Building Leadership for a Nuclear Century:
The Mission of the WNU Summer Institute
John Ritch
Director General, World Nuclear Association
President, World Nuclear University
Opening Remarks
First Annual Summer Institute of the World Nuclear University
Hosted by the Idaho National Laboratory, the Idaho Universities, and the Center for Advanced Energy Studies
Idaho Falls, USA 11 July 2005
Dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen:
We open this first annual Summer Institute with enormous enthusiasm. We cannot yet know the eventual impact of this new institution or how it will grow. But we do begin with historic purpose. Today we embark on a concerted effort, with support from all sectors of the international nuclear community, to build a leadership cadre to advance the constructive worldwide use of nuclear energy in the 21st century.
Those who have worked to design the Summer Institute have followed a clear aim. Our intent is that the WNU Fellows experience an intense educational challenge that serves both to broaden their horizons and to strengthen their commitment to the nuclear profession. We also want the Fellowship itself to be recognized as a badge of distinction, connoting excellence, vision and leadership.
You, the very first WNU Fellows, carry the honour and the burden of this expectation.
In these remarks this morning, I wish to extend congratulations, to offer thanks, and to reflect on the large purpose that has brought us here.
Welcome to the First Class of WNU Fellows
My first and easily accomplished task is to extend a warm welcome and cordial congratulations to this first class of WNU Fellows.
In the past two days, some 77 of you have arrived in Idaho Falls from 34 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.
Appreciation to the Coordinators, the Hosts and Faculty
The thanks I wish to express are to the many people on whose hard work the WNU 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 - and will - come in many forms.
Here in Idaho, our hosts from the Idaho National Laboratory, the Idaho Universities, and the Center for Advanced Energy Studies have put forward a strong effort to create a sound infrastructure for this Summer Institute. This planning has encompassed not just the logistics of your housing, classroom work and field trips; it has also included assembling an exciting range of recreational opportunities that will enable you to experience the remarkable outdoor beauty of this region of America.
These outside activities will offer a pleasant diversion from a demanding educational programme, but they are also integral to the purpose of the Summer Institute. We hope that shared participation in extracurricular experiences will help the WNU Fellows to build bonds that will unite this group for many years to come in a community of friendship and professional contact extending across national borders and around the world.
To our hosts here in Idaho, and to those at the Department of Energy who have backed them up, we offer sincere and cordial thanks.
At the IAEA in Vienna, the Summer Institute found many supporters who have played key roles. Some worked on the curriculum's design; some will provide key presentations during the programme; still others were instrumental in arranging critical financial support for several dozen WNU Fellows from developing countries. These allies were indispensable.
We owe thanks to others, as well. Over the next six weeks, the WNU Fellows will encounter a remarkable group of teachers who will come from all around the world to share their knowledge. As these instructors work with you on a wide diversity of topics, you can expect to find one trait they have in common: a personal dedication to a body of professional expertise and a desire to pass on that knowledge to the younger generation that you, as WNU Fellows, represent.
A few senior professionals will remain with the WNU Fellows for extended periods, coaching the Fellows in assimilating the coursework and in conducting team projects.
To our instructors and to our mentors, we express gratitude for their commitment and contribution.
Among the mentors, one bears special mention. Here and in their future careers, the WNU Fellows will come to attach high value to colleagues who care more about contributing than about claiming credit. Dr. Alan Waltar is such a person. Although he would be the last to say so, he more than anyone deserves the title "godfather" of the Summer Institute.
Finally, we owe explicit thanks to the two people on whom this event has most depended. In the fall of last year, two Americans, Dr. Ed Klevans and Dr. Deborah Klevans, came to London to join the WNU Coordinating Centre with responsibility to design and orchestrate the WNU's first Summer Institute, which at that point was no more than a concept. Their task was to convert concept to reality.
Doing so required creativity, intelligence, long hours, stoicism in coping with setbacks, cheerfulness in the face of confusion, and the quiet courage to overcome obstacles that appeared in a continuing stream. Over the next six weeks, they still have much work to do. But I wish to pay tribute now to Ed and Debbie Klevans, whose dedication has given us such an excellent programme for the first edition of the annual event we inaugurate today.
Purpose of the WNU and the Summer Institute:
Fulfilling an Historic Mission with New Urgency
The Summer Institute is an important manifestation of the World Nuclear University, which we founded two years ago in commemorating the 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower's Atoms-for-Peace initiative.
The WNU is not a university in the traditional sense. It does not have a campus, and it will award no degrees. Nor is it a virtual university, using electronics to teach from afar.
Instead, it is a partnership. Our goal was to draw together, into a single cooperative entity, the world's leading institutions of nuclear learning, the global inter-governmental organisations dealing with nuclear energy, and the world organisations 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 internationalise the study of nuclear science and technology.
Today this partnership is functioning at two levels. First, we have assembled an array of global working groups, composed of academic and governmental experts on a diversity of key topics. Their goal is to promote the sharing of nuclear knowledge and a worldwide harmonization of nuclear learning. This is an extended and elaborate process, and our work has only begun.
