Post-Fukushima: WNA Roles  In a Still Expansive Global Nuclear Industry  

2011 WANO Biennial General Meeting 

Shenzhen, 24 October 2011 

John Ritch, WNA Director General 

Ladies and gentlemen, in speaking with you today I have three goals:

• First, I want to reflect on what we learned from Fukushima and how the industry can best respond – not just in enhancing safety and emergency preparedness but also with respect to the real fragility we have seen in the foundations of public support on which nuclear operations must be based. 
• Second, I want to acquaint you with the World Nuclear Association and to highlight some WNA roles that may hold particular relevance to the post-Fukushima era. 
• Finally, I want to express an unwavering conviction that our industry remains poised for enormous worldwide growth and to convey WNA’s determination to work in tandem with WANO to support that goal.    

 The Real China Syndrome 

 Let me begin with Fukushima and the question of where our world industry stands after an accident that has joined Three Mile Island and Chernobyl among the icons that symbolize public fears about nuclear power.

When we look back to Three Mile Island 32 years ago, knowing that it harmed neither man nor environment, it seems fair to conclude that TMI might by now have faded into obscurity were it not for a remarkable coincidence.  But just then, thousands of miles away, Hollywood had released a movie called the “China Syndrome,” about a recklessly dangerous technology controlled by a gang of moral and environmental thugs. 

Before long this fictional thriller had merged with reality to popularize the image of a nuclear power plant as a catastrophe waiting to happen.  The actor Jack Lemmon won an Oscar for portraying a whistle-blower who saved California, and the movie’s international popularity quickly spread this frightening message to the world.  Now, three decades later, with reinforcement from Chernobyl and Fukushima, that dire perception stands firmly affixed in folklore and the public mind in our globalized media culture. 

Meanwhile, our world has become increasingly aware of another China Syndrome which threatens catastrophic dangers that are quite real.  This China Syndrome can be seen in a satellite photo of the world’s most populous nation under a vast cloud of pollution.  This cloud signifies both severe health damage to citizens below and a dangerously thickening canopy of greenhouse gases above.  It offers an ominous symbol for the self-destructive consequences of our world’s fossil-driven economic development today.

According to our best Earth-system scientists, this cloud and others like it around the world now threaten to destabilize the very climate conditions that enabled our civilizations to evolve.  Ironically, our hope for security against this danger now depends on a vastly increased use of nuclear power.

Compared to the scale and urgency of this menace, our world’s response has been ponderously slow.  But in the past decade, we saw a beginning of action as dozens of nations, representing much of humankind, reviewed their policies and came inexorably to the same conclusion.  For reasons of energy independence, reliable cost, human health and environmental responsibility, they determined that nuclear power must play a central role in their national energy strategies for the 21st Century.  These many decisions formed a promising foundation for a vast world expansion of nuclear power.

Lessons from Fukushima:  Known Truths Reinforced 

Against that background, Fukushima compels us to assess whether that calamity on the east coast of Japan has changed this worldwide prospect.

Certainly we have learned from Fukushima.  But, on reflection, it seems that Fukushima has been educational mainly in reinforcing truths we already knew – about nuclear operations and about public perception and public policy.

In nuclear operations, Fukushima has reminded us of the most fundamental of truths, which is the universal necessity of reliable backup cooling.  This principle is elemental, and industry and regulators in every nation with nuclear power are now engaged in extensive measures to ensure the availability of reliable cooling in even the most extreme circumstances.  As this conference demonstrates, WANO is in the forefront of a worldwide effort to strengthen the industry’s safety defenses and to enhance emergency response capabilities to back up these defenses.

Looking beyond operational conditions, Fukushima has also reinforced truths we already knew about the foundations of public perception and public policy on which nuclear operations depend. 

