[1 - Title]

Ladies and gentlemen, let me begin by offering a very enthusiastic welcome to the new WNU Fellows of the class of 2009.  I extend warm greetings also to friends and colleagues who comprise the faculty of this fifth Summer Institute.  You deserve many thanks for your service and contribution. 

It is a delight to see all of you here - Fellows and faculty.  I know that you have six exciting weeks ahead. 

My thanks too to the coordinating team that has worked so hard in the preparations that brought us here today.  As the Summer Institute unfolds, I hope all of you will come to appreciate how much effort has been devoted to delivering an experience that you find both enjoyable and inspiring.

This fifth Summer Institute marks the beginning of a plan to hold this event each year in this same location.  We first developed the concept of a Summer Institute not long after the WNU was founded in 2003, and having weathered the challenge of inventing and reinventing this event in four different locations around the world, we decided that the time had come to find a permanent home. 

We feel fortunate that our interests and those of this splendid college have merged to enable us to hold the Summer Institute in these magnificent surroundings.  Long ago, in the 1960's, I spent three years in Oxford, and there are few experiences I treasure more.

That we have chosen 101 WNU Fellows is not by chance.  Five hundred years ago when Christ Church was founded, there were 101 original scholars in residence.  Those young students so long ago began what became a remarkable tradition of achievement in scholarship, science and public service.  Christ Church commemorates that legacy each evening at 9 o’clock as the bell in the great Tom Tower tolls 101 times. 

We took the liberty of attaching ourselves to this tradition partly for the sheer fun of it and partly for a serious reason.  We hope that you WNU Fellows and those who follow you in future Summer Institutes will also establish a legacy of achievement - as leaders of the global nuclear profession.  As the 21^st century unfolds, it may well prove to be true that no profession is more important than yours as our world struggles to meet global human needs while preserving the planetary environment on which civilization depends.

A Global Experiment - With Survival as the Stakes

This morning I wish to begin your WNU Fellowship by asking you to consider a fundamental question.  Very simply, why are we here - just what is it that has brought us together, and what common purpose do we share? 

My own answer to this question is that we are here as part of an experiment.  It could, in fact, be called an experiment within an experiment.

[2 - An Experiment within an Experiment]

The larger experiment, which surrounds our presence here, goes far beyond those of us in this room.  Indeed, it involves all of humankind, as all of us together, in nations around the world, face a new and unprecedented challenge. 

The history of humanity - of our species here on Earth - is a story of many chapters.  It is a tale of progress - in science, technology, art and human understanding.  Equally, it is a saga of conflict - between people of different nationalities, ideologies and religious beliefs.  

Generally, as we look back on the history of human civilization, we think of progress as a step forward, and conflict as a step back.  But today, as we enter the 21^st century and look ahead, we have begun to understand that humanity's progress itself has brought us into conflict - a new and profoundly dangerous form of conflict - between our technologically advanced economies and the very planetary environment that enabled civilization to evolve. 

Our best Earth-system scientists now warn that we must resolve this conflict - through the most urgent and far-reaching action - if we are to continue the human story without unleashing environmental catastrophe on a scale we can barely begin to imagine.

[Click]

We are now involved in a great experiment, in which all the world's nations have a stake, that will test whether humanity can summon the wisdom and the will to meet this challenge.  The question is whether we can bring our collective behaviour into harmony with the stable Earthly environment without which we cannot survive. 

Can we act jointly in our own common interest?  Can we use our institutions of international cooperation to defend and maintain the stability of the biosphere that sustains life for us all? 

The test of whether humankind can organize itself to cope with this peril has become nothing less than history’s greatest experiment.  The outcome will determine humanity's future viability on planet Earth, and the results will become clear during your generation.

When I consider this ominous challenge, I find myself contrasting it with the large issues that faced humankind during my own boyhood.  I was born during the Second World War, and grew up in the years just after it.  In those days, this kind of question - as to whether humanity could act together in its collective interest - had just begun to enter people’s minds.  Then, such a question had a different focus.  We did not think in terms of anything as subtle or scientific as environmental danger.  What we feared then was sudden, overwhelming attack and instant nuclear obliteration.

