John Ritch Director General, World Nuclear Association President, World Nuclear University Opening Remarks Second Annual Summer Institute of the World Nuclear University
Co-hosted by the Swedish Centre for Nuclear Technology (SKC), Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), and France's Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA) Stockholm, Sweden, 10 July 2006
Dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen:
One year ago we opened the first annual Summer Institute with enthusiasm and with a sense of historic purpose - but also with a genuine uncertainty as to whether our aspirations would be fulfilled. Fortunately, our successful experience last year has now transformed our uncertainty into confidence. We hope and expect that the WNU Summer Institute is becoming a widely recognized, prestigious tradition in the international nuclear community.
Our goal in creating the Summer Institute was a large one. Previously, at a heavily attended ceremony in London, we had established the World Nuclear University as a partnership to unite all sectors of the international nuclear community in a cooperative effort to enhance education, foster communication, and build leadership in nuclear science and technology. We saw the Summer Institute as an early experiment - to test whether we could use this cooperative mechanism effectively to achieve a clearly identified objective of broad and fundamental value.
The mission of the Summer Institute, as we conceived it, is to build a cadre of highly capable young nuclear professionals and academics from all over the world to help advance the constructive worldwide use of nuclear energy in the 21 st century. We knew that a global nuclear renaissance had begun. Our aim was to help educate and inspire its future leaders.
We want the WNU Fellows to experience an intense educational challenge that serves both to broaden their horizons and to strengthen their commitment to the nuclear profession. As time passes, we want the Fellowship itself to be recognized as a badge of distinction that connotes excellence and vision.
We hope that the WNU Fellows from each year - and from all years collectively - will become a kind of international society comprised of people who share a commitment to the nuclear profession and the great value it can bring to all humankind.
In shaping the programme of the Summer Institute, we have tried to offer you an experience commensurate with these high expectations. When these 6 weeks are over, we hope you depart with new friends from around the world and with a new professional commitment in your own career.
In these remarks this morning, I wish to extend congratulations and offer thanks, and then to reflect on the large purpose that has brought us here.
Congratulations and Appreciation
My first and easily accomplished task is to extend a warm welcome and cordial congratulations to this second class of WNU Fellows. In the past two days, some 89 of you have arrived in Stockholm from 34 countries representing every region of the world. We are very proud to have you here. We trust that you are proud to be here.
The selection process for the WNU Fellowship produced an impressive list of candidates. Your presence here today is evidence that each of you has demonstrated, in the early stages of your career, the intelligence, achievement, and motivation to be identified as a potential future leader in the realm of nuclear science and technology.
The thanks I wish to express are to the many people on whose hard work the WNU has depended in preparing an educational experience designed to challenge you and to help you build toward the fulfilment of your potential. These contributions have - and will - come in many forms.
Yesterday you met the people most directly involved in preparing this year's Summer Institute, including my friend Philippe Hauw, who serves so ably at the WNU Coordinating Centre in London. Philippe displays not only professional competence and constant good humour but also a calm determination to find a way around any bureaucratic obstacle.
Here in Sweden, I offer my whole-hearted and cordial thanks to our hosts led by Tomas Lefvert, Camilla Hansson, and Karolina Pihlblad. We are grateful too to the host-country sponsors who have contributed so generously to widening your programme with exciting outside activities.
My immense thanks also go to the nine great Mentors who will serve as your aunts and uncles for the next 6 weeks. Each of these persons is a talented nuclear professional, and it is a sign of their own visionary and generous spirits that they have chosen to spend these six weeks as your Mentors.
Among the Mentors, one bears special mention. Here and in your future careers, I believe you will come to attach high value to colleagues who care more about contributing than about claiming credit. Dr. Alan Waltar is such a person. Alan more than anyone deserves to be called the "godfather" of the Summer Institute. When I was searching for a way to breathe life into the WNU partnership mechanism, Alan was indispensable as we conceived the Summer Institute and then turned conception to reality.
I offer thanks too to many who are not here in Stockholm, at least for now.
At the IAEA in Vienna, the Summer Institute has found many supporters who have played key roles in the curriculum's design and in arranging financial support for WNU Fellows from developing countries. Some of them will appear before you to provide key presentations during the programme. These allies at the Agency were indispensable.
This year, when IAEA support for developing country participants fell short of our expectations, I was grateful - and also proud - that the U.S. Mission in Vienna was able to ride quickly to the rescue with the necessary funds to help us get the last 12 WNU Fellows to Stockholm. At a time when America's international role does not always enjoy universal support, this was a welcome reminder that the superpower across the Atlantic can sometimes get things right.
