by John Ritch Director General, World Nuclear Association
Charles Francis Adams Lecture The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy Tufts University Boston, Massachusetts 25 October 2004
Friends and members of the Fletcher community:
My thanks to Dean Sheehan for inviting me to be here with you and for the opportunity to present the Charles Francis Adams Lecture.
Tufts attracts an impressive array of speakers on world affairs. On a recent list, I noted Senators Hillary Clinton and Richard Lugar, Mideast negotiator Dennis Ross, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, and my friend Mohamed Elbaradei, Director General of the IAEA.
These figures represent a rich diversity of experience and perspective. Yet I think it is fair to say that all present their views in the common parlance of geo-strategy - a term for the conduct of relations among nations, institutions and cultures.
Today my topic is also geo-strategy, but in a non-traditional sense and on much more fundamental level. The challenge I ask you to consider is whether and how we can preserve the very world we live in.
This phrasing is not for melodramatic effect, for I submit that the tide of history has brought humankind to an existential crisis in the most literal sense.
Your generation must now confront an unprecedented question, and you must do so unflinchingly and in the clearest light of scientific reality. It is whether humankind can maintain - or whether we will destroy - the stability of the Earth's biosphere and thus the very environmental conditions that enabled civilisation to evolve.A Global Crisis Without Precedent
Our world today is struggling to cope with two monumental imperatives:
In all history, humankind has never faced a greater challenge than to reconcile these two imperatives.
Today, as matters stand, we are failing to meet this challenge. On our present course, scientists predict that human activity is releasing greenhouse gases at a rate that will cause global warming to reach a point, sometime in this century, of irreversibility.
At that point, we will have unleashed, with no further possibility of mitigation, forces of climate change that will produce an unfolding catastrophe of flood, famine, pestilence, violent weather, and massive human suffering and dislocation on a truly Biblical scale.
In part, our failure thus far to mount a serious response to this danger may be attributed to psychological and political denial. But our paralysis is compounded because those among us who are most attuned to recognising the crisis - those who comprise organised environmentalism - are proffering solutions based more on myth and dogma than on science and fact.
It is my thesis is that humankind has at its disposal a marvellous tool called nuclear technology that will be indispensable - and that must be central in any rational strategy - if this challenge is to be met.
Today we have some 440 nuclear power reactors, generating one-sixth of the world's electricity cleanly and without greenhouse gases. I submit that our world will need thousands of nuclear reactors - something on the order of six to ten thousand in this century.
And indeed thousands will be built. By mid-century, we can anticipate that China and India will build as many as 300 reactors each - on trajectories that could see each nation exceed 1,000 reactors in the lifetime of a child born today.
But the principal question, as I will seek to describe, is whether we will build enough.
Dimensions of the Global Environmental Crisis
For many environmentalists, any such prescription will still seem shocking if not sacrilegious. But if organised environmentalists have not yet embraced nuclear power, they have helped immensely to build awareness of the crisis we truly face:
This is a powerful message of global crisis.
Sceptics, cynics, curmudgeons - and, ironically, many conservatives - may wish to ignore it, leaving us to note that the term conservatism has lost all meaning if it does not connote a desire to preserve our world's most precious assets and to maintain the very foundations of our society.
For my own part, I find the environmentalist case compelling, profoundly alarming and a clear summons to public action.
The Necessity of a Decisive Strategic Response
Let us state the case - both the problem and the logic of its solution - in the clearest possible terms:
In the next 50 years, as global population grows from 6 toward 9 billion, human need will multiply - and, in the absence of dramatic measures, so too will human misery.
As nations try to meet this need, the rate of world energy consumption will double or even triple, and - in just this narrow 50-year period alone - humankind will use more energy than in all previous history combined.
Today, despite much rhetoric and diplomacy, the global rate of CO2 emissions continues to rise inexorably and so too does the atmospheric build-up of these heat-trapping gases.
The rate of emissions is now 25 billion metric tonnes a year, or 800 tonnes of CO2 per second.
Within the United States, where per capita emissions are most intense, the American lifestyle is emitting at a rate of 125 pounds of CO2 per person per day. Not per year: 125 pounds of CO2 for every person every day.
While Americans show no signs of slackening in this emissions rate, other countries - particularly in the developing world - are beginning to rise toward our catastrophic pace.
What these emissions rate portend must be weighed by looking at the results in terms of atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gases. During the last 400 millennia, CO2 levels have fluctuated between 200 and 300 parts-per-million.
Just how important this statistic is can be seen in its relation to atmospheric temperature. For the last 400,000 years, atmospheric temperature has fluctuated - within a range of about 15 degrees Centigrade - in almost perfect correlation to the atmospheric concentration of CO2.
