Preparing for the Coming Nuclear Century

Remarks by John Ritch
Director General, World Nuclear Association

Nuclear Industry Seminar: "Nuclear Energy - A Hard Look at the Future"

Hosted by the Canadian Nuclear Association

Ontario, 19 February 2004

Chairman Kupcis, President Elston, President Whitlock, members of the Canadian Nuclear Association, ladies and gentlemen:

Being with you today to speak about the future of nuclear energy is both an honour and an opportunity to express a strongly held personal conviction.

I believe that, in the century ahead, nuclear energy will be nothing less than indispensable if we are to meet the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced - which is to cope with our world's vast and expanding human needs without destroying the very Earthly environment that enabled our civilization to evolve.

Our planet's fragile biosphere is now at risk, and history has reached a momentous point where the fate of humanity hinges on whether we can summon the will and the ingenuity to produce clean energy on a massive global scale - a scale our nations cannot realistically hope to attain without an expansive use of nuclear power.

To fail in this is to invite real and unmitigated catastrophe - for people everywhere and for our global environment.

To contemplate this daunting challenge, one could hardly choose a better locale than Canada. No country stands better positioned - through its blessings in geology and its culture of technological innovation - to help animate the global transformation to clean energy we must now achieve.

With your vast resources of uranium, your highly developed use of nuclear power, and your focus on futuristic hydrogen technology as a clean way to distribute energy, Canadians are poised for a major global role as this history unfolds.

The aim of the World Nuclear Association is to coax that history along:

By helping to galvanise and support the global nuclear industry; and
By conveying to citizens worldwide, and to their political leaders, the urgency of the clean-energy challenge and the immense capacity that nuclear energy can supply as we shape a global response.

Today there are some 440 nuclear power reactors, generating one-sixth of the world's electricity. With global energy demand steadily rising, a clean-energy future will require thousands - perhaps 5,000 by mid-century, producing not only electricity but also hydrogen and clean water - if we are to mount a concerted strategy to avert environmental catastrophe.

Dimensions of the Global Environmental Crisis

For many environmentalists, any such projection will still seem shocking if not sacrilegious - a violation of basic assumptions in the environmentalist faith.

But if organised environmentalists have not yet embraced nuclear power, they are acutely aware - and have helped to build awareness - of the crisis we truly face:

They have warned cogently of the enormous consequences - human and environmental - of our world's unprecedented explosion in human numbers.
They have warned compassionately that, of today's 6 billion people, more than half live in dire conditions - and that we must urgently find new ways to meet these needs without jeopardising the global environment.
They have warned alarmingly that expanding populations are quickly depleting the world's precious supplies of fresh water, lowering water tables so drastically that, within 25 years, half the world's people could be without access to potable water - unless we can somehow achieve large-scale desalination of water from our oceans and seas.
They have warned that we face additional energy needs in the rising global demand for food and housing and basic services, and they have warned of the dire consequences - through pollution and global warming - if those needs continue to be met using fossil fuel.
They have warned that stark evidence of global warming is already all around us: that the hottest years in recorded history have occurred in the past decade, that weather catastrophes are on the rise, and that icecaps and glaciers are melting from Africa to Alaska.
They have warned that global warming could, in this century, raise sea levels by as much as 20 feet, flooding thousands of islands and coastal cities worldwide and inundating countries like Bangladesh.
They have warned that the ongoing melting of the Arctic iceberg and Greenland's huge icesheet could entirely disrupt the Atlantic Gulf Stream, bringing to an end the benign delivery of warm air and water to Western Europe, and thereby leaving countries such as Ireland and the United Kingdom - and even much of continental Europe - with climates as cold and severe as Lapland's.
They have warned that global warming is also greatly accelerating the worldwide loss of biodiversity, so much so that, within the next 50 years alone, a full one-fourth of all species on our planet - I repeat, a full one-fourth of all species within the next 50 years - will be lost to extinction, never to appear on Earth again.

This is a powerful message of global crisis.

Sceptics, cynics, curmudgeons - and, ironically, many conservatives - may wish to ignore it. For my own part, far from disparaging these concerns, I find the environmentalist case compelling, profoundly alarming and a clear summons to public action.

But what organised environmentalism has not done is to identify and embrace a feasible global response to the crisis we face - a strategy that must begin with, and be based upon, a sound concept for the massive worldwide production of clean energy.

