Ladies and gentlemen, as keynote remarks are meant to enunciate a theme, I will do so this morning in the most straight-forward of terms: Our world - developed and developing countries together - must achieve a massive expansion in the use of nuclear power if we are to meet the needs of a growing global population while preserving the planetary environment on which civilization depends.

Nuclear electricity is already being generated in nations comprising nearly two-thirds of humanity, and its use should now be judiciously considered by virtually every government - for the soundest of reasons.

Before discussing the urgent global crisis that compels the widespread use of nuclear power, let me offer a word of introduction about the World Nuclear Association.

WNA is the organization of the global nuclear energy industry.  Its membership - numbering 180 companies in 40 nations - includes the entire range of enterprises engaged in the nuclear fuel cycle worldwide.

[3 - World Nuclear Association]

WNA members account for essentially all of the world’s uranium mining; all uranium enrichment worldwide; all reactor vendors; much of the engineering, procurement and construction capability that supports nuclear energy; and about 90% of world nuclear generation.  In sum, WNA membership encompasses most of the global nuclear profession.

WNA activities are wide-ranging:

[4-10 WNA Activities / WNA Website]

First, we speak for the nuclear industry in the most basic way - by providing accurate and comprehensive information about it.  The WNA website is the world’s most heavily used information resource on all aspects of nuclear technology and the world nuclear industry.

As its primary feature, this website contains what we call the WNA Public Information Service.  This includes some 120 papers, covering all aspects of nuclear technology and the nuclear industry.  Written for the layman and constantly updated to include the latest developments, these papers are a ready source of accurate information for journalists, policymakers, students, ordinary citizens and industry insiders around the world.  One of these papers receives a hit every 7 seconds around the clock.

[11-12 - WNN]

We also run the world’s leading nuclear news service, covering the latest industry developments.  You may subscribe online to receive daily or weekly news reports, and you may go to the WNN website to search its accumulating archive.

[13 - Meetings / WNFC]

To bring together those engaged in the nuclear profession, WNA runs two major conferences each year.

In the spring, we partner with America’s Nuclear Energy Institute to hold the World Nuclear Fuel Cycle conference.  This event draws nearly 500 nuclear professionals and rotates its venue from Europe to Asia to America.  Next April, the fuel cycle conference will be in Munich.

[14 - Meetings / Symposium]

Each September in London, we hold the Annual WNA Symposium, which attracts some 800 nuclear executives.  This leading industry event occurs in the week before the IAEA General Conference in Vienna, enabling some professionals to attend both. 

[15 - Expert Consultation]

The most fundamental WNA activities occur through our expert Working Groups.

[16 - WNA Working Group list]

WNA Working Groups meet three times a year, often on the margins of our major conferences.

Through our conferences and Working Groups and the many private commercial meetings that occur on the margins, WNA serves as a global meeting place for leaders, experts and marketers from throughout the industry.

[17 - Expert Consultation - Representation]

An essential WNA role is to represent our world industry - in the public debate and as an interlocutor with standard-setting organizations like the IAEA, the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency, and the International Committee on Radiological Protection.

[18 - WNU Logo]

Still another WNA role is to serve as the animating force behind the World Nuclear University partnership.

[19 - WNU: A Global Partnership]

The WNU partnership aims to unite industry, inter-governmental and academic organizations in support of two goals: strengthening nuclear education and building future nuclear leadership.  The most prominent WNU initiative is its Summer Institute.

[20 - WNU Summer Institute]

This annual event, now held in Oxford University, brings together 100 promising young nuclear professionals, called WNU Fellows, for a six-week programme - a non-technical programme - designed to develop and inspire them as potential future leaders in the nuclear world.  By the end of this summer, there will be nearly 500 former WNU Fellows representing more than 40 countries, and this network of future leaders is growing each year.   

Any company with a major role in our industry might well consider nominating a candidate each year to participate in this prestigious programme.  I can say with confidence that the Summer Institute is beloved by virtually all who have had the experience.

A Global Crisis Without Precedent

[21-26 - Earth]

Let me now turn to the global crisis we face.

