Remarks by John RitchDirector General, World Nuclear Association
Skidmore CollegeSaratoga Springs, New YorkApril 5, 2001
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid I appear before you tonight as a somewhat conflicted man. After I had accepted the invitation to talk about my career, my daughters Nina and Alyssa informed me that the best way to do this at Skidmore was to sit on a stool in my turtleneck and sunglasses and to have a spontaneous encounter session in which I might demonstrate my inner cool. Unfortunately, at the last minute, just as I had begun to rev up, Professor Ginsberg intervened, insisting that I give a formal lecture as long and tedious as possible. Thus, he must accept some responsibility for any pain you are about to endure.
I do appreciate your invitation to be here tonight, as Skidmore holds a warm place in the hearts of my entire family. My wife Christina and I are deeply grateful for the expansive education that this college has afforded both our daughters. Nina graduated in 1999; and Alyssa, a member of the class of 2002, is headed for graduation then , or at least so I have been told.
I myself am something of a recent graduate. Three months ago, I ended an association with the U.S. Government that began 40 years ago , not too far from here , when I entered West Point on a summer day back in 1961. I can still remember it, for life at the United States Military Academy began with a two month program of deeply painful and humiliating indoctrination known as "Beast Barracks."
It was a different time. In my first year, President Kennedy came to speak at West Point, and patriotism was in the air. We cadets were no more warlike than you here today , and had little expectation that we would ever see combat. But we knew that the world arena held great stakes.
Just how great these stakes were became starkly clear one evening a year later, when West Point's head, General William Westmoreland, summoned all twenty-five hundred of us to the great cathedral-like cadet dining hall to announce that President Kennedy had just issued an ultimatum to Premier Khrushchev to withdraw Soviet missiles from Cuba , a challenge that might mean nuclear war. That evening we were sent back to our rooms to clean our rifles , a military order we found positively ridiculous. If a nuclear war broke out, what in the hell were we going to do with clean rifles?
During those 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, people everywhere glimpsed the consequences if Mankind could not bring under control the great force of Nature, then only recently discovered, called atomic energy.
My topic tonight is that force, our efforts to control it, and the vast potential it holds for human sorrow and human benefit. My thesis is straightforward: In the century ahead, Humankind must harness the nuclear Genie, and use it to maximum positive effect, if our needs are to be met and our security preserved.
This is a controversial assertion, for the word "nuclear" has dark connotations , of death and destruction. For many on the political left, where I have always tended to locate myself, "nuclear" is close to a synonym for evil , no distinctions required, no questions asked. Indeed, for a great number of environmentalists who tend to see their cause as a kind of secular religion, opposition to things "nuclear" is a tenet of the faith. Hatred of the nuclear demon is a foundation for belief.
My theme is that the word "nuclear" must be viewed through a more discriminating lens. Dangers do inhere in our ability to split the atom. These dangers will be with us forever because Mankind has discovered certain scientific principles and because the word "undiscover" does not exist in any language. But nuclear technology also offers great benefits , to a world that will be much in need of them in the century ahead.
My conviction is that we must use nuclear energy, widely and well, if we are to cope with another danger , the threat of catastrophic climate change , that now looms before us even more ominously, and with far greater certainty, than the danger of nuclear accident or nuclear war.
Let me offer assurance that I am not a nuclear mandarin or a blind believer in technology.
By way of illustration, I can recount a small parable, involving Senator John Glenn. It occurred one evening more than a dozen years ago when I drove out of the Senate parking lot and headed down Capitol Hill. Having stopped at a light, I suddenly felt a considerable jolt. Looking in my rear-view mirror, I learned that a man who had survived 149 combat missions in two wars without a blemish -- a man who had emerged unscathed as the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth and who had become a living monument to American technological triumph -- had just smashed his car into mine.
Senator Glenn and I had a cordial relationship -- one strengthened perhaps by the fact that I never told this story to a reporter -- and I recount it simply to underscore that my strong belief in the value of nuclear energy co-exists with a keen awareness that all men and women, even heroes, make mistakes. Indeed, it is precisely because a full-blown recognition of human fallibility has been incorporated into modern nuclear technology that I hold confidence in the convictions I espouse this evening.
