A Responsibility of Leadership:

Building Public Understanding of the Global Imperative of Nuclear Power

Closing Session: Seventh Annual Summer Institute of the World Nuclear University

Christ Church, Oxford University
19 August 2011

John Ritch
Director General, World Nuclear Association
President, World Nuclear University



Ladies and gentlemen, good morning; it is a pleasure to be with you again. Somewhere in your memory of these last six weeks, you might recall me from the opening day of the Summer Institute. I’m the guy who stood up here on that first morning to tell you that the world is going to hell and only you can save it.

Now, I recognize that not everyone here will share my concern that this century may see the onset of global climate change so radical as to destabilize much of civilization. But what I am confident we all hold in common – because your presence here testifies to it – is a conviction that nuclear power is a clean-energy technology that can bring invaluable benefit to our fellow citizens around the world.

Nuclear power offers a means to alleviate the devastating consequences of carbon pollution that today afflicts the health of billions of people worldwide. Even more fundamentally, nuclear power offers a means to achieve the broad-based economic prosperity without which we cannot hope to meet human needs and aspirations around the world.

This morning I am aware that I bear the heavy responsibility of being the only obstacle standing between you and the finish of six weeks of speeches and presentations. So I will hope not to strain your patience.

On this last morning of the Summer Institute, I want to declare my profound thanks to your Mentors and to the Coordinators, who have served throughout the last six weeks. The Summer Institute could not exist without your leadership.

I also offer thanks to you, the WNU Fellows of the class 2011. In designing the Summer Institute, we had ambitious hopes, and you have fulfilled our highest expectations. By contributing spirit and energy, you have created in this room a new multinational family of young leaders who embody the full breadth of the global nuclear profession.

And we hope that family will last. As you return home to resume your professional lives, we urge you to maintain the friendships and bonds you formed this summer. We at WNA will do all possible to provide opportunities for you to renew your acquaintance with this class of WNU Fellows and to meet those from other years as well.

We see the WNU Fellows as a growing army of future nuclear leaders. Through your agenda here, our goal was to deepen your appreciation of the pervasive value of nuclear technology in our modern world – and to strengthen your ability to explain that reality to your fellow citizens, who need the leadership you can provide.

Even amidst the dawning of a nuclear renaissance, you know that it is not always easy to make this case, for our world has absorbed much mythology about nuclear energy – mythology that has often been fostered and spread, ironically, by groups that think of themselves as speaking in the interest of the environment. As custodians of nuclear energy, it is our responsibility to break through those myths with persuasive facts and argumentation.

This task is even harder – but even more important – in the aftermath of Fukushima.

This morning I want to enumerate some of the most commonly voiced public concerns, and highlight some points you might make when those concerns are raised.

Answering Public Concerns with Clarity and Conviction
It bears emphasis, of course, that we must welcome the right and the responsibility of our fellow citizens to express and act on legitimate concerns about the public interest.

But what is notable about the “public concerns” we so often hear about in the media is that, upon fair and balanced examination, not one poses a reasonable obstacle to a global expansion of nuclear power. Indeed, several of these concerns are associated with myths that are very close to the opposite of the truth.

1) Proliferation. On nuclear proliferation, our starting point should be a recognition of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as one of the great achievements in the history of international diplomacy. The NPT has created a norm that is adhered to by virtually every country in the world. Its premise is that the interests of international security are best served by maintaining a line against any further expansion in the number of countries possessing nuclear weapons.

The NPT is not perfect. The nuclear “have’s” – including the USA – have been too slow to disarm, as the treaty calls upon them to do. Three countries have not joined the NPT. And there are occasional departures from adherence to the treaty, as we have seen in the cases of North Korea, Iraq, and now – in a story still unfolding – Iran.

But what is remarkable is the positive side: that NPT participation is almost universal, that the nuclear weapons situation has remained generally stable for a very long time, and that long-term adherence to the NPT norm now serves to generate a collective international concern that can be targeted directly at those few countries that flout the norm.

On the topic of nuclear weapons, the essential truths we must emphasize are these:

• Fundamentally, nuclear proliferation danger comes not from the existence of nuclear power plants or even of nuclear fuel-cycle facilities, but from the intentions of governments. The intent of an Iran or a North Korea is a geopolitical variable that is entirely independent of whether countries like Brazil, Canada, South Africa, South Korea or Australia develop additional nuclear fuel-cycle facilities. Where specific problems arise, the international community must develop specific responses. And that has occurred. The questions of Iranian or North Korean nuclear intentions have been front and center on the international agenda since the early 1990’s – indeed, I worked on exactly those two issues when I was President’s Clinton’s nuclear ambassador 15 years ago. But these issues would exist with or without the global renaissance in peaceful nuclear power.