1. Inevitability of Nuclear Events.  First, nuclear accidents happen.  In the 25 years after Chernobyl, our industry came to hope that an extended period of safe performance would build a foundation of public acceptance.  But the worldwide confusion arising from Fukushima tells us that we should confront more directly the challenge of public education about our technology.  Fukushima warns us that most people continue to view any nuclear event with the expectation that it holds the potential for human and environmental catastrophe on a massive scale.  What can we do so that policymakers, journalists and ordinary citizens everywhere are better able to interpret such events whenever they may occur?
2. The Essential Safety of Nuclear Power.  Second, Fukushima underscores the essential safety of nuclear power.  This was truly a worst-case nuclear event.  Yet, amidst a natural disaster that claimed over 20,000 Japanese lives, Fukushima has produced neither a radiation fatality nor a case of radiation sickness.  Nor, according to leading experts, is there any reason to believe that a single human life will be shortened.  This is a powerful truth, and it is also true that only a tiny fraction of the public comprehends it.
3. Media Frenzy is Today’s Norm.  A third truth is that present-day media coverage is more inclined to frenzy than to balance in any event involving nuclear energy.  In a world of competitive, round-the-clock, televised news, there is clearly a compulsion to cover any nuclear story as the industrial equivalent of a sex scandal.  We must expect this tendency to persist so long as we have failed to demythologize nuclear energy.  Achieving that would mean creating much wider public understanding of radiation as a ubiquitous natural phenomenon and of the limited consequences of any radioactive release likely to result even from worst-case events.
4. Weak Support Where Nuclear is an Ideological Issue.  A fourth reality is the bizarre weakness of support for nuclear power in a few technologically advanced European countries.  As Europe’s leading economic power, Germany is especially remarkable.  Acting in the name of environmentalism, Germans will now begin to burn more lignite, coal, and gas, while reverting when necessary to importing their nuclear power.
5. Solidity of Support in Many Key Nations.  A fifth truth is the solidity of public policy support for nuclear power in most countries now using it.  This is especially true in nations planning major programs of nuclear new-build, led by China, India, Russia, Britain, South Africa, and South Korea.  In other major nations too, including Brazil, France, Poland, Ukraine, Canada, and the USA, we see little evidence of lost momentum.
6. Thinness of Public Understanding.  A sixth and countervailing reality is that public understanding of nuclear power in many countries remains thin and readily susceptible to misimpression.  Where we see constancy in policy support for nuclear power, it relies mainly on consensus among policymakers and on nuclear power not becoming, in the country’s politics, an ideological litmus-test and political football as it has in Germany. 
7. Continuing Power of the Chernobyl Myth.  A closely related truth is that the myth of Chernobyl retains a powerful hold on the public mind.  Few people understand that the Chernobyl reactor of 1986 bears little relevance to any reactor now operating, and even fewer know that the scientifically analyzed consequences of Chernobyl differ drastically from the common impression that Chernobyl claimed or shortened hundreds of thousands of lives. How many people know that the Chernobyl death-toll is fewer than 60 and that Chernobyl is the only known instance of fatalities in a world history of nuclear power generation that now totals nearly 15,000 reactor-years?
8. Nuclear Economics Remain Paramount.  A final and fundamental truth that reemerges as the frenzy fades is that the economics of nuclear power remain crucial to its future.  As the nuclear industry struggles to lower capital costs, it is crucially important that regulatory actions in response to Fukushima are limited to those having real demonstrable benefit arising from any increased costs. 

WNA:  Four Roles in Support of the Global Nuclear Industry 

 Let me now offer an overview of WNA roles and then highlight a few that are especially relevant to the post-Fukushima era.  WNA is the trade association of the global nuclear industry, and the best way to explain its role is to compare it with WANO’s – because we perform roles designed to be complementary in supporting the nuclear industry in the international arena.

WANO’s role is to unite nuclear operators in a quest to achieve universal best practice in plant management.  In that role, WANO deals mainly in the currency of performance-related technique.  WANO’s work addresses the question of how to operate nuclear plants with maximum safety and efficiency.

In contrast, WNA’s more diverse global membership spans all nuclear sectors, including uranium miners, enrichers, reactor vendors, EPC companies, and waste managers, as well as operators.  This broad membership is reflected in a wide range of activities.  WNA:

1. Represents the industry in world forums that influence policy and standards affecting nuclear operations;
2. Organizes working groups that enable industry experts to collaborate internationally on a full slate of key topics;
3. Conducts major industry conferences in a recently broadened annual cycle that now includes China and India; and
4. Operates public information and news services that have become a leading resource for a worldwide internet audience. 