Let me take a short detour to describe how I came to be involved in such matters. My path may be instructive not because anyone else would ever follow it but, quite the opposite, because it illustrates the serendipitous way in which most of us live our lives, and how small and unforeseeable events can determine one's destiny.
My exposure to the world beyond our shores began with the good luck that, on graduating from West Point, a Rhodes Scholarship enabled me to go to Oxford University. In the fall of 1965 I sailed to England aboard the Queen Mary with fellow Rhodes Scholars of my class. During three years at Oxford, I studied a little, socialized more, and traveled a lot , developing in the process a lasting fascination with Europe, a fondness for its people and buildings and food (and ale), and a respect for the sheer density of its history, a history so closely intertwined with our own.
But what focused me, with real intensity, on American foreign policy was Vietnam, where the war was expanding even as I sailed for Europe. Soon that conflict evoked a powerfully emotional response among everyone in my generation. The only exception I know is our current President, who says he can't remember talking about it at the time. Everyone else was talking, arguing, marching and more. The Vietnam War dominated our nation , occupying its mind, infecting its bloodstream , like nothing else in my lifetime. Hatreds and polarities developed then that can still be discerned in American political life today.
For me, the war presented an unusual dilemma. Having graduated from West Point, I was an Army officer, with a duty to return to uniform when my three years at Oxford were complete. Many of my West Point classmates meanwhile were among the first to be thrust into the front lines when President Johnson escalated the war in the summer of 1965. Had I not gone to Oxford, I would likely have been among them, some of whom met brave and tragic deaths.
In allowing me to attend Oxford, the Army had wanted me to broaden myself by study on wide horizons. This I did, but what came to consume me was the war in Southeast Asia. Whether in Europe or America, Vietnam was omni-present , a constant topic of conversation. Physically, it was a half a world way; metaphysically, it was everywhere.
With increasing conviction, I came to see the war as a profoundly misguided waste of lives and resources. For America, it was a national hemorrhage, sapping our institutions and unity. In Vietnam, it meant potentially endless slaughter, for Vietnamese nationalism was proving far stronger than any technology we could reasonably use. Our role there seemed to me then, and now, a lost cause , continuing, even after its futility was recognized, because few American politicians had the wisdom or courage to change course.
As my time in Oxford approached an end, deciding how to reconcile that belief with my duty to serve was nothing less than an agony. Should I fight in this cause? If not, what course should I take?
These questions vexed me deeply; and when I returned to America, with orders for Vietnam, I sought counsel from many. I soon discovered an interesting truth. In such circumstances, virtually no one, however sympathetic, wished to advise a young man on a choice among exile, prison, and combat in a cause in which he did not believe. Morally, I was on my own.
As it happened, chance intervened with two events, both unlikely and both involving famous men. One was the legendary chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright, the father of the famous exchanges, who had become a leading critic of the Vietnam war , gaining the admiration of many, and the scorn of others, for conducting hearings that aimed to take the Vietnam debate from the streets into the heart of government. The other was General Westmoreland, who had gone on to lead our forces in Vietnam and who had now returned to the Pentagon as head of the entire Army.
On an impulse, I went to Washington in hope of seeing Senator Fulbright, motivated by the bizarre conceit that we had something in common simply because we both had attended Oxford (he 35 years before I) and were both opposed to the war. This was obviously a stretch; and, not surprisingly, I discovered, upon entering Fulbright's office, that he was difficult to see , particularly for an unknown young man with a strange explanation. With cordial Southern grace, Chairman Fulbright's receptionist gave me a polite version of the "bum's rush" that left me standing in the Senate corridor without a plan.
Being impetuous, however, and lacking the prudence to take no for an answer, I found a folding chair and installed myself conspicuously in the Senate hallway leading to Fulbright's office. In retrospect, I can see that my most likely fate was to feel a tap on my shoulder followed by a brisk eviction by the Senate police. Instead, fortune shined on me. When the tap came, it was the hand of Senator Fulbright's top aide who, having heard about the strange guy in the hall, had decided to invite me in.