• What we must emphasize to our fellow citizens is the positive connection between nuclear energy and international security. With the environmental dangers faced by our world today, there is in fact no global security measure more urgent or important than the nuclear renaissance itself. Our world needs a many-fold increase in nuclear power, and the practical reality is that whatever proliferation risk we face will be essentially unaffected by any increase in the global use of safeguarded nuclear reactors to produce clean energy.

2) Cost / Affordability. When concerns are raised about cost, we have several battles to fight:

First, we must counter the widespread notion that nuclear power is heavily subsidized. It is true that governments in a number of countries have, over the years, invested substantially in researching nuclear technology. But this is quite distinct from an operational subsidy by which electricity generation is incentivized by direct government payment. Today, the widespread reality is that it is not nuclear power, but rather politically popular clean-energy technologies like wind and solar, that benefit from a marketplace that is tilted by government payments.

Nor should we accept the allegation that government loan guarantees for new-build constitute a subsidy. Guarantees do reduce the cost of borrowing by assuring repayment. And they add further to the incentive to borrow by assuring borrowers that the government is committed to the success of new build and can thus be counted on to remove unwarranted obstacles. But the bottom line is that any national treasury will pocket a profitable fee for its guarantee service, which means that the taxpayer will earn rather than spend. Loan guarantees in fact constitute the ultimate win-win deal, in which new-build is facilitated by lower cost, fulfilling a valuable public policy purpose at a gain to the taxpayer and the environment.

Of course, while loan guarantees reduce the cost of borrowing, they do little to reduce the principal that needs to be borrowed – the capital cost. And here our industry has much work left to do. Ten years ago, the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington pointed with some confidence to a target of reducing capital costs to a dollar a watt, or $1 billion per Gigawatt. Today, in the early stages of the nuclear renaissance, we still find ourselves at three or four times that level.

But current difficulties hardly justify long-term pessimism. Just as the industry has steadily lowered operating costs and raised capacity factors, we can expect capital costs to fall sharply as the nuclear renaissance unfolds, through steady gains in standardization, modularization, economies of scale, and accumulating construction management experience.

Already, in terms of long-term economics covering the full life of a plant, nuclear power’s low operating costs make it a fairly close competitor to coal and natural gas. Looking ahead, we can confidently predict that falling capital costs will eventually take us into a future in which nuclear power is not just competitive but a clear winner on the field of affordability.

Over the longer term, we can expect this to occur even without consideration of environmental effects. But governments should not wait. Just as soon as governments begin to introduce serious emissions penalties – through emissions trading or carbon taxes – the balance will tilt dramatically. Even today, nuclear power can easily dominate any market that imposes a real price for environmental damage.

3) Nuclear Waste. As to nuclear waste, which is often alleged to be the industry’s insoluble problem, industry and government have the joint task of building public recognition that, contrary to common perception, waste is nuclear power’s greatest comparative asset – precisely because the volume is minimal and can be safely managed without harm to people or the environment.

For its part, the industry has amassed an impressive record that includes: 

o Safe disposal of all low-level waste

o Safe interim storage of all other end products from nearly a half century of nuclear power plant operations

o Safe transport of radioactive waste, with more than 20,000 containers of high-level waste and used fuel having travelled a total distance of 20 million miles without any instance of a serious radioactive release.

Where major responsibility lies now is with governments. A strong scientific consensus favours deep geological repositories as a safe and affordable means of achieving long-term storage of nuclear waste. It is the duty of governments – following the lead of Finland, Sweden, Russia and others – to summon the political will to implement this crucial component of the nuclear fuel cycle. For its part, the United States, having begun and then deviated from this path, must eventually return to it; and the sooner the better.

4) A Recent Concern: Terrorism. A relatively new public concern is terrorism, and here we must rely on facts, common sense and public education to overcome exaggerated concern.

The use of a radiological device in a modern city – often called a weapon of mass disruption – is clearly a security concern in many countries, and one not to be discounted. But what can be said with some confidence is that, if such a device is ever used, the radiological material will almost surely – for simple reasons of availability – come from a source such as a hospital and not from the nuclear power industry.

As for the sometimes-alleged vulnerability of nuclear power plants, in truth they are, by their very nature, among the most robust structures ever built. As studies have repeatedly shown, even a direct hit by a major airplane, which itself would require superlative piloting, would be unlikely to result in a seriously harmful radioactive release. Indeed, with a 21st century nuclear reactor, the same can be said even if the reactor fell for some time into the hands of a team of people with malevolent intent. Fukushima does not disprove the point that a modern nuclear power plant is simply not an effective instrument for raining destruction on a nearby populace.