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. 

[27 - The Atmosphere]

In full, the atmosphere reaches 350 miles high. 

[28-29 - 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.

[30 - 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.

[31 - 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.

[32 - 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. 

[33-35 - 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. 

[36-37 - 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. 

[38-39 - 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.

[40-48 - 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, which help to underscore the historic suddenness of the surge in human numbers.

[49 - 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. 

[50-53 - 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.

[54-55 - 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.

[56 - 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.

[57-60 - “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.

[61-62 - 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.

[63 - 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.

[64-65 - 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. 

[66-68 - 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.

[69 - 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. 

[70-71 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. 

[72 - Red Line]

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

[73 - 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. 

[74 - 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 more than 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.

[75 - 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. 

The Necessity of a Nuclear Century

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

[76 - Nuclear Century Outlook]

To help answer this question, WNA has developed an analysis called the Nuclear Century Outlook.  Details are available on the WNA website.

[77 - WNA Definition]

The analysis first examines the world country-by-country, estimating each nation’s potential deployment of nuclear energy in the 21^st century, using both optimistic and pessimistic assumptions.

[78 - NCO Table]

Totaling these estimates yields “boundaries” - low and high - of potential global nuclear growth.

Our “low” boundary is a trajectory whereby global nuclear capacity grows to 2,000 gigawatts by 2100. 

[79-80 - Low Boundary]

Even this “low” boundary, based on pessimistic expectations for nuclear growth, represents a six-fold increase over today’s global nuclear capacity of 370 gigawatts.  In other words, the nuclear renaissance is on.  The key question is how far above the low boundary it will take us.

The “high” boundary is 11,000 Gigawatts. 

[81-82 - High Boundary and Domain of Likely Nuclear Future]

This trajectory results from totaling all of the most highly optimistic country estimates. 

Between these boundaries lies the domain of potential nuclear growth.

Under any scenario we foresee, about five-sixths of nuclear growth will occur in countries already producing nuclear power today. 

[83 - World Distribution]

This is not surprising, as those countries represent over three-fourths of global economic output and can build on existing nuclear capability.

The Outlook analysis then examines how much clean-energy capacity the world must develop in the 21^st Century to avert environmental catastrophe. 

[84-88 - Clean-Energy Demand]

This analysis of clean-energy need yields a very steep growth curve.  We will be chasing - and must eventually catch up to - a fast-receding target as we build clean-energy capacity.

In examining how we will do so, the Nuclear Century Outlook makes fair - and indeed generous - assumptions concerning the potential for growth in hydro-electric power, new renewables, and fossil technology using carbon capture and storage.

[89 - Hydro]

Hydro is assumed to continue growing until mid-century, and then to taper off.

[90 - Renewables]

On renewables, we make the robust assumption that these technologies will grow from virtually no contribution today to a level double today’s entire global electricity capacity.

[91 - CCS]

On carbon capture, still an unproven technology, we also make a generous assumption: that it will contribute substantially, although more likely in a transitional role than a permanent one.

[92-94 - Nuclear Low and Clean-Energy Gap]

Finally, we introduce nuclear.  Here we see that nuclear - at the lower end of its potential - cannot contribute much to meeting the clean-energy challenge.  We are still left with an enormous gap.

If Earth-systems science is correct, this gap means environmental catastrophe.

[95 - Nuclear High]

When we introduce the “high” boundary of nuclear, the picture offers hope.  But even here we no grounds for complacency, for you will recall that this analysis embodies extremely optimistic assumptions about all the clean-energy technologies.

[96 - Extra Box]

What we see is the very harshest of realities and the very clearest of truths: that humanity faces an extreme environmental challenge, which we cannot hope to meet without a full realization of nuclear power’s vast growth potential.

[97 - 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 deploy 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.

[98 - 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, and the race between education and catastrophe is underway.

[99 - Earth]

We at the World Nuclear Association are proud to be working with many colleagues here today in the effort to win this race by supporting and advancing a technology on which our world’s future now crucially depends.