Now, however, human activity in the industrial age has suddenly - in geological time - raised CO2 concentrations to well above any pre-industrial level.
Today's level of 350 parts-per-million, while unprecedented, might in itself sound less than alarming. What is undeniably alarming, however, is the projected level. Unless we achieve prompt and drastic global action to curb greenhouse emissions, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will reach double the pre-industrial level by the middle of the 21st century and will continue to rise thereafter.
To stabilise greenhouse gases - even at a dangerously higher level - scientists calculate that daily global emissions must be cut, within the next 50 years, by at least 50%.
Since developing countries such as China and India will inevitably emit far more greenhouse gases, preserving the biosphere will require that the already industrialised countries must cut emissions by 75% - and also lead in disseminating clean-energy technology worldwide.
Nuclear Energy in a Future of Radical Change
This is a challenge of draconian proportions. It faces us with a choice of stark simplicity, which can be described - without overstatement - as the most important choice in human history. Our choice is between two futures of radical change.
Either we will achieve radical transformation in the global economy - or we will experience a radical alteration in the global environment, a radical upsurge in human suffering, and a radical transformation in life as we know it.
Unless we make that choice soon, we will lose the option to choose. We will have chosen, by default, a radically changing and destructive environment that is beyond our control.
If we are to control our destiny, the question before us is this: How are we to accomplish a massive worldwide shift to clean energy technologies?
Authoritative projections by the International Energy Agency (in the public sector) and the World Energy Council (in the private sector) point to the same unambiguous conclusion - that our need for clean energy on a colossal scale cannot conceivably be met without a sharply increased use of nuclear power.
In fact, nuclear power is the quintessential sustainable development technology:
Challenges Met in Preparing for a Nuclear Century
In the century ahead, if we use this available option to full effect, the world will surely come to recognise its profound debt to the scientists and diplomats whose efforts paved the way for an era in which the power of the atom became indispensable to human welfare:
First, we are meeting the challenge of proliferation.
The global regime founded on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty constitutes one of the great diplomatic achievements in history.
We cannot erase the danger of illicit nuclear activity. But it is fundamental to recognise that the challenges posed by North Korea, Iraq and Iran do not arise from the civil use of nuclear energy to produce electricity - either in those countries or elsewhere.
These challenges arise from geo-political conflict, from the ubiquitous availability of nuclear knowledge, and from the ability of any large, well-funded regime to pursue such aims if it chooses and if it is not persuaded or thwarted from doing so. We must meet those challenges to global security where they arise.
What is important is that we have built ever-stronger IAEA safeguards to fulfil the pertinent goal, which is to ensure that valuable use of nuclear technology does not abet the illicit production of nuclear weapons.
Indeed, I would go so far as to argue the opposite: that the existence of a world safeguards system to monitor peaceful nuclear activity - a global system that now consists of obligations backed by sensors and sometimes intrusive inspections - actually strengthens our ability to detect illicit activity where it may be occurring.
In short, the monitoring of harmless activity provides us with an invaluable global network to detect illegal activity.
Second, we have met the challenge of safety with a combination of technological advance and an ever-improving nuclear safety culture that draws on some 12,000 reactor-years of practical experience.
This global safety culture relies on high standards established by the IAEA and reinforced by the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO).
Created in response to the unique accident that occurred at Chernobyl in 1986, WANO represents an extraordinary achievement in private-sector diplomacy. WANO's network of technical exchange and peer review now encompasses every power reactor worldwide.
Already the safest major source of energy - both for plant workers and for the surrounding environment - nuclear power will become even more so in the future, as advanced reactors using "passive" design features provide still another layer of operational safety.
To assure safe transport, today's industry uses highly engineered containers able to withstand enormous impact. To date, more than 20,000 containers of spent fuel and high-level waste have been shipped safely over a total distance of 20 million miles.
During the transport of these and other radioactive substances - for nuclear power, research and medicine - there has never been a seriously harmful radioactive release.
As potential targets of terrorism, nuclear reactors - and used fuel facilities - are robust structures of heavily reinforced concrete and steel that are far, far less vulnerable than chemical factories or most key elements of modern infrastructure. In military parlance, nuclear is a far less lucrative target.
Since 9/11, state-of-the-art computer modelling shows that a similar assault against U.S. nuclear facilities - even under extreme worst-case assumptions - would result in no release of radionuclides. Such facilities represent a standard of impregnability attainable by new reactors everywhere.
As to cost, steady reductions are carrying us toward a future in which nuclear power will emerge as a clear winner on the field of affordability.
Today nuclear is the cheapest clean-energy source, and in many locales - such as the USA - nuclear power has lower operational costs than carbon fuels. Nuclear's higher capital costs will fall steadily - through simplified, standardised reactor designs and faster construction.