That day, I met several of Fulbright's aides and, briefly, the great Senator himself. I found some comfort in having made this connection, although my new acquaintances, like everyone else, could give me little advice about the choice I faced.
But what did result from those encounters was a rumor. Somehow, word reached the Army brass that one of their bright young officers was consorting with anti-war elements on Capitol Hill. I learned this abruptly a few days later when I found myself summoned to General Westmoreland's office in the command corridor of the Pentagon.
Suddenly, my moral dilemma had reached a decisive point. What would I say? I felt myself to be on a tightrope, fearing that if I expressed myself plainly I might be punished for a violation of military protocol, whereas I was determined that, if punishment was to be my fate, it would be for the principle of conscientious resistance.
What I told the Army leadership that day was the simple truth: that whatever America's good intentions in Vietnam, I felt so deeply about the wrongness of the war that I was contemplating the need to submit myself to a court martial.
That meeting ended without resolution , or so I thought. Just a few days later, to my amazement, I received word that I was to be posted not to Vietnam but to Korea. Later, I learned that the Army leadership had made a tactical public relations decision , to avoid the unsightly appearance of a young West Pointer taking a position against the war.
My fate was cast. A few weeks later, I found myself in Korea , eight thousand miles from home, 20 miles even from any sign of civilization, in command of a U.S. infantry rifle company consisting of 130 men, and without any orders to conscientiously resist. There in the Korean wilderness I was left to ponder my moral posture.
For my next three years, I maintained contact with Senator Fulbright's office; and upon leaving the Army I was delighted to be offered a job with the Fulbright Committee. Without knowing it, I had arrived at a vocational home, a place I would stay long after Senator Fulbright had retired. There I would work for 22 years in the company of many famous American Senators , holding hearings, writing speeches and traveling the world, with them and on their behalf.
A brief, totally improbable sequence of events had shaped my future , somewhat miraculously lifting me from a moral quagmire and pointing me toward a future in American foreign policy.
Thus it was in 1972, at the age of 29, that I found myself sitting next to Senator Fulbright in the Senate chamber. My first task was to help Senator Fulbright in a month-long Senate debate over the so-called SALT-I accord , a Nixon-Brezhnev agreement that comprised the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the first U.S.-Soviet pact aimed at capping the race in strategic nuclear arms.
I was far from being an expert on such matters, but I learned as quickly as I could. I could not have predicted it, but from that day on I would remain engaged in matters revolving around a single question: whether the secrets of the atom, once uncovered, could be channeled toward benefit and away from destruction.
In entering this world of nuclear affairs, I assumed a minor role in a great saga that had begun many years before.
Scientists had first begun to explore the inner mysteries of the atom as early as the 1890's, when they identified a phenomenon that Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie labeled "radioactivity." This term referred to the emission from atoms of particles even smaller than atoms. This dazzling discovery opened new worlds of inquiry.
In 1905, Albert Einstein offered his theory of the equivalence of mass and energy. This meant that if changes in an atom left a smaller amount of mass, a huge amount of energy might be released. In the decades thereafter, discovery continued at an exhilarating pace , even as the world passed through one Great War and moved toward a second.
In 1939, the outbreak of the World War II saw scientists on both sides of the Atlantic far advanced in exploring Einstein's theory. By a strange and hazardous quirk of history, a great coincidence occurred. Mankind's greatest conflict began in the very year he discovered that he could actually split an atom of uranium, and release enormous energy, just as Einstein had predicted.
During the next six years of hostilities, physicists in Germany and America pushed toward the breakthrough that would convert this discovery into the ultimate weapon. The outcome of the war , and the future of civilization , were determined by the fact that a band of Americans and émigré scientists, sequestered in the New Mexico desert, got there first. Had Hitler won the race instead, history would pose far different questions than whether President Truman should have used the atom bomb.
The explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war and opened the nuclear age. At the same time, another age was beginning , an age in which the United States was determined to make a success of an idea called the United Nations.
American ideals were reflected in a plan presented to the United Nations in 1946 by Bernard Baruch, who proposed that the United States would place its nuclear knowledge under the custodianship of an international authority.
