Leadership for a Nuclear Century
John Ritch Director General, World Nuclear Association
Opening Remarks Third Annual Summer Institute of the World Nuclear University
Co-hosted by the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI), Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Company (KHNP), and Korea Nuclear Society (KNS)
Daejon, South Korea 16 July 2007
Dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen:
Two years ago, as we opened the first of these annual Summer Institutes, those of us involved shared a sense of great enthusiasm and historic purpose. But it is true we also shared a genuine uncertainty as to whether our aspirations would be fulfilled. The Summer Institute was, after all, an experiment.
Fortunately, with the help of many friends, we found success. First in Idaho in 2005 and then in Stockholm last year, the profoundly positive response of the WNU Fellows themselves and of their parent organizations has converted our original uncertainty into confidence. Today we feel sure that the WNU Summer Institute is fulfilling a widely recognized purpose and is on the way to becoming a prestigious tradition in the international nuclear community.
Our goal in creating the Summer Institute was a large one.
It began in 2003 in a London ceremony attended by top-level participants from industry, academica, and intergovernmental organizations. It was then that we established the World Nuclear University as a partnership to unite all sectors of the international nuclear community in a cooperative effort to enhance education, foster communication, and build leadership in nuclear science and technology.
We saw the Summer Institute as an early experiment - to test whether we could use this cooperative mechanism to achieve a clearly defined objective of broad and fundamental value.
The mission of the Summer Institute, as we conceived it, is to build a cadre of highly capable young nuclear professionals from all over the world to help advance the constructive worldwide use of nuclear energy in the 21st century. We knew that a global nuclear renaissance had begun. Our aim was to help educate and inspire its future leaders.
We want you, as WNU Fellows, to experience an intense educational challenge that serves both to broaden your horizons and to strengthen your commitment to the nuclear profession. As time passes, we want the Fellowship itself to be recognized as a badge of distinction that connotes excellence and vision.
We hope that the WNU Fellows from each year - and from all years collectively - will become a kind of international society, bonded by a shared commitment to the nuclear profession and the great value it can bring to all humankind.
In shaping the programme of the Summer Institute, we have tried to offer you an experience commensurate with these high expectations. When these 6 weeks are over, we hope you depart with new friends from around the world and with a new professional commitment in your own career.
This morning I wish to express congratulations and offer thanks, and then to reflect on the large purpose that has brought us here.
Congratulations and Appreciation
My first and easily accomplished task is to extend a warm welcome and cordial congratulations to all of you, as the third class of WNU Fellows.
In the past two days, some 102 of you have arrived in Daejon from 35 countries representing every region of the world. We are very proud to have you here. We trust that you are proud to be here.
The selection process for the WNU Fellowship produced an impressive list of candidates. Your presence here today is evidence that each of you has demonstrated, in the early stages of your career, the intelligence, achievement, and motivation to be identified as a potential future leader in the realm of nuclear science and technology.
The thanks I wish to express are to the many people on whose hard work the WNU Coordinating Centre has depended in preparing an educational experience designed to challenge you and to help you build toward the fulfilment of your potential. These contributions have come - and they will continue to come - in many forms.
You have already met the two people most directly involved in preparing the programme of this year’s Summer Institute. They are Philippe Hauw of France and Youngmi Nam of Korea. Both are secondees to the WNU Coordinating Centre, supported by the governments and nuclear establishments of their countries.
For the past year, these two worked as partners in London, building this event while overcoming many challenges with a combination of professionalism and good humour. Working closely with them has been Gook- Hee Yoo, who has also been in London as Korea’s long-term contribution to the secretariat of the WNU Coordinating Centre.
Support here in Korea has also been critical, and I offer my whole-hearted and cordial thanks to our hosts at the Korea Atomic Research Institute, the Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Company, and the Korean Nuclear Society. We are especially grateful that these sponsors have contributed so generously in widening your programme with exciting outside activities.
In addition, my warm thanks go to the team of a dozen Mentors who will serve as your aunts and uncles for the next 6 weeks. Each of these persons is a talented nuclear professional, with many years of experience; and it is a sign of their own visionary spirits and generosity that they have chosen to spend these six weeks as your Mentors.
Among them, special mention is due to those who will serve as leaders of the Mentors themselves. Over the next six weeks, this responsibility will be divided. In the first two weeks, Dr. Alan Waltar will be the Chief Mentor, and during the final weeks, Drs. Ed and Debbie Klevans will assume that role.
All three are distinguished academics, who have made indispensable contributions to creating this new institution. Alan Waltar played a seminal role in the original conception of the Summer Institute, and was also a prominent leader in both Idaho and Stockholm. Ed and Debbie Klevans led the planning of the first Summer Institute and then led it jointly as Chief Mentors. All three of these people - Alan and Ed and Debbie - are true godparents of the Summer Institute.
