Remarks by John B RitchDirector General, World Nuclear Association
Korean Atomic IndustrialForum/ Korean NuclearSocietyAnnual ConferenceSeoulApril 18, 2001
I am honored to co-chair this session on the Climate Change Convention and Nuclear Energy. In leading off on my assigned topic, I wish to make four broad points.
The first three relate to gaps between perception and reality, and fourth is a point of admonition:
I. Global Warming as a Crisis Without Precedent
My first point is that Global Warming is a challenge greater and more urgent than generally appreciated. Mankind today is heading, at full speed, toward a crisis in this century like no other in known history.
This crisis can be described by simple statistics. But these statistics have implications so great that they have not yet been fully assimilated into government policies anywhere:
In a way, the Kyoto goals have beguiled us. These goals seem so restrictive that few governments anywhere have taken the necessary steps to meet them. Yet they seem modest enough that many seem to have concluded that this problem is a marginal one - that can be neglected and deferred with little consequence.
What too few realize is that the Kyoto targets were designed to constitute only the most modest first step in a major journey of world economic transformation that will be truly arduous if we are to complete it successfully.
For thousands of years, a pre-industrial level of about 275 parts per million of greenhouse gases has provided the moderate temperature that allowed the evolution of life and civilization as we know it. Today, with that number fast rising, a widely accepted goal of climate control is to stabilize greenhouse gases at double the pre-industrial level - 550 parts per million.
But even this highly ambitious goal has not been identified as "safe." The goal of stopping the accumulation of greenhouse gases at a doubling has been chosen solely because it is the one goal that is conceivable feasible. In short, this is the one goal we might be able to achieve that might avoid catastrophic effect.
How dramatic must the change in our energy consumption be - to have hope of avoiding catastrophe?
Human activity today is producing over 6 billion tonnes of carbon emissions each year. Each American is producing about 120 pounds of carbon dioxide each day; each Japanese nearly 50 pounds, each Korean over 40 pounds. Even each Chinese is already causing the emission of more than 12 pounds a day of carbon dioxide - in other words, one pound every two hours.
Despite Kyoto and all the talk surrounding it, this emissions rate is not declining in most nations of the world. Quite the contrary, worldwide emissions are rapidly expanding - at a rate projected to reach ten billion tonnes a year within 20 years. This rate will continue to rise in the absence of fundamental change in human activity.
To stabilize greenhouse gases at double the pre-industrial level requires that we cut worldwide emissions to half of current levels during this century.
This challenge may seem minor but in fact it is 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%.
Mankind thus faces a future in which radical change is absolutely inevitable. 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.
II. Strong Prospects for Nuclear in America and Europe
My second point relates to nuclear power as Mankind's one available means to produce virtually unlimited amounts of electricity without greenhouse emissions. Ironically, after pioneering nuclear energy, America and Europe have appeared to turn against this technology just when its environmental virtues are most urgently needed. What are the prospects for overcoming this irrational trend?
Fortunately, they are much better than are generally appreciated.
In her keynote address, Angie Howard gave an excellent portrayal of the brightening prospect for a nuclear renaissance in America. I will summarize by saying that both the economics and the politics of nuclear are now more favorable in America than they have been for a quarter century.
But what of Europe, where public opposition has seemed to point the way toward a nuclear phase-out?
In fact, under examination Europe's nuclear prospects are surprisingly strong. The impression of anti-nuclearism has been exaggerated by the media and by the inordinate influence of European environmentalists in the Kyoto negotiations.
In reality, 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 "anti's" may well prove to have been tactical victories and strategic losses.
In Western Europe, the core nuclear countries - France, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Germany, Spain, and the UK - all continue to generate nuclear power at record or near-record levels. And, and with the exceptions of Germany and Sweden, anti-nuclear activity has not seriously impacted upon government policy.
In assessing the prominent case of Germany, two points are salient. First, the decision to phase-out nuclear was solely a consequence of coalition politics, whereby a minority ideological party gained a temporary chokehold on national energy policy. Second, Germany nuclear plants have thus far been entirely unaffected, and industry leaders have secured enough flexibility to meet near-term phase-out requirements through decommisionings already planned. Meanwhile, 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 political coalition that produced it.
Sweden too experienced the misfortune of seeing minority anti-nuclear opinion magnified by the process of coalition building, leading to the premature closure of one reactor. But the surrounding debate saw Swedish anti-nuclearism strongly repudiated, and today nuclear power in Sweden retains strong public support.
Meanwhile, in Sweden and neighboring Finland, progress continues toward the construction of geological repositories acceptable to surrounding communities. Once under way, these repositories will send out worldwide the strong and valuable message that Scandinavian nations respected for moral authority and technological prowess have said "yes" to permanent storage.
Russian policy adds to the strong prospect for nuclear in Europe. Minatom has established a bold 20-year plan to double Russia's nuclear capacity and to import and reprocess of 20,000 tonnes of foreign spent nuclear fuel. If implemented, Russia's storage plan could solve repository issues for a number of other countries.