In those years, we had just experienced history’s most deadly conflict, we had just invented history's most deadly weapon, and we had just begun history’s most extended and dangerous geopolitical confrontation.  Public consciousness was dominated by this angry East-West contest of power and ideology that saw a relentless building of atomic weapons - first thousands, then tens of thousands of missiles - all poised for instant launch, while children hid beneath their school desks, practicing for a day of world destruction.

As a potential defence against this danger, we had a new organization in the world - the United Nations - created just as the great global war had ended.  The unanswered question was whether this new instrument of cooperation could help to protect and advance the cause of civilization.  Idealists and visionaries hoped that this new organ could help us solve historic problems of poverty, disease and despair.  They hoped too that we could use international cooperation to protect ourselves collectively against the terrifying new dangers of mass atomic suicide.

One curious and revealing expression of the public psychology at that time was a new form of popular entertainment - the science-fiction movie - which managed to combine these very real fears and hopes with a strong dose of wild and humorous imagination. 

[3-5 - Sci-Fi Movies]

Many of these films had a common storyline.  Suddenly, there appears a great, new, previously unknown force which threatens planet Earth and all mankind, giving rise to the decisive question:  Can our world's people act together to defend themselves?

[6 - Day the Earth Stood Still]

One particularly famous sci-fi movie - called "The Day the Earth Stood Still" - brought a variation on this theme by asking whether humanity would accept an ultimatum from a benign alien civilization that regarded earthlings as a menace to the universe.  They sent a spaceship to Earth, threatening to destroy humanity unless we stopped using our technology for weapons and conflict and began using it for common peaceful purposes.  Again, the question posed was whether the world's nations could act collectively - with enlightened self-interest - to defend humanity's existence on Earth.

[7 - An Experiment within an Experiment / part 2]

Today it is not science-fiction but hard science which tells us that such a moment has come.  A few years ago, the world’s nations emerged, with the aid of considerable luck, from the nuclear dangers of the Cold War.  But we now face a threat of even greater magnitude, arising from humanity's destabilizing impact on Earth's biosphere.  We must now confront - in reality and not on the cinema screen - the fatal question of whether we can act collectively to protect our common interest.

We know already the path that must be followed if we are to reconcile man and environment.  Many measures will be required, but the most fundamental is a worldwide transformation in the way we produce and consume energy.  We know that in the decades just ahead we must achieve nothing less than a global clean-energy revolution. 

And we know still more.  For those willing and able to face facts, it has become clear that this worldwide revolution must be led by a sweeping expansion in the use of nuclear energy.  In years past, we have spoken in terms of hundreds of nuclear reactors.  Now we must think and plan in terms of thousands.  From a base of just over 400 power reactors worldwide, we must build to 4,000 reactors - and then well beyond.  And we must begin to do so with urgency and without delay.

In the 20^th century, atomic science truly threatened human civilization.  But in the 21^st century, just as truly, atomic science must be the instrument of our survival.   We must make this a nuclear century.

Purpose of the WNU and the Summer Institute: Fulfilling an Historic Mission with New Urgency

To achieve that objective, nothing will be more essential than leadership - leadership from professionals who understand nuclear technology, who believe deeply in its importance to the world, who can communicate that conviction to their colleagues, and who can inspire confidence and support from their fellow citizens. 

If nuclear energy is to play its essential role in reconciling the conflict between man and environment, we will need a cadre of sophisticated, internationally minded young professionals to serve as nuclear statesmen of the future. 

[Click]

Your presence here today is part of the effort to build those statesmen and stateswomen.  The question is whether we can do so, through mechanisms like the WNU.  This is the experiment-within-the-experiment that will determine whether our nations can develop this world-changing nuclear leadership. 