We know that a terrorist seeking to achieve either slaughter or mayhem can find, in a modern industrial metropolis, what the military calls a target-rich environment. But the practical reality is that those with such intent will find nuclear power plants very low on the list of inviting targets. Indeed, in the infrastructure of modern society, nuclear plants stand out as almost unique bulwarks of security.

5) Red Herrings: Chronic Shortages of Fuel, People, Key Equipment.

In addition to traditional public concerns, a few additional questions have recently been introduced into the energy debate by opponents of nuclear energy purporting to be industry analysts.

A “red herring” is an idiomatic way of describing a phoney or diversionary issue, and it sometimes seems that nuclear professionals are condemned to swim in a sea of these fish. Three red herrings have recently appeared in our sea.

Each is an assertion that a robust nuclear renaissance simply cannot unfold because of systemic shortages – either of fuel, or of people, or of major reactor equipment such as reactor pressure vessels. In all three cases, nuclear opponents have taken a short-term industry concern about potential temporary bottlenecks, and they have extrapolated it into an assertion of longer-term incapacity.

In fact, in none of these cases does the industry itself worry seriously for the longer-term. In each case, there is every reason to believe that market mechanisms will generate supply to meet demand:

o Regarding nuclear fuel, the industry has full confidence that a combination of factors – new ore discoveries, new mining techniques, more reprocessing, introduction of the thorium fuel cycle, and employment of breeder reactors – will ensure ample and affordable nuclear fuel supplies into the distant future.

o Regarding people, we need only recall that the education required for those who will operate a reactor can accomplished while a reactor is being built. In today’s real nuclear world, we can be certain that a stream of new reactor builds around the world will register itself strongly in the educational and career choices of top young scientists and engineers everywhere.

o Finally, as to key nuclear reactor equipment, anyone who believes that a demand for engineering and manufacturing services will long go unmet in today’s globalized market, hasn’t recently been to Asia. There, major companies are gearing up, indeed working around the clock, to meet the demands they anticipate from a burgeoning global nuclear market.

6) Safety from Radiation. Finally, and now very prominent again in the public mind, is concern about the ultimate safety of nuclear power plants. Over the past decade, this concern seemed to have faded almost to the point of insignificance, having been superseded by such concerns as nuclear waste, affordability and sustainability. At the beginning of this year, as we approached the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl, the industry was content to point calmly and confidently to its long post-Chernobyl record of safety performance.

We believed and we asserted that our industry had met the challenge of safety through technological advance and responsible professional management. We pointed to a global nuclear safety culture that now draws on over 14,500 reactor-years of practical experience. We pointed, with considerable and well-justified pride, to the creation and operation of WANO as a great achievement in private-sector diplomacy and the living embodiment of the industry’s commitment to responsible international nuclear professionalism.

Then came Fukushima, which shattered any possible complacency that we had persuaded the public about nuclear safety. Fukushima demonstrated not only the truth that nuclear accidents could still happen. It also demonstrated a truth far more troubling for the future of nuclear power. It showed that much of the public, in nations around the world, continues to believe that nuclear power plants, by their very nature, embody the potential, however low in probability, of a disastrously lethal event from which thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, might die.

Now we can argue, with some considerable justification, that Fukushima itself – as a kind of worst-case nuclear event from which there has not yet been a single radiation fatality – offers evidence precisely to the contrary of this belief. But very few in the public have so perceived it.

Fukushima has shown that nuclear leaders must face the stark reality that the future of nuclear energy will rest on fragile foundations as long as the public continues to perceive that nuclear power holds the potential for extreme risk to human well-being. We now face the challenging uphill task of explaining that even worst-case nuclear events are not only extremely low in probability but also increasingly small in consequence as nuclear technology continues to advance. This is true and we must learn to present it believably.

This challenge of public perception is worldwide, and includes even those countries with long experience in nuclear power. In the aftermath of Fukushima, it is fortunate that most countries have displayed a constancy in policy support for nuclear power. But even there, such constancy relies mainly on consensus among policymakers and on the nuclear issue not becoming, in the country’s politics, an ideological litmus-test and a political football as it has in Germany.

But that political football can be put into play almost anywhere. Today in America, we see the popular major of New York City locked in a high-stakes political struggle with the popular governor of New York State over the future of the Indian Point power plant just north of Manhattan. New York’s governor, by deciding to play the populist anti-nuclear card, has shown what can now happen almost anywhere.

As industry leaders facing this reality, we must look for underlying causes; and what we see is that the word “radiation” continues to rank as one of the potent, evocative, and broadly misunderstood terms in any language.