But American idealism coexisted with realism. Even as Baruch spoke, the U.S. military undertook a series of postwar atomic tests at the Bikini atoll in the Pacific. These tests, as it happens, were witnessed by my father, then a young naval officer; and my daughters would want me to tell you that my first sentence as a baby , my first comment on nuclear affairs , was "Da-da gone ,kini."
From that moment on, the history of the nuclear age became a struggle in which men and women have labored mightily to see if the discoveries of Man-the-Scientist could be guided by the hand of Man-the-Statesman.
This struggle began badly. As Baruch offered his plan, the Iron Curtain was falling across Europe. For Josef Stalin, the Bikini tests offered the perfect excuse to reject Baruch's proposal, and the arms race was on. Three years later, in 1949, came the first Soviet atomic tests, and for the next forty years , until the Berlin Wall fell , the world would be locked in nuclear confrontation.
Looking back now, the history of the Cold War can be seen as a twin effort , to contain both the Soviet Union and nuclear danger. Containing the Soviet Union meant matching it, step by step, in the building of arms of all kinds. Containing nuclear danger meant pursuing a goal called "nuclear stability." This was defined as a situation in which neither side would gain advantage by launching its nuclear weapons first. A vast body of literature began to develop about the arcane concept called "nuclear deterrence theory."
Nuclear stability also meant preventing the secrets of the Bomb from falling into more hands. It was to this end in 1953 that President Eisenhower made his "Atoms for Peace" proposal, calling for the creation of a world agency that would reap the benefits of nuclear science while helping to avert its misuse.
In future years, Eisenhower's proposal would become a monumental success. It led to the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency , today one of the stars in the UN system. At the time, the proposal seemed a sideshow. On center stage, American and Soviet arsenals continued to grow.
Through the 1950's and 60's and into the 70's, the nuclear arms race continued unchecked, consuming vast resources as well as the talents of the most brilliant Soviet and American scientists. Steadily each side amassed ever-larger machines for nuclear warfare. Quaintly, they were called nuclear "triads" , consisting of bombers on constant alert, intercontinental ballistic missiles perched in underground silos, and missile-carrying submarines deployed in the world's oceans and prepared at any moment to rise to the surface and to inflict, at the touch of a button, a holocaust of human suffering five thousand miles away.
By the time I arrived at the side of Senator Fulbright in 1972, the race had become so virulent that the two arsenals were rapidly rising toward a total of 50,000 nuclear devices. The technology had become so potent that a single American submarine , powered by nuclear energy and carrying nuclear-tipped missiles , held, under the command of a 40-year-old U.S. Navy captain, more destructive power than had been unleashed in all the combined wars of human history. At any one time, we had dozens of such boats at sea.
As it happened, my arrival in the Senate coincided with a new chapter in the nuclear age, for the two sides had decided to negotiate even while continuing the race. They had assigned their diplomats to try to establish an agreed framework for the nuclear competition that would prevent either from having an incentive to launch first. This was called nuclear arms control.
Through the 1970's and 1980's, my time in the Senate was much consumed with such matters. Mastering the lingo was a job in itself. We talked in terms like "throw-weight" and "circular error probable"; Titan missiles and Minutemen; SS-18's and B-52's; SLBM's and ICBM's. All this jargon tended to disguise that we were dealing with the most horrific creations in Man's history , weapons ten times, or even 100 times, more powerful than the bombs that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In those years, we proceeded through a series of arms pacts called SALT I and SALT II, START I and START II. Each was highly complex, each the subject of a hard U.S.-Soviet negotiation followed by a bitter Senate debate. Thousands of hours of my life were devoted to these treaties as an effort to contain nuclear danger.
Today, history's verdict about nuclear arms control remains controversial. Conservatives argue that these talks and treaties accomplished nothing, that the arsenals were not really constrained by negotiations and that nuclear war was avoided only by American strength and resolve. My answer is that the very process of U.S.-Soviet negotiation was valuable in creating personal connections across the Iron Curtain , and in reorienting both of the two huge military bureaucracies, focusing each on the task of avoiding war rather than waging it.