We owe thanks to others, as well. Over the next six weeks, you will encounter a remarkable group of speakers who will come from all around the world to share their knowledge on a wide diversity of topics. Among them, I expect that you will find one trait in common: a personal dedication to a body of professional expertise and a strong sense of responsibility to pass on that knowledge to the younger generation that you represent.
Purpose of the WNU and the Summer Institute: Fulfilling an Historic Mission with New Urgency
The Summer Institute is the first important manifestation of the World Nuclear University, which we founded in 2003 to commemorate the 50 th anniversary of President Eisenhower's Atoms-for-Peace initiative.
The WNU is not a university in the traditional sense. It does not have a campus, and it will award no degrees. Nor is it a virtual university, using electronics to teach from afar.
Instead, it is a partnership. Our goal was to draw together, into a single cooperative entity, the world's leading institutions of nuclear learning, the global inter-governmental organisations dealing with nuclear energy, and the world organisations representing the enterprises that actually produce nuclear power.
An early meaning of the word "university" - one the dictionary now labels as obsolete - was "the whole of things in the world". For us, this definition is not obsolete, for it captures what the World Nuclear University is meant to be: a partnership uniting the whole of things in the nuclear world.
Stated briefly, the WNU's mission is to carry the Atoms-for-Peace vision into the 21 st century through an international alliance that serves to support, to advance, and to help internationalise the study of nuclear science and technology.
Precisely because our world is globalizing, creating the WNU partnership was a natural step. But our efforts hold larger significance because history has followed a great arc.
In the 20 th century, the discovery of atomic energy came to threaten the very survival of civilisation. In this new century, humanity's future will depend on using that same force constructively, on an expansive global scale, as we seek to preserve the very biosphere that enabled civilisation to evolve.
Let it be said clearly and with confidence: If we are to meet expanding worldwide human need without destroying our planetary environment, this must became a nuclear century.
In 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 second Summer Institute here in Stockholm, it is fitting that we remind ourselves of the origins of the tradition we intend to carry forward.
[Eisenhower "Atoms for Peace" video]
As we are speaking of events in long-ago1953, please allow me to digress for a personal recollection. As C.K. Lee and other friends from Korea know, my Korean experiences go back a long way. When I was a young man of about 25, I was an infantry captain on the Korean DMZ. Later, I also served - on loan from the U.S. Army - as coach of the Korean Olympic basketball team for about 6 months.
But my first Korean experiences actually go all the way back to 1953, which was the fourth year of the Korean War. I then lived in a town on the West Coast, which was the home of a large U.S. Navy shipyard near Seattle. That year a local shoe store offered a bicycle as a prize to the young person who could collect the most used shoes to be shipped to Korean refugees. I took up this challenge and knocked on many, many doors - so many that I won the contest. And suddenly, to my great surprise as a 10-year old boy, I became nationally famous in the United States, as my picture appeared in many newspapers - sitting atop a pile of 10,000 pairs of shoes.
Here, for example, is the front page of what was then New York City's largest newspaper. This picture appeared just after Eisenhower was inaugurated and just before he went to New York to propose "Atoms for Peace". This picture and the Eisenhower video we saw evoke a time gone by. They also underscore a dividing line in history.
Earlier, I noted that our faculty and mentors share a common dedication to the nuclear profession. There is another trait that we also share - but one we would not wish to pass on to a new generation. All of us in the senior generation came of age in a world that lived under the spectre of a global nuclear holocaust.
Human and Environmental Imperatives in Conflict
The world has now emerged from the era in which "mutual assured destruction" was the strategic doctrine of the military superpowers. But humankind has now passed into a new era of danger. We face a global emergency of another kind - and a threat that may prove even more perilous.
Our world is now locked in a potentially fatal conflict - not between two military superpowers but between two momentous global trends. The first vector is the explosive growth of world population and, with it, of human needs and aspirations. The second is the destructive effect of humankind's expanding economic activity on the very environmental conditions that allowed civilization to evolve.
All public policy must now be shaped by the need to reconcile this conflict. As matters stand, we have hardly begun.
Between now and 2050, as world population swells from 6.4 billion toward 9 billion, humankind will consume more energy than the combined total used in all previous history. Under current patterns of energy use, the results will prove calamitous. The resulting pollution will be suffocatingly harmful to tens and likely hundreds of millions of citizens, mainly in the developing world.
Far worse, the rising accumulation of greenhouse gases will carry us across the point of no return as we hurdle toward climate catastrophe. The evidence is now overwhelming that, without massive reductions in greenhouse emissions, we face catastrophic climate change with the severest consequences for sea levels, species extinction, epidemic disease, drought and extreme weather events that could combine to disrupt all civilization.
Today the world economy is producing greenhouse emissions at the rate of 25 billion tonnes per year - 800 tonnes per second - a rate still growing despite rhetoric and negotiation. The Kyoto Protocol, even if implemented, would make barely a dent in the problem.