These diverse roles involve a common currency.  That currency is information:  information-sharing within the industry and information WNA presents to the outside world on behalf of the industry.

The complementarity of WNA and WANO might be summarized as follows:  While WANO underpins safe nuclear performance around the world, WNA underpins industry commerce to help promote a maximum worldwide use of the nuclear technology that WANO helps to make safe. 

But complementarity does not mean splendid isolation.  WANO and WNA must act together to demonstrate that our industry is resolved to incorporate lessons from experience, taking nuclear technology to ever higher standards of safety advance, and applying those standards universally, especially in nations introducing nuclear power.

Against that background, let me describe WNA’s four roles more fully. 

“External” Roles 

Two WNA roles are external functions where we act on behalf of the industry.  In our representational role, we present industry positions in forums that shape the policy and regulatory environment in which the industry operates.  These efforts relate mainly to the setting and adjustment of international standards, which often form the basis for national standards.  In WNA’s information and news function, we have worked hard and with results.  Over the past decade, our websites have become the world’s leading reference resource on nuclear energy and the industry that produces it.   

On the WNA website, our Public Information Service offers some 200 frequently updated information and educational papers, one of which gets a hit every five seconds around the clock.  Journalists, policymakers and students rely on this resource, and so does the industry.  When a nuclear CEO wants to give a speech, there’s a good chance the speechwriter will google WNA to make sure he’s got the facts straight.  I expect that many people here today have given speeches or received memos based on WNA-sourced information.

Meanwhile, on our WNN website, we provide objective reporting on developments within the industry.  To deliver this news, we offer a free subscription service enabling our readers to receive a daily or weekly email message with headlines and links back to the full stories on the WNN website.  Here again, I expect that many people in this room use WNN or have colleagues who do.  The staff of IAEA in Vienna is the biggest institutional user of WNN, and employees at Areva constitute our biggest corporate user.

“Internal” Roles 

WNA’s other two roles – collaboration and conferences – are internal, meaning they facilitate valuable interaction within the industry. 

Our main tool of industry collaboration is our family of expert Working Groups.  By participating, members share expertise, stay abreast of industry developments, gain insight and build contacts.  A few Working Groups trace back to the Uranium Institute on whose foundations WNA was launched in 2001.   Most were created over the past decade as WNA expanded from 60 members in 16 countries to 200 members in 35 countries.  Now that WNA encompasses most of today’s global nuclear industry, our Working Group structure continues to evolve.

Each WNA Working Group is supported by a full-time Staff Director, who facilitates ongoing electronic communication within the Group.  The WNA Working Groups meet in person several times a year, usually on the margins of WNA conferences. 

Until recently, WNA ran two major conferences each year.  Our main conference is the Annual WNA Symposium, held in London each September, an event that began in the days of the Uranium Institute.  Last month, with 700 nuclear leaders in attendance, we held the 36^th Annual Symposium.  

Our second major event occurs every April, when we partner with the U.S.-based Nuclear Energy Institute to co-host the World Nuclear Fuel Cycle conference.  This event has a new venue each year.  Next April we’ll be in Helsinki.

We have now added two new annual conferences – in China and India – in recognition that the world’s nuclear center of gravity is shifting to the East.  We held our first China Symposium last year in Beijing and the second in Hong Kong last week.  In India, our inaugural symposium will be next February in Delhi.  With these innovations, WNA will now run a cycle of four major conferences each year. 

This wider conference schedule will enable us to expand participation in our WNA Working Groups, which can now meet on the margins of all four conferences.  We expect a new surge of Asian participation to infuse our Working Groups with even greater vitality and value to the industry.

Post-Fukushima: WNA Activities of Particular Relevance 

Let me now highlight certain WNA activities that have special relevance as our industry charts its way forward in the post-Fukushima era.