Two things are certain. Nuclear war did not come and containment worked. In 1947, a brilliant American diplomat named George Kennan had propounded the containment theory, arguing that the West could not actually defeat the Soviet Union but could outwait it , preventing the Soviet empire from expanding until it finally collapsed under the weight of the miseries inflicted by its tyranny. This is precisely what occurred between 1989 and 1991.
With sheer good fortune, the Soviet Union was led at that time by a man who recognized the weakness of the Soviet empire and was willing to see it disintegrate rather than battle in futility to save it. In 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the Berlin Wall to fall peacefully and relinquished Soviet control in Eastern Europe without a fight. Two years later, the Soviet Union itself dissolved with almost no bloodshed.
Just as the Soviet era came to an end, my life changed with the election in 1992 of President Bill Clinton , like myself a protégé of Senator Fulbright. In Vienna there was a job that combined my belief in the UN idea and my interest in arms control, and luckily the new President was willing to let me have it. In 1993, after the Senate had approved my nomination as ambassador, Christina, Nina, Alyssa, and I packed up our old lives up and departed for an adventure in one of Europe's ancient capitals.
Although I was U.S. ambassador to all the UN organizations in Vienna, the one that consumed my attention was the International Atomic Energy Agency, born of President Eisenhower's initiative 40 years earlier. Over the years, the IAEA had acquired key roles affecting the safety and security of people everywhere.
The first of these is called nuclear safeguards. Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, almost every nation in the world has voluntarily undertaken a legal obligation not to acquire a nuclear weapon. Today the IAEA presides over a global inspection system to see that nations adhere to this pledge.
When I arrived in Vienna, the safeguards system was in a state of turmoil because the Gulf War had revealed that it didn't always work. In the war's aftermath, we had discovered that Saddam Hussein had tried to build a Bomb secretly even while IAEA inspectors policed Iraq's known nuclear installations. For seven years, my job in Vienna was to help the IAEA build a better system , one that would prevent any future Saddam from constructing a Bomb in covert facilities.
Meanwhile, another crisis erupted when the IAEA discovered that North Korea was lying about its nuclear program. In 1994, this discovery nearly led to war when North Korea threatened to defy the IAEA and transfer nuclear material in a way that might enable Pyongyang to construct a nuclear bomb. Few Americans are aware of how close we came at that moment to attacking North Korea to prevent this from occurring.
Amidst this crisis, I had a remarkable experience showing how small our world has become. One morning , with tension at a fever pitch , I arrived at my Vienna office to find that former President Jimmy Carter was on the line from South Korea. On his own, the former President had traveled there and was preparing to cross into North Korea , an act of personal diplomacy he hoped would defuse the crisis. With only a moment's warning, I heard the familiar southern drawl of a man I had never met , asking me exactly what he should try to accomplish in his forthcoming meeting with North Korea's leader, Kim Il Sung.
I improvised as best I could, scratching thoughts on a paper as I talked. I suggested three specific objectives and explained the rationale. After 25 minutes, President Carter thanked me, saying that he had learned from mutual friends that my views might be helpful.
A few minutes later, still bemused if not befuddled by what had just occurred, I turned on CNN to see a live press conference with President Carter at the border between North and South Korea. I was all the more amazed when I heard him say, "Today I hope to accomplish three objectives." As I listened to him repeat many of my own words, I felt, more than any other time before or since, almost surrealistically "plugged in" to world events. My part was minor, but President Carter did indeed defuse the crisis, and we went on to negotiate a deal with the North Koreans that prevented war.
Another aspect of my work was supporting the IAEA as it helps nations maximize the safety of nuclear plants that produce electricity.
In 1986, the world had been shocked when a Soviet-designed electricity-generating reactor in Ukraine at a place called Chernobyl malfunctioned, creating a huge fire that released radioactivity into the air. Before that, the IAEA had helped nations on reactor safety only when they asked for it. After Chernobyl, the Agency set out to build a global safety regime in which all nations were expected to meet certain standards.
Today the IAEA and a new World Association of Nuclear Operators work together to oversee operations at every nuclear reactor around the world. What was left to chance before Chernobyl is now a matter of professional scrutiny worldwide. Fifteen years later, Chernobyl stands as a lesson learned , a salutary warning which fostered a global safety culture that has yielded a total of 10,000 reactor-years of nuclear electricity production with no other serious accident.