From our experience with past Summer Institutes, we expect that you will enjoy this event and gain professionally from it.  But we will not know whether this part of the experiment has truly succeeded until we know where you are and what you have done in the years ahead.  We look to you as an investment in our world’s future, and we attach high hopes to the nuclear careers that lie ahead of you.

Six years ago, when we founded the World Nuclear University, we were commemorating the 50^th anniversary of President Eisenhower’s Atoms-for-Peace initiative of 1953. 

[8 - Eisenhower]

During the WNU's inaugural ceremony, we showed newsreel footage from a half-century before, depicting the Cold War context in which President Eisenhower made his bold proposal to the United Nations.  Today, as we embark on this fifth Summer Institute, let us remind ourselves of the origins of the tradition we seek to carry forward.

[Eisenhower "Atoms for Peace" video]

[9 - Title]

I feel confident that President Eisenhower and all of those, from many nations, who supported him in the Atoms-for-Peace initiative a half-century ago would be proud that the World Nuclear University is carrying forward their purpose and building on the foundations they sought to lay.

History's Greatest Challenge

Let me now focus on the great global challenge that will demand your nuclear leadership.

[10-15 - Earth]

Between now and 2050, as world population swells from 6.8 billion toward 9 billion, humankind will consume more energy than the combined total used in all previous history.  Under present patterns of energy use, the consequences will prove calamitous. 

The resulting pollution will damage or ruin the health of tens and likely hundreds of millions of citizens, mainly in the developing world.  Far worse, the intensifying concentration of greenhouse gases will take us past a point of no return as we hurdle toward climate catastrophe.   

Today the world economy is producing greenhouse emissions at the rate of 30 billion tonnes per year - nearly 1,000 tonnes per second. 

Our best Earth-system scientists warn that greenhouse gas emissions, if continued at this massive scale, will yield consequences that are - quite literally - apocalyptic:  increasingly radical temperature changes, a worldwide upsurge in violent weather events, widespread drought, flooding, wildfires, famine, species extinction, rising sea levels, mass migration and epidemic disease that will leave no country untouched. 

For all of us, even those most determined to face reality, the crisis we face is counter-intuitive for simple reasons of human instinct.   When we look upward, either in the daylight or under the stars, it is natural to think of the sky as an unlimited expanse.  In fact, our atmosphere represents little more than a thin coating on the Earth's surface. 

[16 - The Atmosphere]

In full, the atmosphere reaches 350 miles high. 

[17-18 - The Troposphere]

But most of the atmosphere - more than 99% of its molecules - is concentrated far lower, in the troposphere and stratosphere, no more than 30 miles high. 

[19 - The Biosphere]

The biosphere is even narrower, just 12 miles in bandwidth. 

Take an ordinary soccer ball and coat it with just a few layers of varnish, and the thickness of that coating can represent the biosphere.  Apply a few more coats, and the thickness will represent most of the atmosphere above us, including the canopy of greenhouse gases.  This thin shell of atmosphere is a very small trash container indeed for the massive volumes of fossil waste we are now spewing into it.

[20 - Catastrophic Climate Change]

To avert catastrophe, our leading climate scientists, and an increasing cohort of world political leaders, agree that we must, by mid-century, cut global greenhouse emissions by a full 80% - even as world energy consumption triples. 

In the sheer scope and urgency of this challenge, we face nothing less than a global emergency.

For many people, the spectre of global warming remains too nebulous to contemplate.  But what is not nebulous is the human condition that lies behind global warming. 

Here are some basic truths, which underscore the human dimensions of the global crisis we face.

[21 - Earth and Humanity]

This crisis, it bears emphasis, originates not in human evil, but in human success: humanity’s accumulating, accelerating success in acquiring, disseminating, and applying science-based knowledge.  It is this success - taking form in agriculture, industry, commerce, and medicine - that has spawned the growth in human population and the gathering threat to our environment. 

Viewed through history’s eye, this success has come in a sudden burst.  Through virtually all of the 50,000 years since humans first appeared, world population never exceeded 10 million. 

[22-24 - Fifty Millennia]

Then, at some point within the last 2,000 years, something happened.  To take a phrase from nuclear science, human inventiveness reached critical mass, and advance led to advance at increasing speed. 