We owe gratitude also to friends at the IAEA in Vienna, who have helped both in the curriculum’s design and also in arranging financial support for WNU Fellows from developing countries. Some of these IAEA professionals will appear before you to provide presentations during the programme. I cannot emphasize enough that the Agency has been indispensable in ensuring both the strength of our programme and the breadth of participation from developing countries.
We owe thanks to many others, as well, who you have not yet met. Over the next six weeks, you will encounter a stream of remarkable speakers who will come from all around the world to share their knowledge on a wide diversity of topics. Among them, I expect that you will find one common trait: a personal dedication to a body of professional expertise and a strong sense of responsibility to pass on that knowledge to the younger generation that you represent.
Purpose of the WNU and the Summer Institute: Fulfilling an Historic Mission with New Urgency
When we founded the World Nuclear University in 2003, we were commemorating the 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower’s Atoms-for-Peace initiative by creating a new form of organization, not a university in the traditional sense. The WNU will have a Coordinating Centre but no permanent campus. Nor will it issue university degrees - or even serve as a virtual university by using electronics to teach from afar.
Instead, WNU is a global partnership, which draws together, into a single cooperative entity, the world’s leading institutions of nuclear learning, the major inter-governmental organizations dealing with nuclear energy, and the world organizations representing the enterprises that actually produce nuclear power.
An early meaning of the word “university” - one the dictionary now labels as obsolete - was “the whole of things in the world”. For us, this definition is not obsolete, for it captures what the World Nuclear University is meant to be: a partnership uniting the whole of things in the nuclear world.
Stated briefly, the WNU’s mission is to carry the Atoms-for-Peace vision into the 21st century through an international alliance that serves to support, to advance, and to help internationalize the study of nuclear science and technology.
How to do this in practice has been our challenge. As an institution, the WNU draws enormous potential strength from the broad span and the diverse expertise and capabilities among its impressive partners. But the WNU’s real - as opposed to potential - strength arises only insofar as we can draw those capabilities into common purpose to achieve synergy in orchestrating valuable activities that wouldn’t otherwise occur.
Creating the WNU partnership was a natural step in a world that it is globalizing so rapidly. But our efforts hold larger significance because history has followed a great arc.
In the 20th century, the discovery of atomic energy came to threaten the very survival of civilization. In this new century, humanity’s future will depend on using that same force constructively, and on an expansive global scale, as we seek to preserve the very biosphere that enabled civilization to evolve.
Let it be said clearly and with confidence: If we are to meet expanding worldwide human need without destroying our planetary environment, this must became a nuclear century.
During the WNU’s inaugural ceremony, we showed newsreel footage from a half-century before, depicting the Cold War context in which President Eisenhower made his bold proposal to the United Nations. Today, as we embark on this third Summer Institute here in Daejon, it is fitting that we remind ourselves of the origins of the tradition we intend to carry forward.
[Eisenhower “Atoms for Peace” video]
As we speak of events in long-ago 1953, please allow me to digress for a personal recollection, for own my Korean experiences began in that very year.
In 1969, when I was a young man of 26, I was a U.S. Army captain stationed on the Korean DMZ to command an infantry company north of Seoul. In 1970, while still in Korea, I was then loaned by the U.S. Army to the Korean government to serve as coach of the Korean Olympic basketball team for about 6 months.
But my first Korean experiences actually go all the way back to 1953, exactly the year of Eisenhower’s speech and also the fourth year of the Korean War. I then lived in a town on America’s West Coast, which was the home of a large U.S. Navy shipyard near Seattle (now known to many of you as the home of Microsoft). That year 1953 was a time of suffering and homelessness in Korea, and it happened that a local shoe store offered a bicycle as a prize to any young person who could collect the most used shoes to be shipped to Korean refugees.
Being a junior humanitarian who was also quite eager to have a bicycle, I took up this challenge and knocked on many hundreds of doors - so many that I won the contest. And suddenly, to my great surprise as a 10-year old boy, I became famous, as my picture appeared in many newspapers around the world - sitting atop a pile of 10,000 pairs of shoes.
Here, for example, is the front page of what was then New York City’s largest newspaper. This picture appeared just after Eisenhower was inaugurated and just before he went to New York to propose “Atoms for Peace”.
This picture and the Eisenhower video we watched evoke a time gone by. They also underscore a dividing line in history.