Still another IAEA activity was the most fascinating. When the nuclear age opened, optimists had hoped that atomic technology might hold marvelous and unknown benefits for Humankind. What has happened over the years is precisely that. Today, scientists and technicians at the IAEA are busy disseminating a truly dazzling array of nuclear sciences. These technologies promote agricultural productivity, enhance human nutrition, protect livestock health, preserve food, eradicate virulent pests, improve industrial processes, and help in the search for scarce water resources and the advancement of environmental science. Nuclear science is proving equally valuable in the developed world and in helping to advance the world's poorest countries.
In my seven years in Vienna, I was encouraged profoundly by seeing the UN idea at work. In tasks as diverse as combating illicit drugs, promoting industrial development, and helping Palestinian refugees, I found men and women from around the world working effectively together toward common goals. In the IAEA, I saw people constituting a virtual zoo of humanity , professionals from scores of countries , bound by the shared aim of seeing atomic technology used for good and not ill.
I was encouraged too that in working to fulfill President Eisenhower's vision of "atoms for peace," these men and women were in fact succeeding. With the Cold War over and with the nuclear superpowers dismantling their arsenals, the promise of the nuclear age was beginning to be fulfilled.
What discouraged me, however, was the vast disparity between my positive perceptions of nuclear technology and the hostile view that continued to dominant public opinion. I expected the public to loathe nuclear weapons , I had devoted much of my life to efforts to curtail their danger. What bothered me was the widespread and indiscriminate antipathy to all things nuclear, most importantly nuclear energy.
I understand that Professor Ginsberg has circulated an article of mine that tries to debunk certain myths about nuclear energy. Perhaps the worst of these is that nuclear energy produces a huge amount of uniquely ghastly waste that society doesn't know what to do with and that represents a horrible curse on future generations. This myth is truly ironic because it is the energy waste issue that shows why the world so urgently needs nuclear energy.
Today, most of the world's energy comes from fossil fuel. When we burn coal, oil, or gas for electricity, or heating, or industry, or transportation, the waste gases and particulates are emitted directly into the atmosphere. Some of these wastes pollute the air immediately around us. Some , the so-called greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide , rise into the upper atmosphere where they accumulate in a build-up that adds to the amount of natural greenhouse gases that have been there for many thousands of years. That level is called the pre-industrial level, and we are now beginning to move well above it.
It bears emphasis that the greenhouse effect is not a scientific theory but a recognized fact. The moderate temperature on Earth that has allowed life to evolve exists precisely because the natural level of greenhouses gases has captured just the right proportion of the sun's heat from being reflected back off the Earth and out into space. Without the greenhouse effect, the Earth would be covered with ice.
But the greenhouse effect is now being rapidly intensified by Mankind's use of fossil fuel. Each year, the world's consumption of fossil fuel is releasing 7 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere.
This may seem an abstract number, so let me reduce it to personal terms. Every American , each person in this room , is responsible for emitting into the atmosphere 120 pounds of greenhouse gases every single day. I am not commenting on the health of your digestive systems. I am talking about the amount of fossil fuel waste that is released every day in the process of supporting your lifestyle , your housing, food, transportation, entertainment, and everything else you do.
Whereas consumers of fossil fuel are despoiling the Biosphere by using it as a vast dumpsite, nuclear energy produces almost no waste. No waste goes into the air, and only a tiny amount of solid waste results from the production of even a vast amount of nuclear-generated electricity.
It should not be surprising that the volume of nuclear waste is small, for tinyness is the essential magic of nuclear energy. A lump of uranium fuel the size of a ping-pong ball holds more energy than a fully loaded trainload of coal.
Today the world has 434 nuclear reactors around the world , a fourth of them in the United States , together producing one-sixth of the world's electricity. The amount of waste produced by all of these reactors in an entire year would fit into a three-story building the size of a baseball diamond, and I'm talking about just the infield. That's the sum total for the world. If all of the world's electricity were being produced by nuclear, we'd have six such buildings' worth each year.
It is true that nuclear waste is radioactive. But radiation is an ordinary phenomenon , and scientists have agreed on a safe way to handle the relatively small, albeit highly concentrated volume of radioactive material coming from nuclear reactors.
