India Atomic Industrial Forum
Mumbai, 29 September 2011
John Ritch, WNA Director General
Ladies and gentlemen, in speaking with you today I have three goals:
In this connection, I hope some of you will soon decide that the time has come for your company to join WNA and take a place alongside NPCIL, Larsen & Toubro, Hindustan Construction, and other Indian enterprises that have already become WNA members.
Let me begin with basics by describing WNA as the trade association of the global nuclear industry.
A good way to explain our role is to contrast it with that of WANO, the World Association of Nuclear Operators. Although WNA and WANO are separate organizations, the practical reality is that we function as partners – because we perform roles that are carefully designed to be non-duplicative and fully complementary in supporting the nuclear industry in the international arena.
WANO’s role is to unite the world’s nuclear operators in a common quest to achieve universal best practice in plant management. In performing that role, WANO deals essentially in the currency of performance-related technique. WANO’s ongoing 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. Our broad membership is reflected in a wide range of activities, though which WNA:
While diverse, these roles involve a single common currency. That currency is information – information that WNA activities generate within the industry and information that WNA presents to the outside world on behalf of the industry.
Within the industry, WNA activities enable our members to gain valuable information. They do so by gathering topical knowledge in our expert working groups, identifying commercial opportunities, and building a global network of colleagues and contacts. Acquiring such information is essential to their business success.
Meanwhile, WNA delivers information to the outside world. We do so by presenting industry perspective in key international policy forums and by operating world-class websites that dispense an encyclopaedic volume of accurate information aimed at building wider appreciation of the virtues of nuclear power.
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 facilitate and promote maximum worldwide use of the nuclear technology that WANO helps to make safe.
The WNA roles numbered #1 and #4 are the external functions in which we act on behalf of the industry.
In WNA’s representational role, we develop and present industry positions in forums that shape the policy and regulatory environment in which the industry operates. Primarily these efforts relate to the setting and adjustment of international standards, which often form the basis for national standards.
An acutely important example is radiation protection, where we work to resist the efforts of RP specialists when they become engaged, as often happens, in ratcheting down dose limits without regard to cost impact and well beyond any point where real health or safety benefit can be demonstrated. An RP standard that is unnecessarily stringent does not simply waste billions of dollars; it has the perverse health and environmental effect of inhibiting maximum effective use of the world’s premier clean-energy technology.
In WNA’s information and news function, I am proud to say that we have worked hard at this – with results. Over the past decade, our websites have become the world’s leading reference resource on nuclear energy and developments in 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 that the speechwriter will google WNA to make sure he’s got the facts straight.
On a companion website, World Nuclear News offers objective reporting on developments within the industry. In delivering this news, we offer a free subscription service enabling our readers to receive a daily or weekly email message that provides headlines and links to the full stories on the WNN website.
I expect that many people in this room either use WNN or have colleagues who do. The staff of IAEA is the biggest institutional user of WNN, and employees of Areva constitute our biggest corporate user.
Before I discuss WNA roles #2 and #3, and especially how those functions relate to India, let me first comment on Fukushima and where the world nuclear industry stands now that this recent accident has joined Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in the pantheon of icons that symbolize public fears about nuclear power.
When we look back to Three Mile Island some 32 years ago, knowing that the accident there 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 that coincidence was indeed fateful. Just then, three thousand miles away, Hollywood was releasing 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. At Academy Award time, actor Jack Lemmon won an Oscar for portraying a whistle-blower who saved California and perhaps the world; 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 go far beyond cinematic fiction. This real 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 thicker canopy of greenhouse gases above. It provides 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. The clouds that constitute this real China Syndrome now hover over humanity’s future, and ironically our hope for security against the danger they pose now depends on a vastly increased use of nuclear power.
Compared to the urgency of this menace, the world’s response has been ponderously slow. But in the past decade, we saw the beginnings of action as dozens of nations, representing much of humankind, reviewed their policies and came inexorably to the same conclusion.
For reasons that include 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. In their collective significance, these many decisions formed a promising foundation for a vast world expansion of nuclear power.
Against that background, events at Fukushima have compelled us to assess whether that calamity on the east coast of Japan has changed this worldwide prospect.
Certainly we have learned from Fukushima. But it seems, on reflection, that Fukushima has been educational mainly in reinforcing truths we already knew – about nuclear technology and public perception.
In response to Fukushima, government regulators and nuclear companies around the world have acted to apply relevant lessons pertaining both to the safety of nuclear operations and to nuclear technology. By all evidence, the pressures of democracy and corporate responsibility have combined to produce a response that is substantively thorough as well as being seen to be thorough.
But still largely untouched is the complex area where Fukushima may offer its most compelling lesson, which is our collective failure in most countries to attain a situation in which public understanding of nuclear power is commensurate with its essential value to the future well-being of our society. In many countries, Fukushima has demonstrated a weakness in public perception that commands our attention and our concerted action to rectify it.
On the positive side, it seems true that much of the public has become intuitively aware that the nuclear industry has accumulated an extended and even impressive record of safe management. But what Fukushima shows is that recognition 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.
Achieving public acceptance based on real understanding will require that such understanding be grounded in 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 unite 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 be designed to fill the 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 seriously sought 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. Backed by resources and infused with a degree of wit, such a campaign could be mounted using the persuasive appeal of surprising facts cleverly presented. Can and should we do this? An increasing number of WNA members seem convinced that it is time for a breakthrough that ends our self-imposed silence.