A closely related truth is that the myth of Chernobyl retains a powerful hold on public consciousness and remains a main journalistic reference point with respect to the perceived dangers of nuclear power. I refer to the “myth” of Chernobyl because so few people understand that the Chernobyl reactor that exploded and caught fire in 1986 bears little relevance to any reactor now operating and because the real, scientifically analyzed consequences of Chernobyl differ so drastically from the public impression.

As you have heard over these six weeks, the actual and quite limited consequences of Chernobyl have been thoroughly documented by such authorities as the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation and the Chernobyl Tissue Bank in London. But little of this is commonly understood.

It thus now falls to all leaders and future leaders in this industry to think anew about the question of public perception of nuclear energy. In the quarter-century since Chernobyl, industry and government have operated on the paradigm that ever tighter standards on nuclear safety and an ever longer record of safe nuclear performance would build public confidence in nuclear power.

This was not misguided, and was to a considerable degree successful. But it was incomplete. Fukushima revealed in harsh light that both the media and the public have gotten only part of the message. The nuclear industry is still, in essence, regarded as managing Doomsday machines. In that concept, the word “Doomsday” will always trump any assertion of safe management.

We must act to change this widespread conception. If electricity is a vital public service and not simply a market commodity, if the issue of how we generate electricity now bears urgently on the future of our Earthly environment, and if our scientists and policymakers share conviction that nuclear power must play a central role if we are to avert radical climate change, then there exists a compelling public interest and a policy of laissez-faire will not suffice. We need to focus rigorously, in a cooperative effort involving government and industry, on the question of public understanding.

Building real public awareness will require focused educational projects in countries where energy ministries and nuclear enterprises are prepared to commit resources to strengthen the foundations of public perception on which nuclear power operates. Such projects could prove supremely cost-effective, especially by employing the multiplier effect of educating educators. Each project would begin with a careful look at what ordinary students are learning, not learning and mis-learning about nuclear power. For any such project, organizations like WNA can provide reliable resource material, but others must adapt and apply it in diverse social, cultural and educational settings.

Thus, in the wake of Fukushima, as we act quite rightly to strengthen WANO and other institutions of nuclear safety, we cannot afford to ignore the goal of building accurate public perception about the very nature of the technology we are managing. 

Turning to the Positive

As we address pubic concerns and seek to promote public understanding, our dual task is to discredit falsehoods while stressing the affirmative case for nuclear energy. And here we can draw confidence that the facts about nuclear technology equip us with a strong hand.

For the reality is that nuclear power is nothing less than the quintessential energy resource for sustainable development:

o Its fuel will be readily available for multiple centuries
o Its presence confers energy autonomy
o Its consumption causes virtually no pollution or greenhouse gases
o Its use preserves fossil resources for future generations
o Its capacities are scalable, from smaller reactors to large
o Its costs are competitive and declining
o Its waste can be secured over the long-term
o Its operations are manageable in developed & developing nations
o Even after Fukushima, its safety record is superior among major energy sources.

All of these virtues remain real even after Fukushima. And they combine into an essential point that can be stated quite plainly. Our world’s human and environmental imperatives in the 21st Century simply cannot be met – and reconciled – without a massive expansion of nuclear power.

Six weeks ago, I called your attention to an ongoing WNA analysis called the Nuclear Century Outlook, in which we project optimistic and pessimistic scenarios defining an envelope of potential nuclear construction in the 21st Century. We then compare that potential nuclear capacity to the level of global clean-energy need that is unlikely to be met by any means other than nuclear power. In short, how much nuclear power can be supplied, and how much will be needed?

The paramount conclusion is that our world will need some 8,000 Gigawatts of nuclear power in the 21St Century, and that this need can be met.

This, of course, is not an exact number. Such analysis is not intended to offer precision. It is designed to show an order of magnitude and to serve as a guide to planning and action.

What we can draw from our projection is that 8,000 Gigawatts, while challenging, is most certainly feasible, as well as being an urgent necessity for the needs of man and environment. The projection tells us that we have a big task ahead, but that it can be done.

Six weeks ago, I recalled a statement by H.G. Wells that life is a race between education and catastrophe. This dictum applies to individual lives and to the life of civilization, and most certainly to today’s global crisis. I recall it again this morning in order to express my hope that all of you here will go on to play active roles in the public education, around the world, that will be needed to win this century’s very real race against human and environmental catastrophe.

This WNU class of 2011 came here to Oxford with impressively strong credentials, and our goal was to send you on your way six weeks later with some added spark of insight and inspiration. We hope you depart tomorrow with that spark, along with good memories and new friends. We know you leave with our fondest regard and our best wishes for the many valuable careers that surely lie ahead of you. Thank you.