History’s Greatest Challenge
Over thousands of years, the human saga is replete with conflicts between people of different nationalities, ideologies, and religious beliefs. The Cold War, into which my generation was born, was one of them. Although rendered intensely dangerous by nuclear missiles, that geopolitical confrontation was still on the long continuum of history’s relentless stream of rivalries and struggle.
But as the Cold War ended, and as your generation came of age, history crossed a threshold. Today we face a conflict even more daunting in its dangers and scale, a challenge that is also unlike any previously faced by humanity in any era. It is, in the truest sense of the phrase, an existential conflict - between humankind’s current pattern of behaviour and the very planetary environment that enabled civilization to evolve.
In these early years of the 21st century, this new form of conflict has come increasingly to be recognized as nothing less than a global emergency - a crisis that will require, if catastrophe is to be averted, a worldwide transformation to clean forms of energy. This revolution - led by nuclear power, and using technology of which our industry serves as the world’s custodian - must be achieved if humanity is to prosper and prevail.
It is time for nuclear professionals to speak with conviction, it is time for citizens everywhere to recognize that the nuclear industry represents a mature and immensely valuable technology, and it is time for political leaders to support the rapidly expanded use of this technology if we are to cope with a global emergency that has no borders. Your leadership will be needed if this evolution in human behaviour is to occur.
The fact of a planetary crisis can no longer be a matter of psychological or political denial.
Today the world’s economies are emitting carbon dioxide at the rate of 27 billion tonnes per year - some 900 tonnes per second - a rate that continues to grow, despite years of rhetoric and political posturing. Meanwhile, our best Earth-system scientists now warn, with ever increasing certainty, that greenhouse gas emissions, if continued at the present massive scale, will yield consequences that are - quite literally - apocalyptic: increasingly radical temperature changes, a worldwide upsurge in violent weather events, widespread drought, flooding, wildfires, famine, species extinction, rising sea levels, mass migration and epidemic disease that will leave no country untouched.
The science of weather prediction is still far from exact. But the science of Earth systems - which enables us to understand the drivers of climate change - is well advanced indeed. If the predictions from this science hold true, the combined effect - of greenhouse gas emissions and the compounding reverberations from positive feedback in our world’s oceans, land and air - will be the deaths of not just millions but of billions of people, and the destruction of much of civilization on all continents.
Precisely because we face dangers that go far beyond what we can readily imagine, the spectre of global warming still remains, for many people, too nebulous to contemplate. But what is not nebulous is the human condition that lies behind global warming.
Allow me to present some well-known facts, basic truths that are not in dispute. However familiar they may be, these realities are no less shocking in their significance. They underscore the compelling human dimensions of the global crisis we face.
The Human Dimensions of the Environmental Crisis
This crisis, it bears emphasis, originates not in human evil, but in human success: humanity’s accumulating, accelerating success in acquiring, disseminating, and applying science-based knowledge. It is this success - taking form in agriculture, industry, commerce, and medicine that has spawned the growth in human population and the gathering threat to our environment.
Viewed through history’s eye, this success has come in a sudden burst. Through virtually all of the 50,000 years since humans first appeared, world population never exceeded 10 million.
Then, at some point within the last 2,000 years, something happened. To take a phrase from nuclear science, human inventiveness reached critical mass, and advance led to advance at increasing speed.
Within the last 2,000 years - as shown here - these gains in knowledge brought enlightenment and prosperity to hundreds of millions of people. But the surge of world population also carried a consequence. Before, humanity’s effect on our Earth’s ecosystems was like a flea on a camel - wholly inconsequential.
But in just the 200 years we call the Industrial Age - the time frame pictured in this slide - humanity became an influence on Earth’s fundamental mechanisms. Now this impact - this anthropogenic impact - threatens to destroy the very environmental conditions that enabled human success.
This map sequence illustrates humanity’s growth over the past two millennia. Note that it took 50,000 years for population to reach one billion, a little more than a century to reach two billion, 33 years to reach three billion, 14 years to reach four billion, 13 years to reach five billion, 12 years to reach six billion. Today we are at 6.6 billion people, with 9 billion projected by the year 2050.
Let us look at the sequence a second time to underscore the suddenness of this astonishing surge of human numbers.
Viewing this population through an economic lens serves to describe the human condition. What we find is a world of extremes.
At one end of the scale are the OECD countries, where global prosperity is centred. These wealthy nations represent a mere one-sixth of humanity. At the other end are the world’s poorest. Here an equal number of people - 1.1 billion - live in destitution with constant hunger, no clean water, the death of a child every 3 seconds, and virtually no income or prospect of improvement.
