kyoto, and that helps to incentivize a massive application of real-world clean-energy technologies to achieve the emissions cuts required.
This regime - which must capture and incentivize economic activity in America, Europe and all of Asia including China and India - must be some variant of the contraction-and-convergence concept. This means overall contraction in global emissions by over 50%, even as China and India grow. And it means gradual, long-term convergence to some common per-capita emissions allowance.
That common gap will be a political and a logical necessity, and does not impose an unrealistic utopian parameter. As we move toward that long-term objective, deviations from it could be used within a global emissions trading system to provide for North-South transfers of capital and technology to further our clean-energy objectives.
Ultimately, our global goal must be:
This can only be achieved by a concerted global strategy to multiply the use of all clean-energy technologies - nuclear and renewables alike. In this technological partnership of nuclear and renewables, it is a practical reality that nuclear will be the main workhorse.
The role of the WNA is to promote understanding of this reality and to coordinate cooperation among the global array of companies that can deliver this invaluable technology.
Here is where we fit into the picture:
WNA strategy has four components:
The first is institution-building. We founded the WNA only three years ago, on the foundations of the old Uranium Institute. Since then, we have grown from 60 members in 16 countries to about twice that. We now have some 120 members spread across over 30 countries.
This organising function is particularly important because the so-called nuclear industry is really a much thinner and weaker entity - economically and politically - than commonly perceived. Ironically, the explanation of the industry's political weakness lies in the immense advantage of its technology. Because uranium is relatively common and cheap - and because so much energy can be obtained from so little uranium - nuclear power does not produce a powerful vested interest comparable to the vast economic power that arises from the use of oil, gas and coal.
In environmentalist demonology, nuclear power symbolises the evils of the military-industrial juggernaut. But in the ideological battle that Greenpeace wages against the nuclear industry, it is not the lavishly funded Geenpeace that is the David. In reality, if nuclear power is to succeed, it must be recognised for its merits.
The final element of our institution-building agenda relates to strengthening the industry's global educational foundations. I will return to that goal in a moment.
The second WNA function is industry coordination. We accomplish this through a wide array of active Working Groups on subjects ranging from the nuclear fuel market to strategies for gaining public acceptance of nuclear power as the quintessential instrument of sustainable development.
Our third function is public education. Here we engage in several activities - all based on our operation of a website that has become the world's most comprehensive information source on the global nuclear industry.
Our fourth WNA function is industry representation vis-à-vis various transnational institutions. Of particular importance here are:
On the latter, it is important to note that these negotiations have been characterised in the past decade by a very real institutional perversity.
The UN system has successfully assembled delegations from throughout the world to tackle the most profound problem on the human agenda. Yet because these delegations are typically led by environmental ministries where anti-nuclearism is accepted dogma -- even in countries where nuclear is accepted and successful - we have been convening global assemblies of people who are directly opposed to a fundamental solution to the problem they are meant to address.
In the context of a looming global crisis, this is the quintessence of perversity. The WNA is working to overcome this, as I can explain further to any who might be interested.
Finally, let me return to a special aspect of our institution-building efforts: our lead role in creating a new institution. At the annual WNA Symposium last September here in London, we inaugurated this new institution called the World Nuclear University.
The WNU will not have a campus and limestone buildings. Rather, it is a cooperative network of leading institutions of nuclear learning and research from all over the world. This network will be engaged with - and supported by - all four of the global nuclear organisations I mentioned earlier.
The WNU's goal is to raise the quality of nuclear coursework worldwide, to help globalise professional standards, and to attract far wider student interest in this fast globalising industry. If nuclear technology is to make the historic contribution we can envisage, the nuclear industry will require large numbers of skilled professionals from all over the world.
The WNU initiative has the strong support of Mohamed Elbaradei at the IAEA, and the WNU's Chancellor is former IAEA head Hans Blix.
Let me close with a comment on nuclear power in the UK. It is, I believe, nothing short of tragic - for Britain and for the world - that this country is not stepping forward as a global leader in the application of nuclear power to meet the global crisis we face:
Having shifted from coal and having rapidly squandered much of the blessing of North Sea gas, Britain urgently needs new nuclear power - on a substantial scale - lest it become perilously dependent on foreign gas that will be dangerously unreliable in supply and perhaps catastrophically volatile in cost.
For your own security interests and for the world's, Britain should be leading - rather than trailing behind - in the nuclear renaissance and the global expansion that lies ahead and that indeed is well under way all around the world. Germany's temporary setbacks for nuclear power are not the rule but the exception. Nuclear power's star is rising on every continent worldwide.
For Britain, resurrecting nuclear power is an urgent matter of such gravity as to warrant a cross-party policy of support for nuclear power. You will know better than I whether your politics are capable of producing such statesmanship.