Elsewhere in Europe, nuclear prospects appear equally solid. Slovakia, Romania, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine have reactors under construction. Hungary, Slovenia, and Bulgaria remain pro-nuclear, and even non-nuclear but heavily polluted Poland is weighing its options.
In summary, a survey of the European landscape shows a nuclear prospect far stronger than commonly assumed. The noisy anti-nuclearism of Denmark and Austria must not be overestimated; these countries show no more than the unfortunate tendency of small countries with windmills and hydropower to engage in a kind of hypocritical moral exhibitionism, expounding environmental nonsense even while importing nuclear-produced electricity. Italy, the one major European country to renounce nuclear energy, has paid a stiff price by becoming the world's leading importer of electricity, including France's nuclear electricity - an anomaly the Italians may reconsider in the decade ahead by deciding to produce their own.
III. The American and European Roles in the Kyoto Process
My third point concerns the respective roles of the American and European governments in efforts to implement the Climate Change Convention and the Kyoto Protocol. In this process, the U.S. has made a greater contribution than generally appreciated while European governments have been less constructive than they should have been.
I make these points not as an American but as an analyst keenly ware of the world's disappointment at President Bush's current posture toward the Kyoto negotiation.
My point about the United States relates to progress to date. The Kyoto Protocol reflects not only that climate change is now a preeminent and permanent fixture on the global agenda. It also represents the achievement of broad worldwide agreement on the elements of a sound regime, as embodied in the so-called flexibility devices - emissions trading, joint implementation, and the clean development mechanism.
The adoption of a market-based approach was a remarkable innovation that owed much to U.S. creativity. Rather than imposing country-by-country command-and-control regulation, the Kyoto architecture invites markets to allocate least-cost reductions - across international borders - to achieve those goals.
This system was not an abstract creation of diplomats. Rather it was a proven import from the American experience in curtailing emissions of sulfur dioxide. Ironically, I think the Bush Administration would like the Kyoto Protocol better if it appreciated how strongly many Europeans resisted an approach so geared to the profit motive and the free-market.
This brings me to the role of European governments. If the United States can be faulted for its current abdication of leadership, there is fault also to be laid at Europe's door - 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 misguided environmentalists in the European Union - and elsewhere - essentially to hijack the outcome by enforcing a narrow, unrealistic environmentalist ideology.
One distortion was the effort to exclude nuclear as a technology relevant to the climate challenge. The extent of the environmentalists, 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.
IV. Spurring Our Governments To Do Better
This brings me to my final point, which is that our governments must do better.
In a speech earlier this month at the NEI conference in San Francisco, I pointed out several ways in which our governments must bring new thinking to bear if we are to address the climate challenge successfully:
Most urgently, we must change the dynamic of the Kyoto negotiations. Previously, the excessive influence of poorly informed environmentalists has damaged the negotiations both substantively and politically. Politically, it alienated the Bush Administration, and substantively it pointed the talks away from necessary practical solutions.
The Europeans are not the sole culprits in this phenomenon. It could be seen in the conduct of the Clinton Administration's own delegation, and many others.
Korea, for example, was typical of countries that are essentially pro-nuclear but that allowed environmental ministries to wield too strong a hand. This resulted in a kind of schizophrenia. On the one hand, Korea's delegation was formally favorable to nuclear. On the other hand, Korea joined a group called the "Environmental Integrity Group," which included Switzerland, Mexico and Monaco and which enunciated a strongly anti-nuclear position with regard to the role of nuclear technology in the implementation of projects under the Kyoto mechanisms.
Such schizophrenia must be eliminated if the Kyoto negotiations are to succeed. Achieving this will require that nuclear industry representatives in each key country make their voice felt in the halls of government, spurring those in the financial, commercial, industrial and trade ministries to gain participation in the Kyoto delegations - so that the true positions and interests of governments are equitably represented.
Gaining balanced representation in the Kyoto process will hardly matter, of course, if the negotiations do not proceed. But here, I think, we can be optimistic - despite recent statements from President Bush. If other governments rectify the balance of their own delegations, and if they continue to stress the importance of the climate issue, I am confident that the Bush Administration will react. It will feel compelled by international opinion - and by the mounting scientific evidence - to pick up the pieces of the Kyoto process and "reinvent" the negotiation.
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. Once engaged, President Bush will be able to bring the American Congress into support for the Kyoto process.
Let me close by offering a standard against which our efforts in the Kyoto process can be gauged. 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. Together, China and India represent 40% of the world's population, and those two great nations are now engaged in the construction of energy infrastructures that will affect not just the world economy in the 21 st century but also the Biosphere itself. Our success in promoting a global clean-energy future can 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? The very highest policy priority must be accorded to averting the creation of a vast carbon-burning energy infrastructure in the major population centers of Asia.
In conclusion, let me underscore the important role I see for Korea as a nation that stands preeminent in the world today in showing that miracles of transformation are possible through vision and hard work. Korea?s economic and technological success has laid the foundation for this nation to play a central role as Mankind confronts an enormous global challenge that will entail concerted effort - and an indispensable contribution from nuclear technology - if we are to succeed in developing our societies while preserving our Biosphere for our own children and for theirs.