Meanwhile, fossil costs - particularly for gas and oil - will rise, as shortages engender price spikes and energy insecurity.
The introduction of soundly conceived emissions penalties (whether through emissions trading or taxes) will tilt this balance even faster, enabling nuclear power to dominate any market that imposes a real price for environmental damage.
Clean coal, even if it proves technically feasible, will almost certainly be far costlier than nuclear power.
Finally, as to waste, nuclear power has made enormous progress, both technically and politically.
The irony that some environmentalists oppose nuclear energy is compounded when they oppose it using the contention that waste is the insoluble problem of nuclear power.
For, in truth, waste is the greatest comparative asset of nuclear power - precisely because the volume is tiny and, unlike the waste from fossil fuel, it can be safely managed without harm to people or the environment.
The volume is indeed remarkably small. Consider that the entire quantity of high-level waste produced annually from producing one-sixth of the world's electricity would fit into a structure two stories high built on a basketball court.
Future progress in new technologies of partition & transmutation may someday reduce this volume still further and also shorten the decay-life of spent fuel.
But, even with current technology, an overwhelming scientific consensus supports the use of geological repositories as feasible, affordable and eminently safe.
The governing principle is both simple and sound: to establish multiple barriers of substance and distance, so that even worst-case scenarios result in a harmless long-term dilution of the deposited materials into the natural levels of radioactivity present in the Earth itself.
The creation of such repositories is now under way in Sweden, Finland, and the United States, and similar steps can be expected in Russia and elsewhere as these acts of leadership become widely emulated.
Recognising Nuclear Power as an Essential Clean-Energy Asset
It is a fundamental irony of our age - and it is fast becoming a tragic irony - that so many citizens and organisations most concerned about the clean energy problem are fixated on myths, dogmas and sheer fantasies regarding the solution.
The irony is a dual one: first, because environmentalists continue to oppose this marvellous tool of environmentalism; and second, because nuclear technology of other kinds has come to pervade modern society as a matter of routine and without challenge.
Fifty years ago, even with the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fresh in mind, few would have predicted that such irrationality would so fully entrench itself in our political lives.
Then, despite the recognised dangers of nuclear weapons, public opinion exhibited a pervasive optimism that enormous human benefit would come from exploring the full potential of nuclear science.
A Walt Disney book entitled Our Friend, the Atom - heralding a cornucopia of such benefits - could be found in classrooms across America.
Nor was that optimism misplaced. For much of what was predicted - and even more - has come to pass.
Today, far more than most people realise, nuclear technology has become part of the everyday experience of any person in modern society, and this is increasingly so in developing nations.
Around the world, many of the foods we eat today - particularly cereals like wheat, rice, barley, and maize - now come from seeds adapted for local conditions using nuclear techniques. Travel to Italy, for example, and at least half the pasta and pizza you eat will come from wheat seeds developed with nuclear techniques.
In scores of countries, crops today are irrigated with water systems that have been optimised with techniques of nuclear hydrology, and this agricultural produce - and livestock as well - are protected from pests and disease with technologies, like the Sterile Insect Technique, that use nuclear science.
Our foods are packaged in paper and plastic products efficiently manufactured using nuclear technology, and then protected from spoilage on the way to market by nuclear irradiation techniques that eliminate destructive bacteria and microorganisms while leaving the food entirely unaffected.
Finally, those of us waiting to consume this nourishment are living longer and healthier lives through health care that relies heavily on nuclear medicine, both for the diagnosis and then for the cure of many of our ailments.
None of this, I hasten to add, represents a Faustian bargain by which we are leaving a residue of waste or danger to future generations. These nuclear techniques - and many, many more being developed and applied in science, agricultural and industry - are safe and harmless, while contributing immensely to technological progress, to environmental analysis, and to the high efficiencies that support modern economic prosperity.
While this widespread assimilation of nuclear technology has gone largely unnoticed and unchallenged in modern life, the question of nuclear energy for power production continues, at least in some countries, to be a cause of public agitation and political confusion - even as our Earth's rapidly emerging environmental crisis makes it ever more urgent that we employ nuclear power expansively and with serious clarity of purpose.
On this question, democratic politics and public opinion remain strangely aligned. Many persons on the political right are comfortable with nuclear power but remain sceptical about environmental danger and global warming. Many on the political left are concerned about the environment but remain sceptical about nuclear power. I am among those - in a constituency that is slowly but steadily growing - who support nuclear power precisely because of a deep concern about the environment.
The world's environmentalists have performed many valuable services. But they can provide their fellow citizens no greater service now than to discard the fiction that conservation, solar panels and windmills alone can meet human needs.