Were we to be so bold, a proudly rational response to widespread irrationality might prove to be an historic feat. But even in the absence of such an effort, nothing in and about Fukushima accident can be found to alter the stark and compelling realities that led so many different nations in recent years to a common nuclear path.
These realities remain as fundamental and as powerful as they were before Japan’s natural disaster. What these unchanged realities mean for the custodians of nuclear power is that 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.
Nowhere is this truth more relevant than in India.
Let me return then to the ways in which WNA hopes to work with you to facilitate nuclear commerce, especially in the wider global arena that is bringing foreign companies into India and inviting Indian companies onto the world stage.
Of WNA’s four roles, representation and information involve WNA’s external voice. In the two other roles, WNA works to facilitate valuable interaction within the industry. Our efforts in India will focus on bringing these two internal industry functions – collaboration and conferences – directly and conveniently to your doorstep.
Some of you know that we began such a process last year in China, and we envisage a parallel path in India. Our logic is straight-forward. Both India and China represent vast need for nuclear energy and a vast potential for the further development of an indigenous nuclear industry, and we believe WNA can play a constructive role in meeting this human need and realizing this economic potential precisely because nuclear technology today will be deployed in a fast-globalizing market where success is best achieved with a global perspective and openness to international partnership. By its nature, the WNA membership embodies that global perspective and offers opportunity for international partnership.
WNA’s essential tool of industry collaboration is our family of expert Working Groups. These groups constitute the bread and butter of WNA activity, enabling our members to share expertise, stay abreast of industry developments, gain insight and build contacts. Working Groups also support our representational function by shaping the industry positions we present in such forums as the ICRP and IAEA advisory groups.
WNA Working Groups evolve over time. A few trace back all the way to the days of the Uranium Institute on whose foundations WNA was created 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 will continue to evolve.
Participation in a Working Group is voluntary and open to all WNA members. Each Group is supported by a full-time professional called a Staff Director whose role provides continuity and cohesion. The Staff Director facilitates electronic communication within the Group, and this ongoing interaction maintains a pace of progress while enabling individual Group members to continue participating even if they are not always able to attend meetings in person.
Starting in 2012, we intend for WNA Working Groups to meet at least once each year in India.
This will occur on the margins of a new India International Symposium that WNA will hold annually in a major Indian venue. WNA’s first annual India Symposium will be held next February in Delhi.
This new conference will be patterned after the Annual WNA Symposium which we will continue to hold in London each year. Our new conference in India will also join an annual WNA conference schedule that includes the World Nuclear Fuel Cycle conference, an event jointly hosted every April by WNA and the U.S.-based Nuclear Energy Institute. We locate this WNFC conference using a worldwide rotation.
Our new conferences in India and China will now put WNA in the business of running a yearly cycle of four conferences.
We expect that holding meetings of the WNA Working Groups on the margins of these new conferences will bring in new participants with new perspectives and thereby infuse our Working Groups with even greater vitality and value to the industry.
Before closing, allow me to emphasize a point about WNA’s essential nature and purpose. We are not a business entity. We exist to serve enterprises that are. We see ourselves as servants and supporters of all WNA members, and our ongoing quest is to find ways to provide value to them. We operate in the transnational dimension, recognizing that each major nuclear nation will have its own national professional society and its own nuclear industry association or industry forum. We seek neither to compete with nor to duplicate any such national activities. Our aim is to identify and perform roles for the industry that help to provide connective links across international borders. Everything we do is performed in that spirit and with that mission.
Nothing better illustrates our aim of providing unique transnational value than the World Nuclear University. We created WNU not as a place but rather as an international partnership.
Within the WNU partnership, WNA’s role is to provide administrative support and creative energy. Acting under the WNU umbrella, our aim is to find innovative ways to unite WNA, IAEA, NEA, and WANO in valuable activities designed to build nuclear leadership for an expanding global industry. In the past eight years, we have invented a diversity of WNU activities. Our most prominent success – we think of it as the WNU flagship – is the annual 6-week Summer Institute. Despite its short history, the WNU Summer Institute is now widely viewed as an established institution in the nuclear world.
Each year’s Summer Institute brings together about 90 promising young professionals from some 30 countries. We call them WNU Fellows. Their average age is about 30-35, and they are hand-picked by their parent companies to participate. Situated in prestigious Oxford University, their curriculum consists of an intense program of lectures, projects and team-building exercises that we design to give them a broad global perspective on the crucial need for nuclear power while they engage and network with professional counterparts from around the world. Our WNU Fellows commonly describe the Summer Institute as the most challenging and inspirational experience of their careers.
Many companies now send at least one or two WNU Fellows per year, and we are now seeing heightened interest on the part of the nuclear establishments of certain countries – such as China, Russia and Korea – which clearly regard the Summer Institute as an asset to their aspirations in tomorrow’s global nuclear market. Some countries now send a minimum of 5-7 WNU Fellows per year.
Heretofore, India has been represented by just the single WNU Fellow sent each year by Larsen & Toubro. But we hope and expect that India’s emergence into the global nuclear market will soon be reflected in a larger Indian presence. Companies that regularly send WNU Fellows do so as a corporate investment in leadership development and in future marketing on a global stage. Today the Indian nuclear establishment is, and should be, thinking in those terms.
Ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate the opportunity to be with you today. I hope it marks a further step on a journey of constructive partnership between your companies and WNA as we move forward into a century in which nuclear power provides indispensable value both to India and to the world.