1. CORDEL:  Promoting Regulatory Harmonization 

 A prime example is our Working Group called CORDEL, an acronym for “Cooperation in Reactor Design Evaluation & Licensing.”  CORDEL unites senior experts from vendors and utilities in an industry effort to engage with key regulatory bodies on how to achieve greater standardization in reactor design and a convergence in regulatory requirements.  Success in this effort offers enormous gains in cost and efficiency in building and operating nuclear reactors in the 21^st Century. 

The CORDEL effort may now prove especially timely in a context in which regulators around the world have responded to Fukushima by undertaking bottom-up reviews of national standards and requirements.  In this potentially volatile regulatory environment, CORDEL’s ongoing engagement to push for greater regulatory uniformity can be a valuable antidote against any tendency toward even greater regulatory disparities.

2. Radiation Protection: Resisting Excessive Application of the Precautionary Principle   

Another area to highlight is radiation protection.  In representing the industry vis-à-vis the International Commission on Radiological Protection and various IAEA safety advisory committees, WNA’s purpose is to resist any tendency by RP authorities to ratchet down dose limits without regard to cost impact and beyond any point where real health or safety benefit can be demonstrated.  An unnecessarily stringent RP standard does not simply waste money; it can have a perverse health and environmental effect by inhibiting effective use of the world’s premier clean-energy technology. 

Among RP authorities, the accident at Fukushima has given rise to fresh consideration of RP requirements to cope with extremely improbable large-scale events.  This process holds the potential to increase predicted doses to the public and thus to expand zones required for evacuation and population shelter, changes that could undercut the affordability and even the feasibility of nuclear operations in many locales.

In a context in which national regulators and international standard setters are reexamining emergency and post-emergency scenarios, it is crucial that any revised requirements be developed with due consideration of operational expertise and operational implications.  In consultation with WANO, WNA will continue to resist scientifically unwarranted changes, and we will be particularly strenuous in emphasizing that excessive application of the precautionary principle can have the perverse effect of jeopardizing the massive health and environmental benefits that nuclear power can so clearly deliver. 

3. WNCN: Sharing Information, Lessons and Strategies in Nuclear Communication  

Still another WNA activity relevant to the post-Fukushima era is information-sharing among nuclear communicators.  Last year WNA chairman Chris Crane announced the start-up of the World Nuclear Communicators Network as a private channel for communication professionals from nuclear companies and associations.  The network’s purpose is two-fold: (a) to provide a reliable channel of information-sharing during time-urgent situations of international interest; and (b) to serve as a continuing channel for nuclear communicators to share experiences and develop strategies.     

Fukushima brought the WNCN network into unexpectedly early use.  For three weeks following March 11^th this year, the WNA secretariat staffed our London offices 24 hours a day, fielding calls and maintaining current knowledge through contact with Tepco and other colleagues in Japan.  With frequent updates, the WNA and WNN websites received millions of hits, and our key communicators gave more than a hundred interviews to international media – in print and on radio and television.  Meanwhile, using the WNCN network, we shared information with other nuclear communicators around the world. 

In the network’s second role – of sharing lessons and developing strategies in nuclear communication – we recognize the need for intellectual leadership that can only come from direct personal collaboration.  We have thus created a Working Group for Nuclear Communicators from leading companies throughout the industry.  We will share the Working Group’s product in WNA conferences and via the WNCN network.

4. World Nuclear University: Building Global Nuclear Leadership  

Another activity of heightened relevance after Fukushima is our effort to build future nuclear leadership through the World Nuclear University.  Our goal is to develop nuclear statesmen who can lead their companies responsibly and also present the case for nuclear energy with persuasive conviction in the public domain.

WNU is an international partnership that unites WNA, WANO, IAEA, and NEA in cooperative activities aimed at this purpose.  In the past eight years, we have invented a diversity of WNU activities.  The most prominent is the annual 6-week Summer Institute.  Held in Oxford University, the Summer Institute brings together 90-100 promising young professionals from some 30 countries.  We call them WNU Fellows, and they are hand-picked by their own companies to participate.

The curriculum is an intense program of lectures, projects and team-building exercises.  Its aim is to equip the Fellows with a global perspective on nuclear power along with a new worldwide network of professional colleagues.  Former WNU Fellows commonly describe the Summer Institute as the most inspirational experience of their careers. 