Back at the wealthier end of the spectrum, if we add the 300 million semi-prosperous population of the former Soviet bloc, we find that 1.4 billion of the world’s people - just over 20% - account for 80% of global economic consumption. This means that 80% of the world’s people subsist on 20% of world production of goods and services.
The 80% of humanity in the poor and developing world continues to increase. The rate is 20,000 per day. Think of it as the birth of a new city of 6 million people once each month. Our world’s problem is not shrinking; it is worsening by the day.
The poorest 1.1 billion people are categorized as being in “extreme” poverty. Another 1.6 billion are classified as being in “moderate” poverty - just a small step above abject misery. They have little sanitation and virtually no money. They survive amidst pollution and disease.
The energy dimension of poverty is fundamental. Poverty correlates so closely to the absence of electricity that access to electricity is the best single barometer to gauge a person’s standard of living. In today’s world of 6.6 billion, a full 2 billion people have no electricity, and 2 billion more have only limited access. In other words, just 40% of the world’s people can easily switch on the lights.
Numbers on the same scale apply to clean water. Today, world water tables are falling under the demands of expanding human consumption. As this crisis emerges, we can expect the growing shortage of potable water to produce thirst, disease, and water wars - in other words, a deadly combination of human suffering and human strife. As a remedy, we have one available tool: large-scale desalination of seawater, an energy-intensive process that will compound global energy demand.
Finally, we have the great mass of humanity positioned between poverty and prosperity. This population, poised for advance, will be the engine of our world’s future economic development.
In terms of future energy use, the human condition divides us into three categories: those with energy access who will continue to use it, those with none who desperately need it, and those poised in between, whose drive for economic advance is producing an expanded use of energy and, with it, an intensified outpouring of greenhouse emissions.
The environmental impact of this central group cannot be overstated. Less than ten years from now, greenhouse emissions from developing nations will equal the emissions from the countries we now call developed. After that, emissions from the developing world will be the major driver of global climate change.
This single fact underscores the magnitude, the urgency, and the nature of the challenge we face. It should make clear to all but the most committed ideologue that, while energy conservation, windmills, and solar panels may help, we cannot hope to rely on such measures alone to meet our world’s expanding appetite for more energy.
Accelerating the Nuclear Renaissance
Our starting point for action must be agreement on a basic premise that emerges from every authoritative analysis:
Humankind cannot conceivably achieve a global clean-energy revolution without a huge expansion of nuclear power - to generate electricity, to produce battery power and perhaps hydrogen for tomorrow’s vehicles, and to desalinate seawater in response to the world’s rapidly emerging fresh-water crisis.
This reality is clearly evident in the analyses of the International Energy Agency in the inter-governmental sector and the World Energy Council in the private sector. And just days ago, this reality landed a new bridgehead in the UN environmental sector when Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, declared that there is no credible scenario for global emission reduction without a major role for nuclear power.
The widening recognition of this truth is now reflected in a worldwide nuclear renaissance that is gathering speed and momentum.
For the nuclear industry - from uranium miners to technology vendors to plant constructors - this expansive outlook offers a promising future.
But for serious environmentalists, current projections can provide little comfort - not because nuclear energy is growing but because it is not yet growing fast enough to play its needed role in the clean-energy revolution our world so desperately needs.
In three distinct areas, governments must take decisive action to accelerate the nuclear renaissance.
1) Construct a Comprehensive Global Regime. The first necessity is to move beyond Kyoto to construct a truly comprehensive, long-term climate regime that yields strong political signals - and economic incentives - for a worldwide transformation to clean-energy technology.
To be both effective and politically feasible, any such treaty must include all major nations, developed and developing, and must embody some variation on the principle of “contraction and convergence”.
“Contraction” means that the agreement must produce, over a span of decades, a global reduction in greenhouse emissions on the order of 60%. “Convergence” means that the agreement must adopt, at least implicitly, the principle of equal per-capita emission rights.
From a Northern perspective, this economic aid would be the most cost-effective in history if it helps to prevent the globally destructive growth in greenhouse emissions that might otherwise occur in the developing world.
Last month, in his new initiative on climate change, President Bush took a very belated but considerable step in this direction. While still rejecting international emissions trading as a matter of principle, the President did embrace two principles of enormous consequence:
We are still far away from agreement on a comprehensive regime, and realism dictates pessimism about the prospect of a major multinational treaty. But the very act of seeking one - or even of achieving widespread agreement that major greenhouse emitters should take parallel steps to achieve deep reductions - will send powerful signals to the energy marketplace.
2) Elevate Nuclear Investment to a National and International Policy Priority. This points us toward the second necessity, which is to shape national policies and international institutions to directly support nuclear investment.