First, the waste is turned into glass , a process called vitrification. Then it is packed into corrosion-resistant canisters, which are then buried deep underground , surrounded by a thick layer of clay and sand , in a stable geological formation. All of this can be done in a manner that allows the waste to be inspected whenever desired, and retrieved if new technologies make it advisable to do so. Meanwhile, there is no danger of damage to Man or Environment.
A common question is whether the repository will remain stable. The answer is that we can have a high degree of certainty. To help envisage long-term geological stability, consider the millions of liters of natural gas we use each day. This most highly volatile of substances is being tapped from geological formations where it has been captured by Nature for not just thousands but millions of years. It is not difficult to find places on Earth with such long-term geological stability. But, for insurance, repositories can be designed so that, even if there were Earth movement, the amount of radiation reaching the surface would not add significantly to natural levels of radiation.
Let me now place all of this into context by citing some large and ominous facts , facts that, taken together, show that Mankind is heading, full speed, toward a crisis in this Century like no other in known history. This crisis is a result of the combined forces of population, economic growth, and energy consumption and their inexorably debilitating effect on the Biosphere. A few statistics tell the story.
In the face of these facts , facts pointing directly to impending catastrophe , governments and citizens 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.
In a way, the Kyoto climate change negotiations may have beguiled us. They call for developed countries to cut their emissions by a few percent , to slightly below their 1990 levels. 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. Today, among experts, a widely-accepted goal of climate control strategy is to try 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 has been chosen solely because it is the one goal that is conceivably feasible. In other words, it might avoid catastrophe 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?
Today, despite all the talk about climate treaties and cutbacks in greenhouse gases, the rate of emissions is rising rapidly ? in America and in most countries of the world. From the current level of 7 billion tons of carbon a year, emissions will rise to 10 billion tons a year in the next 20 years. In short, the curve for greenhouse gas emissions is heading straight up. To have hope of avoiding catastrophe, we must first pull this curve back to current emission levels within the next fifty years ? and then to half of current levels in the second half of this century.
This might sound like a modest task, but it is in fact a challenge of such monumental proportions that few have yet grasped it. With the developing world exploding in population and energy consumption, what this entails for already-industrialized countries like America is a cut in carbon emissions, in the decades just head, of something on the order of 60-70%.
Your generation faces a future in which radical change is not just a possibility. 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.
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 true capabilities of the measures available to deal with it.
On the right side of the political spectrum, people tend to be indifferent or skeptical about the problem, even though they might be comfortable with any form of energy solution, including nuclear. On the left hand side are environmentalists who are admirable in their sincere concern about the problem but who incline strongly toward fantasy about solutions.
You will hear from many environmentalists that the solution to global warming lies in the so-called "renewables," meaning solar power, wind, geothermal energy, and biomass. These are indeed good things. But they have one overwhelming drawback: Their effect is far too small to solve the problem. Renewables should be developed as rapidly as possible and can meet some energy demand. But taken together ? even under the most optimistic assumptions ? renewables cannot even come close to meeting the world?s need for large-scale clean energy in the 21 st Century.
There is, in fact, only one technology on our horizon today capable of producing unlimited amounts of clean electricity ? it is the technology embodied in a nuclear power reactor incorporating state-of-the-art scientific advance. This is true in the developed countries ? the United States and Europe and Japan ? and it is true in China and India, the heart of the developing world.
We thus have a perilous gap in our political system in dealing with a looming crisis requiring urgent attention. Whereas the right tends toward fantasy about the problem of global warming and the left toward fantasy about the solution, what we desperately need are men and women who are deeply serious about the problem and highly realistic about the solution.
In heading the World Nuclear Association, my principal aim is to help close this gap by fostering seriousness and realism in our public debate. I invite you to do the same. As students and young citizens, you possess the freshness of outlook to see a new way forward. I urge you not only to recognize that Mankind faces a crisis without precedent but also to consider that its solution may involve a strange and beautiful twist of history ? by which the atomic power that so terrorized the world during my generation becomes, for you, an indispensable tool in preserving the Biosphere itself.