What organised environmentalism has rendered thus far is less a coherent strategy than an amalgam of dogma, wishful thinking and sometimes sheer fantasy that does not yet represent a basis for successful global action.

Having raised a resounding clarion call concerning our global problem, environmentalists must now focus with equal acuteness on the solution.

By its sheer magnitude and severity, the global environmental crisis will not allow us the luxury of political posturing or fuzzy thinking. We must discard preconceptions and ideology, assess our options carefully and build - with clear logic and determination - a feasible, science-based plan for collective action.

The Urgent Necessity of a Decisive Strategic Response

Let us state the case - both the problem and the logic of its solution - in the clearest possible terms:

In the next 50 years, as global population grows from 6 to 9 billion, human need will multiply - and, in the absence of dramatic measures, so too will human misery.

As nations try to meet this need, the rate of world energy consumption will double or even triple, and - in just this narrow 50-year period alone - humankind will use more energy than in all previous history combined.

Today, despite much rhetoric and diplomacy, the global rate of CO₂ emissions - now 25 billion tonnes a year, or 800 tonnes a second - continues to rise inexorably and so too does the atmospheric build-up of these heat-trapping gases.

The implications of this unprecedented accumulation can be found in the Earth's history over the last 400,000 years, which shows CO₂ levels fluctuating between 200 and 300 parts-per-million and atmospheric temperature fluctuating - by about 15 degrees Centigrade - in almost perfect correlation.

Now, however, human activity in the industrial age has suddenly - in geological time - raised CO₂ concentrations to well above any pre-industrial level.

Today's level of 350 parts-per-million might in itself sound less than alarming. What is undeniably alarming, however, is the projected level. Unless we achieve prompt and drastic global action to curb greenhouse emissions, atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ will reach double the pre-industrial level by the middle of the 21st century and will continue to rise thereafter.

It is thus far from alarmist to warn that pervasive air pollution and a changing, unstable global climate could, in the not distant future - and certainly in the lifetimes of our children - become threats far more devastating than terrorism or manmade weapons.

To stabilise greenhouse gases - even at a dangerously higher level - scientists calculate that daily global emissions must be cut, within the next 50 years, by at least 50%.

Since developing countries such as China and India will inevitably emit far more greenhouse gases, the already industrialised countries must, if we are to preserve the biosphere, cut emissions by 75% - and also lead in disseminating clean-energy technology worldwide.

The Crucial Contribution of Nuclear Energy

We face a future of radical change. Either we will achieve radical transformation in the global economy or we will experience a radical upsurge in human suffering and a radical alteration in the global environment.

No aspect of sustainable development is more elemental than the need to achieve a massive worldwide shift to clean energy technologies.

How are we to accomplish this?

Authoritative projections by the International Energy Agency (in the public sector) and the World Energy Council (in the private sector) point unambiguously to the same conclusion - that our need for clean energy on a colossal scale cannot conceivably be met without a sharply increased use of nuclear power.

In fact, nuclear power is the quintessential sustainable development technology:

Its fuel will be available for multiple centuries, its safety record is superior among major energy sources, its consumption causes virtually no pollution, its use preserves precious fossil resources for future generations, its costs are competitive and declining, and its waste can be securely managed over the long-term.

Those who persist in opposing nuclear power in the name of environmental preservation will surely earn the scorn of history and of future generations.

The world's environmentalists have performed many valuable services. But they can provide their fellow citizens no greater service now than to discard the fiction that conservation, solar panels and windmills alone can meet human needs.

Sustainability requires nuclear energy; and the path of sound environmentalism today is to embrace, fight for - and finance - a future in which nuclear power and "new renewables" function as clean-energy partners in a transformed global economy.

Hydrogen: Distributing the Clean-Energy Benefits of Nuclear Power

Achieving consensus on the value of a nuclear-renewables partnership is all the more vital because another atomic marvel - the ability to unite hydrogen and oxygen to make electricity - is about to transform our world and lift our prospects for a clean-energy future.

Hydrogen offers a means, for the first time in history, to store enormous quantities of electricity - for use, on demand, in cleanly powered transportation and in the full range of traditional electrical uses for home and industry.

But hydrogen's environmental value depends on making it cleanly - using the clean primary energy that only nuclear power can provide on a vast scale.

Hydrogen provides the bridge by which nuclear power can contribute not just to base-load electricity but to the entire spectrum of energy use.