Over the long-term, nuclear power is highly competitive - indeed, in most countries, it is already a low-cost option even without emissions trading or a tax on carbon. But two factors now weigh against nuclear investment: the short-term decision-making bias of deregulated energy markets and the fact that 21st century nuclear reactors have not been built in sufficient numbers to achieve economies of scale.
National governments must therefore act to incentivize immediate nuclear investments - not to subsidize longterm nuclear operations but simply to pump-prime these early phases of the nuclear renaissance, for reasons of environmental urgency as well as energy security.
A similar rationale applies, at the international level, among the global institutions we established a half-century ago to meet urgent developmental needs. Today it is a fundamental failing of the UN system that all of its major development institutions continue to embrace, or to be intimidated by, old-school anti-nuclear environmentalism. Governments must now direct the World Bank and the UN Development and Environment Programmes to act in pursuit of a clean-energy vision in which nuclear power holds a central role.
3) Preparing the Nuclear Profession for a Nuclear Century. A third imperative is to apply the concept of nuclear investment to the human level - by stimulating enrolments in the study of nuclear science and technology. The nuclear profession must be readied for a nuclear century.
Ultimately, the nuclear industry can rely on that famous dictum from the cinematic baseball classic Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.” Certainly, a stream of new reactor builds will register itself strongly in the educational and career choices of top young scientists and engineers.
But given the urgent need to accelerate the nuclear renaissance, the market mechanism should be supplemented by pro-active measures, at the national and international levels, to stimulate nuclear education and to promote harmonization of professional standards across borders.
That is why the World Nuclear Association has worked with the IAEA, WANO, and the NEA to create the new World Nuclear University.
As we have discussed, the WNU is a partnership in which these four global organizations cooperate together, and with leading institutions of nuclear learning, in activities to enhance nuclear education and leadership for the 21st century. The WNU partnership is supported by a small multinational secretariat in London composed of nuclear professionals seconded by key governments and nuclear enterprises.
As the flagship of the partnership, the Summer Institute is still only three years old. But by the end of this summer, we will already have spawned a network of some 269 former WNU Fellows in 50 countries, and that number will grow each year.
Meanwhile, the WNU project has begun to branch out, as the multinational team at the WNU Coordinating Centre works to develop other educational and leader-building programmes.
In the process, the WNU will seek to build an international endowment for scholarships in nuclear technology. Establishing such scholarships should also be a national priority for governments around the world.
A Time of Peril, A Fateful Race
In closing, let me attach some specific numbers to the challenge we face. Today nuclear energy is using 440 reactors to produce one-sixth of the world’s electricity. From an environmental perspective, it will not be adequate if the nuclear industry simply doubles, or triples, or quadruples its capacity in this century. Indeed, it will not be adequate to meet the needs of a global clean-energy revolution even if we multiple nuclear generation by a factor of ten.
We must place ourselves on a trajectory for a 21st century nuclear industry that achieves the deployment of nothing less than 8,000-10,000 Gigawatts of nuclear power - a twenty-fold increase. To plan for anything less would be to invite environmental disaster.
Is this simply pie-in-the-sky? Recall this: In the 1980’s, France alone started-up 42 major nuclear power reactors. From a standing start in the 1970’s, France brought on-line, in a single decade, 1,000 Megawatts of nuclear power for every one-million of its citizens - enough to meet virtually all of the electricity needs of a modern industrial society for decades to come.
The projection on the screen before you simply spreads the same achievement - over the course of a full century - to a wider world that will not be starting from a standstill and that will need nuclear for transport and desalination as well as traditional electricity. If we can achieve clarity about the dangers that beset us and galvanize leadership - national and international - to employ the tools at hand, success in this task lies within the wit and capacity of humankind.
What is pie-in-the-sky is to believe that humanity can avoid environmental calamity without clean-energy achievement on this scale.
The English historian H.G. Wells viewed life as “a race between education and catastrophe”. Today this adage applies to all humankind. Our world is in dire peril, the race between education and catastrophe is underway, and we have no time to lose. We are in a race that will, at best, be close-run.
This Summer Institute is, on one level, intended to be an enjoyable, career-building experience. But we also see it as a convocation of future leaders who today hold a monumental responsibility - to make a vital contribution to victory in a fateful race that will determine the sustainability of humanity’s future.
For those of us in the nuclear profession, history has bestowed both a solemn obligation and, on the other side of that coin, an inspiring opportunity.
As WNU Fellows, you are here today because you have been selected - and, in many cases, have selected yourselves - for a very special purpose. We are investing in you, with hope that you will help humanity to win that race.
I welcome you once again to Daejon. Have fun here and also work hard here, for the citizens of your generation have much to do, and we are counting on you to help lead them.