[25-26 - Last Two Millennia]

Within the last 2,000 years - as shown here - these gains in knowledge brought enlightenment and prosperity to hundreds of millions of people.  But the surge of world population also carried a consequence.  Before, humanity’s effect on our Earth’s ecosystems was like a flea on a camel – wholly inconsequential.  -

[27-28 - Industrial Age]

But in just the 200 years we call the Industrial Age humanity became an influence on Earth’s fundamental mechanisms.  Now this anthropogenic impact threatens to destroy the very environmental conditions that enabled human success.

[29-46 - Maps]

This map sequence illustrates humanity's growth over the past two millennia.  Note that it took 50,000 years for population to reach one billion, a little more than a century to reach two billion, 33 years to reach three billion, 14 years to reach four billion, 13 years to reach five billion, 12 years to reach six billion.  Today we are at 6.8 billion people, with 9 billion projected by the year 2050.  I will quickly repeat these maps, for they underscore the historic suddenness of the surge in our human numbers.

[47 - A World of Extremes]

Viewing this population through an economic lens serves to describe the human condition.  What we find is a world of extremes. 

[48-51 - First Phase / OECD and Poorest]

At one end of the scale are the OECD countries, where global prosperity is centred.  These wealthy nations represent a mere one-sixth of humanity.  At the other end are the world’s poorest.  Here an equal number of people - 1.1 billion - live in destitution with constant hunger, no clean water, the death of a child every 3 seconds, and virtually no income or prospect of improvement.

[52-53 - Former Soviet bloc and 80% of World Consumption]

Back at the wealthier end of the spectrum, if we add the 300 million semi-prosperous population of the former Soviet bloc, we find that 1.4 billion of the world's people - just 20% - account for 80% of global economic consumption.  This means that 80% of the world’s people subsist on 20% of world production of goods and services.

[54 - 75,000,000 more per year]

The 80% of humanity in the poor and developing world continues to increase.  The rate is 20,000 per day.  Think of it as the birth of a new city of 6 million people once each month.  Our world’s problem is not shrinking; it is worsening by the day.

[55-58 - "Moderate" Poverty]

The poorest 1.1 billion people are categorized as being in "extreme" poverty.  Another 1.6 billion are classified as being in “moderate” poverty - just a small step above abject misery.  They have little sanitation and virtually no money.  They survive amidst pollution and disease.

[59-60 - Electricity]

The energy dimension of poverty is fundamental.  Poverty correlates so closely to the absence of electricity that access to electricity is the best single barometer to gauge a person's standard of living.  In today's world of 6.8 billion, a full 2 billion people have no electricity, and 2 billion more have only limited access.  In other words, just 40% of the world's people can easily switch on the lights.

[61 - Water Vulnerability]

Numbers on the same scale apply to clean water.  Today, world water tables are falling under the demands of expanding human consumption.  As this crisis emerges, we can expect the growing shortage of potable water to produce thirst, disease, and water wars - in other words, a deadly combination of human suffering and human strife.  As a remedy, we have one available tool: large-scale desalination of seawater, an energy-intensive process that will compound global energy demand.

[62-63 - Advanced Sector]

Finally, we have the great mass of humanity positioned between poverty and prosperity.  This population, poised for advance, will be the engine of our world's future economic development. 

[64-66 - Three Categories]

In terms of future energy use, the human condition divides us into three categories:  those with energy access who will continue to use it, those with none who desperately need it, and those poised in between, whose drive for economic advance is producing an expanded use of energy and, with it, an intensified outpouring of greenhouse emissions. 

In the near future, greenhouse emissions from developing nations will equal the emissions from the countries we now call developed.  After that, emissions from the developing world will be the major driver of global climate change.

[67 - Apocalypse Graph]

The historical surge in human numbers and human activity we have just described gives rise to the shock we are delivering to the Earthly balance of natural forces that, for many thousands of years, has yielded a climate congenial to human development. 