With this bridge, it is now possible for the first time to envisage a thriving, large-scale, emissions-free industrial economy - with nuclear power and renewables providing clean primary energy for direct electricity and for electricity storage via hydrogen.

The man whom many have dubbed the father of the hydrogen-fuel cell, Geoffrey Ballard, describes this as an economy operating on "hydricity". As both a pioneer and a realist, Ballard was early to recognise the essential role of nuclear power, and he has been wise and forthright in saying so.

Hydricity is exciting technologically, and can also inspire action diplomatically.
Our great need is for a comprehensive treaty regime in which all the nations of the world - developed and developing - undertake a binding commitment to use emissions trading as the driving economic incentive for a long-term evolution to a global clean energy economy.

Our failure thus far traces ultimately to the lack of a plausible vision as to how a collective commitment to deep emissions cuts might realistically be fulfilled.

The emergence of a technologically feasible, widely understood clean-energy vision could break this logjam, stimulating nations to undertake the commitments that will accelerate the vision's fulfilment.

An Expansive Nuclear Future

A future in which nuclear power plays a central role in supporting hydricity will not require a radical change - but only an acceleration - in current trends:

For four consecutive decades - including the 1990's - nuclear power has been the fastest growing major energy source in the world. And today:
Thirty-one nations representing 2/3 of humanity have nuclear power;
Important nations representing an additional half-billion people are planning to begin to use it for the first time;
Nations representing half of world population are building nuclear power plants, and
The U.S. nuclear industry, owners of the world's largest nuclear fleet, plans 50% growth over the next 20 years.

The essential issue about nuclear power is not whether it will grow but how fast:

Will it grow fast enough to meet the world's urgent need for clean energy on a massive scale?
Will we further strengthen the global infrastructure of people and institutions to guide and promote its growth?

Transnational Support for the Global Nuclear Industry

The role of the World Nuclear Association is to act in concert with CNA and other leading national associations to promote positive answers to these essential questions.

In this role, we are part of the basic support structure for the global nuclear industry, a support structure composed of:

Intergovernmental organisations: the IAEA and the OECD's Nuclear Energy Agency; and
Private sector organisations: WANO and the WNA.

Among these four organisations, there is a clearly recognised division of labour and also a considerable degree of cooperation. Together, we serve to strengthen the technologies, standards, safety culture and skills associated with nuclear power - and to broaden public understanding of this invaluable technology.

Last year the four organisations began to collaborate on an exciting project that we believe will make an enormous contribution to global sustainable development.

Five months ago, at the annual WNA conference in London - with the heads of all four organisations in attendance - we inaugurated a new institution, called the World Nuclear University, which is designed to strengthen the educational foundations of the global nuclear industry for an expanding role in the 21st century.

The mission of the WNU is to:

Improve the quality of nuclear course work everywhere;
Build student interest and enrolment worldwide; and
Move toward a globalisation of standards and credentials in this increasingly global industry.

The essence of the WNU is a network of leading institutions of nuclear education and research in more than two dozen countries worldwide.

Canadian participation is managed through your own already established national network called UNENE: the University Network for Excellence in Nuclear Engineering

UNENE is led by Dr. Mohan Mathur, who serves as your Country Representative on the WNU's Academic Council.

The WNU will not itself have a campus or a large faculty. Instead, using a small secretariat co-located with WNA and WANO in London, it will act as unifying force:

Coordinating cooperation within the WNU network of educational and research institutions; and
Acting as a link between them and the four global organisations that cooperated to found the WNU partnership.

For those who may be interested, the WNU offers an open door for participation and contribution.

We see the World Nuclear University as a powerful idea whose time has come, as we prepare for this nuclear century.

A Race between Education and Catastrophe

The great George Orwell described human life as a "race between education and catastrophe". This truth, which applies to individuals and to society as a whole, neatly summarises the precariousness of our human existence, and our tightrope walk over the abyss of self-destructive irrationality.

Today we as a civilization face the unprecedented danger of ruining the very biosphere that nurtured our growth as a species and as a social order. Yet we now have at hand the tools we need to avert that threat - and, instead of succumbing to our own excesses, to build an ever stronger and more successful civilization.

In all history, the race between education and catastrophe has never been more intense than that we are engaged in today.

Those of us in the nuclear industry have the opportunity and responsibility to contribute to victory for enlightenment and progress in the race against folly and catastrophe.

All of us at this conference have much important work to do.

Thank you.