Sustainability requires nuclear energy; and the path of sound environmentalism today is to embrace, fight for - and finance - a future in which nuclear power and "new renewables" function as clean-energy partners in a transformed global economy.
The Coming Age of "Hydricity"
Achieving consensus on the need for a nuclear-renewables partnership is an essential first-step in a rational policy response to the environmental dangers we face.
But such consensus is even more crucial if we are to exploit still another atomic marvel - the ability to unite hydrogen and oxygen to make electricity - that now awaits us on the near horizon in our quest for a clean-energy future.
Amazingly, the futurist Jules Verne predicted the hydrogen economy in any uncanny forecast written in 1878.
"Yes, my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light.As long as the earth is inhabited, it will supply the wants of its inhabitants, and there will be no want of either light or heat as long as the production of the vegetable, mineral or animal kingdoms do not fail us."
What that visionary author could not recognise was that another power source would be needed if hydrogen and oxygen were to be exploited for their energy value. This is so because hydrogen is a delivery vehicle - not a source - of energy.
A hydrogen fuel cell closely resembles an electricity power plant. Each provides the means of delivering - in an electrical current - the energy drawn from another source.
In a hydrogen fuel cell, the original energy source is the one needed to create pure hydrogen by pulling it apart from its combination with oxygen or other chemical elements with which it unites in Nature.
That original energy input becomes, in a fuel cell, an energy output when hydrogen recombines with oxygen to yield electricity as the product and water as a by-product.
A hydrogen fuel cell represents a revolutionary innovation because it will produce electricity on demand and cleanly.
Hydrogen thus offers a means, for the first time in history, to store enormous quantities of electricity - for use, when needed, in cleanly powered transportation and in the full range of traditional electrical uses for home and industry.
But hydrogen's environmental value depends on making it cleanly.
Renewables like solar and wind can help to produce hydrogen cleanly on a small scale. But only nuclear power offers clean primary energy on the vast scale a hydrogen economy will require.
In essence, hydrogen offers a means by which the clean primary energy of nuclear power can be stored. Thus, the advent of the hydrogen economy provides a bridge by which nuclear power can contribute not just to direct base-load electricity but also to transport and the entire spectrum of energy use.
With this bridge, it is now possible for the first time to envisage a thriving, large-scale, emissions-free industrial economy, in which nuclear power and renewables together provide clean primary energy to generate electricity and to store electricity - via hydrogen - for transport and a myriad of other uses.
The man often described as the father of the hydrogen fuel cell, the scientific pioneer Geoffrey Ballard, has referred to such a comprehensive system as "hydricity".
The vision of hydricity is exciting technologically - and can also inspire action diplomatically.
In global environmental diplomacy, our urgent need is for a comprehensive treaty regime in which all the nations of the world - developed and developing - undertake a binding commitment to use emissions trading as the driving economic incentive for a long-term evolution to a global clean energy economy.
Our failure thus far traces ultimately to the lack of a plausible vision as to how a collective commitment to deep emissions cuts might realistically be fulfilled.
Until now, China and India have refused to accept limitations that might hinder economic development, while the United States has refused to accept what have been perceived as debilitating limitations on an industrial economy that is already developed.
The emergence of a clear vision of a modern, technologically feasible clean-energy economy could break this logjam, stimulating nations to undertake the commitments that will accelerate our steps toward the vision's fulfilment.
An Expansive Nuclear Future
A future in which nuclear power plays a central role in producing electricity, hydrogen, and also clean water will not require a revolutionary change in the use of this technology, but rather only an acceleration in current trends:
The essential issue about nuclear power is not whether it will grow but how fast:
Transnational Support for the Global Nuclear Industry
The role of the World Nuclear Association is to promote positive answers to these essential questions.
In this role, we are part of the transnational support structure for the global nuclear industry, a support structure composed of:
Among these four organisations, there is a clearly recognised division of labour and also a considerable degree of cooperation.
Last year the four organisations began to collaborate on an exciting project that we believe will make an enormous contribution to global sustainable development.
We inaugurated a new institution, called the World Nuclear University, which is designed to strengthen the educational foundations of the global nuclear industry for an expanding role in the 21st century.
The mission of the WNU is to:
The WNU is a network of leading institutions of nuclear education and research in more than two-dozen countries worldwide.
The WNU does not itself have a campus or a large faculty. Instead, we use a small coordinating centre, co-located with WNA and WANO in London, to act as unifying force.
An Idea Whose Time Has Come
We see the World Nuclear University as a powerful idea whose time has come, as we prepare for what must be "a nuclear century" if we are to meet worldwide human need while preserving the biosphere.
George Orwell described human life as a "race between education and catastrophe".
Today, with global environmental catastrophe a real and impending danger, all of humankind is in that race, and we will need nuclear power if we are to win it.
Thank you.