Reference Docs

Nuclear Energy and Sustainable Development

Wilton Park Conference: "Climate Change: What Can Be Done?"

Remarks by John Ritch
Director General, World Nuclear Association

Wilton Park, West Sussex, UK
14 May 2002

Ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you today about the role of nuclear energy in the context of the enormous security threat posed ? to all nations ? by our world?s heavy use of fossil energy and the resulting danger of catastrophic climate change.

You require no education from me to know that his problem will not be solved solely by energy conservation and energy efficiency. Even in the industrialised world, such measures can have only limited benefit. And if our aim is to meet the needs of huge populations now living in misery, as well as the billions of people soon to be born, we must produce even more energy.

Indeed, in the next half-century alone, humanity is likely to consume more energy than the combined total consumed in all previous history.

We have no choice: To meet human needs without destabilizing the biosphere ? in other words, to lay a sound foundation for sustainable development ? we must start a massive shift to clean-energy technologies.

If we do not, we consign ourselves to a perverse race in which the contestants are the precipitous depletion of irreplaceable fossil resources and the ruination of our planet?s health through their excessive use.

In the effort to produce clean energy, renewables deserve widespread support. But this fact must be faced: other clean sources are needed.

I work for the World Nuclear Association because I believe that nuclear energy can make a central contribution to sustainable development in the 21 st century.

I have seen no realistic scenario by which the world can meet the challenge of sustainable development without a central role for nuclear energy? and an enormous worldwide growth in the industry that provides it.

While some shy from this prospect, I welcome it.

I believe that it takes only a small stretch of the imagination to envisage a future in which nuclear power is providing both clean electricity and hydrogen fuel to produce a worldwide clean-energy revolution.

Beyond that, it quite easy to imagine that nuclear energy will eventually prove critical in providing three essentials to the world ? not just electricity and hydrogen, but also clean water through desalination.

As a point of reference, let me show you a slide. The numbers on it by no means constitute a prediction. Rather, they are an exercise in mathematics.

This "visionary order of magnitude" shows the rate of nuclear reactor construction that would be needed if, over the next 50 years, we were to move to a world in which nuclear power supported not only all of global electricity production but also provided the energy for making hydrogen and for a high level of desalination.

What the arithmetic produces is a need to build one 1-Gigawatt reactor per day for the next 50 years. Obviously, this is implausible in the extreme. However, this calculation does help to demonstrate the dimensions of the problem we face. If we want a clean-energy world, we need clean energy on this order of magnitude from one source or another ? through some combination of nuclear, renewables, and clean-fossil.

Returning now to the real world ? a world in which nuclear energy continues to confront public sensitivity and fear ? I think in terms of two barriers in the realm of public understanding:

In many countries, these two barriers tend to be associated with the two sides of the political spectrum. On the political left we see a resistance to nuclear technology, and on the political right a resistance to dealing decisively with the huge environmental and developmental problems that nuclear energy can help to solve.

Putting it starkly, the political right still hasn?t embraced the problem, and the left still hasn?t embraced the technology that, in my view, is essential to the solution.

With both groups, however, progress has been substantial. While some people many still hope or expect that nuclear energy is a "sunset" industry, I see on the horizon the possibility of a clear and lasting victory in establishing public and policy support for nuclear power as a critically important technology in meeting a crucially important energy-and-environmental challenge.

A positive factor is that nuclear energy is now in the news. What we are seeing is a "constructive cycle" in which nuclear?s resurgence is creating news-and-debate, and news-and-debate are producing a valuable educational effect that serves to support the industry?s resurgence.

Something similar is occurring even in countries like Sweden, Germany and Belgium where anti-nuclear greens have gained power and ? by trying to convert green ideology into national policy ? have forced a public debate about the consequences of denuclearisation.

This process I liken to an "inoculation effect" whereby a dose of anti-nuclearism, once it works its way through the political system, helps to strengthen public appreciation of nuclear power?s unique clean-energy value. I am absolutely certain that none of those countries will abandon nuclear energy.

The second barrier to public understanding relates to the environmental context that surrounds nuclear energy.

The Kyoto Protocol represents one small step toward global action on the environment. But as its limited goals and faltering success underscore quite vividly, our governmental institutions are only just beginning to respond to the great global challenges that now demand a dominant role for nuclear power.

We can understand this more clearly perhaps when we see that world politics are in the early stages of a profound transformation that began just a few years ago.

Before that, for almost a half-century, the world was consumed in a great geopolitical struggle that dominated the passions and priorities of people everywhere ? absorbing resources in vast quantity and shaping all political thought and action. In that era, even broad global issues of human need and economic development were viewed through a Cold War prism.

One of the great positive consequences of the end of the Cold War is that the world has refocused ? and begun to comprehend that some of the most critical questions of human history, far from being behind us, have been dangerously neglected and are now pressing upon us with an urgency that intensifies by the day.

Among these questions, none is more profound than whether and how mankind can produce vast amounts of energy ? cleanly. As this question acquires an ever-increasing urgency, I believe it will inexorably point the world to an increasing reliance on nuclear power.

At the World Nuclear Association, our goal is to prepare for ? and to hasten the arrival of ? a future in which nuclear energy plays a sharply expanding global role.

The relationship among the different global nuclear organisations can be explained in terms of a "division of labour" involving a "triad" of responsibilities:

Our efforts to represent the industry at the trans-national level are limited and targeted. One area of particular interest, of course, is the UN negotiations on climate and sustainable development. Here we have responded to the request from a large group of industry CEO?s by establishing what we call the ?Strategy Group on Sustainable Development? to coordinate industry messages and activities relevant to these negotiations.

Our obvious concern in these talks lies with the efforts of anti-nuclear environmentalists operating from a base in environmental ministries ? even in many countries that have strong policies favouring nuclear power. Because these ministries have dominated the staffing of national delegations, we continue to face the possibility that well-positioned minorities ? collaborating together at the multilateral level ? will hijack these major global negotiations, right under the noses of their pro-nuclear governments.

In our view, this is the ultimate perversity ? the effort to use global negotiations on a gravely important world problem to stigmatise a technology that is poised to play an essential role in the solution.

A central aim of anti-nuclear forces is to deny that nuclear energy is sustainable. To counter this, we aim to orchestrate presentations from all corners of the world ? including China, India, South Africa, and Brazil ? to deliver the rebuttal message that nuclear energy has already been embraced as a sustainable development technology in the strategies of many key developing countries representing much of world population.

As the WNA works to advance these messages, we place particular emphasis on our website.

We are glad to be told that it constitutes the most comprehensive and accessible source of information on the global nuclear industry.

The WNA website now receives ? from all around the world ? over 3,000 hits a day, heavily concentrated on information briefs that we constantly expand and update.

I thought it would lay a useful groundwork for our discussion if I showed you a feature from our website, which we call the AutoEssay. We have designed it to unfold the case for nuclear energy with maximum efficiency. It takes just 12 minutes.

In a few weeks, the AutoEssay will be available ? both on our website and on CD ? in more than 20 languages. Viewing it will, I believe, give us more to talk about.