Beijing, China 24 November 2010 John Ritch Director General, World Nuclear Association
Ladies and gentlemen, this has been an intensive and valuable two days. As your final speaker, I promise to finish our programme without great delay. Allow me simply to offer you some brief remarks focused broadly on what has brought us here.
Yesterday WNA Chairman Chris Crane said he hoped this conference would become a landmark on the annual nuclear calendar. He said he saw two main purposes in the Symposium:
With that in mind, let me quickly refresh you on what WNA does, and the philosophy and purpose that guide our work. Let me first mention philosophy and purpose.WNA: Philosophy and Purpose
WNA is an organization built on a single profound reality, contained in this logic:
Meeting this challenge will require an efficient, highly globalized nuclear industry.
WNA’s mission is to foster and support the emergence of that efficient, highly globalized nuclear industry.
Underlying the WNA there is an element of philosophy, which I ask you to consider. As we have built an array of activities to support the industry, we know that some WNA activities provide direct commercial benefit to those that participate in them. However, other WNA activities - by their nature - support the industry as a whole, including companies that are not members of WNA.
A strong example is the WNA Public Information Service, which is the world’s most intensively used resource on nuclear energy and the industry that provides it. It is available to all who use it, without charge.
Because of this duality - of direct commercial benefit and general collective benefit - we think of WNA membership as embodying a combination of:
Thus, as we seek to build a membership that encompasses the entire nuclear industry worldwide, we believe we can appeal successfully to the commercial motives of companies. But we also ask our members and prospective members to recognize - and take some pride in the fact - that they are also supporting activities that support and advance the long-term success of nuclear power.
Building a Global Nuclear Industry Association
We began the task of building the WNA ten years ago, and today our membership is truly global. We are now beginning to foresee the possibility of a WNA that comprehensively encompasses the entire nuclear industry worldwide. We still have some distance to go on this journey, but we have travelled far down the road.
As WNA activities have evolved, we have envisaged them as falling into four categories, which we describe as “Four Pillars” of support for the global industry.
The first of these consists of our efforts to provide strong and coherent representation of the nuclear industry in international forums that shape the commercial and policy environment in which the industry operates. Even within our industry, it is sometimes too little appreciated that, in these forums, decisions are made and standards are set that have profound implications for the cost and effectiveness of nuclear power around the world.
It is the WNA’s ongoing goal to ensure that the industry’s voice - and its expertise - are brought to bear in these forums in a timely way that serves the public interest. We believe strongly that the public interest is best served by standards that enable the nuclear industry to be both safe and cost-effective - so that the public is protected from risk while receiving an affordable and plentiful supply of clean energy.
The second WNA pillar consists of the wide variety of our activities that bring the industry together - at the executive level and at the expert level. We do this through major conferences and through WNA Working Groups.
In many respects, the ongoing activities of more than one dozen of these Working Groups represent the heart and soul of WNA’s work. They are the means by which we bring industry experts together to share information, develop ideas, and shape the industry positions that WNA presents and supports in international forums.
The third category of WNA activity consists of two bodies of ongoing analysis. One of these is long-established, and traces back to the days of the Uranium Institute. This is our work in generating a highly authoritative projection of the global nuclear fuel market.
A new and comparably important form of analysis is one we have just begun in the last year. It is our effort, in an emerging era of widespread nuclear new build, to help our members as they work to assemble complex supply chains. Development of efficient and reliable supply chains will be crucial if our industry is to construct dozens, then hundreds, and eventually thousands of new nuclear reactors.
Our fourth pillar of support consists of a truly unique combination of services. The WNA Public Information Service is not always fully appreciated for the role that it plays as a huge base-load supplier to the public domain of accurate information on nuclear energy. Through this service, WNA has become nothing less than the world’s most intensively used resource on nuclear power and the industry that provides it.
Among people who need information on nuclear energy - whether they be industry experts, journalists, speechwriters, policymakers, teachers or students - this WNA resource is both widely known and highly respected. This explains why the WNA website receives a “hit” on the average of every 5 seconds twenty-four hours a day. No other nuclear website comes even a close second.
Our companion to the information service is our news service, World Nuclear News. WNN has been in operation for four years, and quickly established itself as the leading electronic news source on developments in our global industry. WNN’s readership has grown large and continues to expand at a rapid rate.
WNA: Working Hard on a Work in Progress
Ladies and gentlemen, we are very proud of this array of WNA activities. We believe that together they contribute strong and cost-effective support for an industry on which our world will increasingly depend.
To say this is not to express complacency. We regard WNA as a work in progress - and we will continue working hard to advance that progress - both in recruiting important additional members and in strengthening still further the roles and activities that our organization performs. We look forward to cooperating with all of you here today as we continue in this valuable endeavour.
On behalf of the World Nuclear Association, I express appreciation to all of you for your participation in this inaugural China International Nuclear Symposium. For WNA and for CNEA, this was a pioneering effort, and through it we hope we have taken a constructive step forward. Thank you and Xiexie.