Although climate science is immensely complex, the basics are well understood.  At the centre of climate science is the gradual oscillation in the concentration of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide, which form an atmospheric canopy that captures just enough heat to nourish life on Earth. 

[68-69 - CO₂ Fluctuation / Ice Ages]

For hundreds of millennia, starting long before human life first appeared, Earth’s primary greenhouse gas has fluctuated in a range between 200 and 300 parts per million.  This oscillation has corresponded to the cyclical alternation between ice ages, when the greenhouse canopy was thinner, and so-called interglacials, the warmer periods associated with a thicker greenhouse canopy. 

[70 - Red Line]

Today, human activity - primarily through the burning of fossil fuel - has taken Earth out of this historic cycle.  Already we are nearing 400 parts per million. 

[71 - Tipping Point]

What makes this number ominous is the mounting evidence in climate science that somewhere in the range of 450 to 550 we will reach a tipping point where change becomes self-reinforcing, through a variety of positive feedback mechanisms, and thus irreversible. 

[72 - Future Red Line]

A salient example of positive feedback is the expectation that continued global heating, by melting the arctic tundra in Siberia and Canada, will cause a sudden release of the methane gas trapped within that tundra.  This single development could itself be cataclysmic - because the amounts will be massive and methane gas is 20 times more potent in its greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide.

We can rightly regard our accelerating rush toward this expected tipping point as the most dangerous development in the long history of humankind.

[73 - Crucial Premise]

Our starting point for action must be agreement on a basic premise that emerges from every authoritative analysis:

Humankind cannot conceivably achieve a global clean-energy revolution without a huge expansion of nuclear power - to generate electricity, to produce battery power and perhaps hydrogen for tomorrow's vehicles, and to desalinate seawater in response to our world’s rapidly emerging fresh-water crisis. 

[74 - Characteristics of Nuclear Power]

Indeed, under fair and balanced assessment, nuclear power can be seen as the quintessential energy technology for sustainable global development:

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

Slowly, around the world, this reality is gaining hold on the minds of men - and on public policy.  But the pace remains all too slow.

The Necessity of a Nuclear Century

In deploying nuclear energy, what is the order of magnitude of the challenge we face? 

[75 - Nuclear Century Outlook]

To help answer this question, the World Nuclear Association has developed an analysis called the Nuclear Century Outlook.  Details are available on the WNA website, and I will simply summarize the conclusion here this morning.

[76 - Environmental Success or Failure]

Based on all we know and expect - about the climate and about technology we can foresee - humanity's perilous situation will not be salvaged unless we achieve the deployment of at least 8,000 nuclear gigawatts in this century.

Anyone inclined to doubt the feasibility of that task should consider the rate at which France deployed reactors in the 1980's - roughly one reactor for every million people.  If today, in the 21^st century, just the OECD countries plus China and India began to deploy reactors at only one-fourth that rate, we could fulfil the momentous goal our circumstances require.

The question is whether we will summon the wisdom and will to achieve the concerted policy actions - nationally and internationally - that will be necessary to accelerate the global nuclear renaissance.

[77 - H.G. Wells]

A great English historian, H.G. Wells, saw life as “a race between education and catastrophe”.  Today this adage applies to all humankind.  Our world is in dire peril, the race between education and catastrophe is underway, and we have no time to lose.

This Summer Institute is, on one level, intended to be an enjoyable, career-building experience.  But we also see it as a convocation of future leaders who today hold a monumental responsibility - to make a vital contribution to victory in a fateful race that will determine the sustainability of humanity's future.

For those of us in the nuclear profession, history has bestowed both a solemn obligation and, on the other side of that coin, an inspiring opportunity.

As WNU Fellows, you are here today because you have been selected - and, in many cases, have selected yourselves - for a very special purpose.  We are investing in you, with hope that you will help humanity to win that race.

[78 - Earth]

I welcome you once again to Oxford.  Have fun here and also work hard, for the citizens of your generation have much to do, and we are counting on you to help lead them.