It is clear that a number of companies now view the Summer Institute as a valuable asset as they build capability for tomorrow’s global market.  Several companies now send at least one or two WNU Fellows per year, and some countries regularly send a minimum of 5-7 WNU Fellows per year.  If your company has not yet participated, please consider it.

Work Still To Be Done: Strategic Public Education?   

I offer these highlights to illustrate ways WNA can help, after Fukushima, to complement the essential work being done at the operational level by WANO.

But we should recognize that none of these measures – by WANO or WNA – will have major direct impact on the area where Fukushima may offer its most compelling lesson, which is our collective failure in most countries to build adequate foundations of public support.  By this I mean attaining a situation where public appreciation of nuclear power is fully commensurate with the essential value of this technology to the future well-being of our society.

What Fukushima shows is that even an extended and impressive record of safe performance is not a sufficient condition for public acceptance if that same public still regards us as safely managing what, in effect, are Doomsday machines.  We must face the fact that public acceptance will remain inherently fragile so long as the public believes that nuclear power comes from installations which, if all goes wrong, may inflict catastrophic damage on local populations and the environment.  We must seek to dispel this Doomsday perception in the public mind.

Achieving broad public appreciation of nuclear power will require genuine education, a process naturally centered at the national and local levels.  Successful strategies for public education would seem most likely to occur in countries where energy ministries and nuclear enterprises are prepared to cooperate in concerted efforts to strengthen the foundations on which nuclear power operates. 

Such projects could begin with a careful look at what students are learning, not learning and mis-learning about nuclear power and would seek to fill this void with some basic appreciation of nuclear technology.  Educational projects of course require resources, but such efforts could also prove supremely cost-effective, especially by employing the multiplier effect of educating educators. 

At the international level, an organization like WNA can contribute reliable resource material and could also supplement national educational efforts through adroitly crafted messages in the international media targeted to reach policymakers, business executives, the non-nuclear science community, and international opinion leaders. 

The truth is that no organization has ever had the audacity to advertise nuclear power with a proudly confident voice that underscores its overwhelming comparative strengths and assertively dispels the cloud of myths that surround it.  Can and should we do this and thereby break our long, self-imposed silence?  An increasing number of WNA members seems convinced that we should try. 

After Fukushima: An Unchanged and Compelling Global Reality 

But even in the absence of such an effort, nothing about the Fukushima accident can alter the stark facts that led so many different nations in recent years to a common nuclear path.  With or without public education, compelling planetary realities will continue to drive a nuclear renaissance:

• Global population will continue its explosive growth – from 3 billion in 1960, to 7 billion today, and now upward toward 9 billion by 2050; 
• World electricity demand will continue to grow even faster, tripling by 2050; 
• Earth-systems science will continue to warn that we must cut carbon emissions by 80% – or risk radical changes in Earth’s climate that could imperil all civilization; and 
• All authoritative analysis will continue to inform us that our world can achieve the necessary clean-energy revolution only with a vastly expanded use of nuclear power.

These realities remain as fundamental and as powerful as they were before Japan’s natural disaster.  For the custodians of nuclear power, our duty too remains unchanged.  We must continue the hard, practical work that will enable this immensely valuable technology to play its central and necessary global role.   

Ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate the opportunity to be with you, and I hope to have conveyed WNA’s dedication to serving as a valuable partner to WANO in supporting our industry.   

I hope too that you will permit me the liberty of seeking your active participation in helping WNA to perform this role.  WNA membership is large and still growing.  Notably, ten years ago we began with less than 40% of world generation and today that figure has grown to 85%.  With 15% remaining, we want to complete the mosaic by winning 100% operator support.  We ask you to help us get there – by joining if you are not yet a WNA member and by persuading others if you already are. 

Let me close with an analogy.  In America all nuclear operators have determined that both INPO and NEI are needed to achieve safety cooperation and industry representation in the domestic arena.  I have often heard one of WANO’s great leaders, Zack Pate, declare his hope that nuclear operators everywhere will view WANO and WNA in a similar light – as a needed combination of safety cooperation and industry representation in the international arena. 

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the honor of speaking here today.