As an initial goal, we hope to reach the point of providing WNU certification to high-quality courses taught at the educational institutions participating in the WNU system. Ultimately, we envisage granting WNU certification to the degrees those institutions award. In a fast-growing and globalizing nuclear industry, such certification can play the valuable role of internationalising academic and professional credentials.
On a close and parallel track, the WNU's other activity has been to develop this Summer Institute. We see this event as a way of focussing the combined expertise within the WNU partnership on the task of building nuclear leadership for the future. We want the Summer Institute to gain a place of value in the nuclear world.
Precisely because our world is globalizing, creating the WNU partnership was a natural step. 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 civilisation. In this new century, humanity's future will depend on using that same force constructively, on an expansive global scale, as we seek to preserve the very biosphere that enabled civilisation 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.
In the WNU's inaugural ceremony two years ago, 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 new enterprise here in Idaho Falls, it is fitting that we remind ourselves of the origins of the tradition we intend to carry forward.
[Eisenhower "Atoms for Peace" video]
This video evokes a time gone by, and it also underscores a dividing line in history.
Earlier, I noted that our faculty and mentors share a common dedication to the nuclear profession. There is another trait they also share - but one they would not wish to pass on to a new generation. All of us in the senior generation came of age in a world that lived under the spectre of a global nuclear holocaust.
The world has now emerged from the era in which "mutual assured destruction" was the strategic doctrine of the military superpowers. But humankind has now passed into a new era of danger. We face a global emergency of another kind - and a threat that may ultimately prove even more perilous.
Between now and 2050, as world population grows from six to nine billion, world energy consumption will triple and humankind will consume more energy than the combined total used in all previous history. As a consequence of the resulting greenhouse emissions, we are hurtling with accelerating speed toward the destabilization of our biosphere.
The evidence is now overwhelming that, without massive reductions in greenhouse emissions, we face catastrophic climate change with the severest consequences for sea levels, species extinction, epidemic disease, drought and extreme weather events that could combine to disrupt all civilization.
It is now beyond rational doubt that humankind must confront, with a true sense of urgency, the imperative of achieving a global clean-energy revolution. And with the very biosphere at risk, our energy strategies must be founded on hard, practical science - not on ideology and myth.
Thus far, humankind has taken little serious action. Even if implemented, the Kyoto provisions are meagre, and few nations have taken truly significant steps to constrain emissions.
A new visitor to planet Earth who was informed of the danger we face would have to find it very comical indeed to be told that the windmills of Germany, Denmark, and Britain represent even the beginning of a rational defence against the global peril we know to exist.
Today, as we inaugurate this Summer Institute, humankind is continuing to produce greenhouse gases at the rate of 900 tonnes per second - more than 25 billion tonnes per year.
In comprehending that it may be difficult for the biosphere to absorb this kind of assault, it gives a sense of proportion if one brings the magnitudes down to a human scale. If the Earth were the size of a soccer ball, the biosphere surrounding it would be little more than the thickness of a credit card. That is not nearly as large a waste bin as our economic behaviour assumes the skies above us to be.
At this point, our governments and our public debate are still failing to provide clarity as to where a feasible solution may lie. Yet every authoritative energy analysis points to an inescapable imperative: Humankind cannot conceivably achieve a global clean-energy revolution without a rapid expansion of nuclear power - to generate electricity, to produce hydrogen for tomorrow's vehicles, and to drive seawater desalination plants to meet a fast-emerging world water crisis.
This reality will require, at least, a ten-fold increase in nuclear energy during the 21st century. Today - in 30 countries representing 2/3 of humankind - we have 440 reactors producing 16 percent of global electricity. For an adequate nuclear contribution to electricity, hydrogen production, and desalination, we will need 5,000 reactors at a minimum.
Evidence of the dawning of this truth is all around us, and slowly but surely - despite much confusion, misinformation from entrenched nuclear opponents, and widespread government timidity - a global nuclear renaissance is gaining momentum.
China and India will lead the way - probably building some 250 reactors each by mid-century. Nuclear power is also on the drawing boards in new countries as diverse as Poland, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Chile and Nigeria. Italy, the one country to abandon the actual use of nuclear power, will surely come back to it.
Meanwhile, we can expect most of today's big users of nuclear power to intensify their use of it - with the exception perhaps of France, where nuclear power already accounts for 80% of electricity supply. The widespread recommitment to nuclear is happening in America, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Russia and Ukraine.
It will also happen even where anti-nuclearism has gained a temporary ascendancy: Sweden, Belgium and Holland are already emerging from anti-nuclear phases, and surely Germany's nuclear "phase out" will itself be phased out once the Red-Green coalition leaves power. Meanwhile, such major developing countries as South Africa and Brazil are beginning to make nuclear a much more prominent part of their energy strategies.
The question is not whether a worldwide nuclear renaissance will occur but whether it will happen rapidly enough for nuclear energy to make the contribution it must make if we are to achieve a global clean-energy revolution before the destructive vectors taking us toward catastrophic climate change become irreversible.
We are in a race that will, at best, be close-run.
As WNU Fellows, you are here today because you have been selected 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 Idaho Falls. Work hard, for the citizens of your generation have much to do, and we are counting on you to help lead them.