Our best Earth scientists tell us that, if are to avert climate catastrophe, we must by mid-century achieve a 60% cut in global greenhouse emissions - and we must accomplish this reduction even as world energy consumption doubles or even triples.
During this Summer Institute, you will learn and discuss much about the perils and processes of global warming and about the technologies we have at our disposal to avert climate catastrophe. In these remarks this morning, I would like to focus your attention on the human aspect of the crisis.
A World of Extremes and a Challenge for Humanity
The global crisis we face does not originate 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.
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. Then, at some point only in the last 2,000 years, something happened. To take a phase from nuclear science, humanity's technological inventiveness reached critical mass, and advance led to advance with increasing speed.
These gains brought amazing enlightenment and prosperity - and also an ominous consequence. Before, humanity's effect on Earth and its ecosystems was as a flea on a camel - wholly inconsequential. But in just the 200 years we call the Industrial Age humanity became an influence on Earth's fundamental mechanisms. Now this impact - this anthropogenic impact - threatens to ruin the very environmental conditions that fostered human success.
This impressive map sequence illustrates humanity's growth over the past two millennia. It shows the suddenness and size of our proliferating numbers. 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 6.4 billion people, with 9 billion projected by the year 2050.
Viewing this population through an economic lens serves to describe the human condition. What we find is a world of extremes.
At one end of the scale are the OECD countries, where global prosperity is centred. We in this category represent a mere one-sixth of humanity. At the other end are the world's poorest. Here an equally large 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.
Back at the richer end of the spectrum, if we add the 300 million people of the former Soviet bloc who are yet in the OECD, we find that 1.4 billion persons - just 20% of world population - account for 80% of global economic consumption. This means that 80% of the world's people subsist on just 20% of world production of goods and services.
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 problem is not shrinking.
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.
The energy dimension of poverty is fundamental. Conditions of poverty correlate so closely to the absence of electricity that access to electricity is the best single gauge of a person's standard of living. In today's world of 6.4 billion, a full 2 billion people have no electricity, and 2 billion more have only limited access. In other words, fewer than 40% of the world's people can easily switch on the lights.
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 supplies 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: worldwide desalination of seawater, an energy-intensive process that will compound global energy demand and that we must accomplish cleanly if we are not to exacerbate climate dangers.
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.
As energy users, 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 already producing an expanded use of energy and, with it, an intensified outpouring of greenhouse emissions.
The growing environmental impact of this central group cannot be overstated. Within 10 years from now, annual greenhouse emissions from developing nations will exceed emissions from the countries we now call developed.
Conclusion: The Future Role of the WNU Fellows
It is now beyond rational doubt that humankind must confront, with a compelling sense of urgency, the imperative of achieving a global clean-energy revolution. And with the very biosphere at risk, our energy strategies must be founded on hard, practical science - not on ideology and myth.
A fundamental purpose of the Summer Institute is to equip you to participate in the rational public debate that is needed to produce rational public strategy. Your participation is much needed. For at this point, sadly, our governments and our public debate are still failing to provide full and assertive clarity as to where a feasible solution may lie.
Last week in St. Petersburg, at the G8 conference, the heads of the world's leading industrial economies were confronted by a group of more than 100 non-governmental organizations - including the world's major NGO's - who issued them an ultimatum. It is essential, these moral leaders said, that the world's major nations take action to stop global warming - and that they stop building nuclear power plants. Never has there been a clearer demonstration that moral sincerity does not equate to strategic wisdom.
Yet the facts are there. Every authoritative energy analysis points to an inescapable imperative: Humankind cannot conceivably achieve a global clean-energy revolution without a rapid expansion of nuclear power - to generate electricity, to produce battery power and hydrogen for tomorrow's vehicles, and to drive seawater desalination plants to meet a fast-emerging world water crisis.
This reality will require an enormous increase in nuclear energy during the 21 st century. Today - in 30 countries representing 2/3 of humankind - we have 440 reactors producing 16 percent of global electricity. For an adequate nuclear contribution to electricity, battery power, hydrogen production and desalination, we will need 6,000-8,000 reactors at the very minimum.
Evidence of the dawning of this truth is all around us, and slowly but surely - despite much confusion, misinformation from entrenched nuclear opponents, and widespread government timidity - a global nuclear renaissance is gaining momentum.
The question is not whether a worldwide nuclear renaissance will occur but whether it will happen rapidly enough for nuclear energy to make the contribution it must make if we are to achieve a global clean-energy revolution before the destructive vectors taking us toward catastrophic climate change become irreversible.
We are in a race that will, at best, be close-run.
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.
I welcome you once again to Stockholm. Have fun here and also work hard here, for the citizens of your generation have much to do, and we are counting on you to help lead them.