Nuclear rising on both sides of the Atlantic.

• Author: Ritch, John
• Position: IN FOCUS: John Ritch, Nuclear Energy Advocate - Interview

As the director-general of the World Nuclear Association, John Ritch has a bird's eye overview of the trends and the issues associated with nuclear technology. Unsurprisingly, as an ally of the industry, he champions the nuclear option, calling it an indispensable asset for a world that wants more energy (lots more, in fact) in order to prosper and also wants it to be increasingly carbon-free to fight climate change. While maintaining that other alternatives will play their roles, too, he insists that current debates about the future energy-mix often obscure an overriding trend: most leaders in the United States and in Europe are embracing nuclear power as a mainstay in their countries' emerging energy strategies. Already, nuclear energy powers roughly one light bulb in five in the United States and one in three in Europe, and now new political commitments and financial investments are starting to flow into commercial nuclear power. As Ritch explains it, the new energy crisis is more complicated than previous energy shocks because this one involves so many interlocking questions: supply security versus dependence on imports; competitive costs of different fuels; and environmental stabilization and sustainability.

Fundamentally, Europeans and Americans view the energy crisis from different perspectives. For Europeans, "energy" is essentially a question of natural gas and their dependence on Russia as an unreliable, increasingly pricey source of supply of electricity (Russia is expected to provide as much as two-thirds of Europe's natural gas by 2050.) For the United States, "energy" essentially means oil for cars and trucks, which has to come mainly from the Middle East. Put another way, Europe uses much less oil to run its vehicles--it manages the "demand" for oil and other energy with taxes. In contrast, the United States tends to think more in terms of "supply:" It produces most of the energy it consumes, except for oil, where imports are rising. Translated into figures, the EU is more than 50 percent dependent on energy imports (a level set to rise to 70 percent by 2020)--most of it from Russia. In comparison, the net energy imports of the United States amount to less than 25 percent of its consumption.

Both sides of the Atlantic recognize the need to do better on both supply and demand--and, Ritch insists, both sides will find that their approaches are necessary but not sufficient unless they include a lot more nuclear energy in their own countries, in Asia and in fact around the world. Nuclear reactors can compete directly with natural gas and coal in generating electricity in Europe and the U.S. Of course, nuclear energy does not directly power vehicles, but, as Ritch notes, it can produce the huge amounts of hydrogen and battery power that many people expect will be needed as a fuel to drive cars completely cleanly.

Many people in the policy community have been slow to recognize the scale and challenges of a new nuclear revolution that is already under way, Ritch contends, because the nuclear industry does not possess the pubic-relations machinery and clout of its longstanding rivals such as coal and oil. Since those fossil fuels involve enormous ongoing operations of mining, refining and distribution, they generate large permanent payrolls and huge financial flows. In contrast, nuclear power--unleashing huge amounts of energy from small amounts of uranium--is financially much smaller and lacks the means to pay for and support a ubiquitous "nuclear lobby"--which exists, he says, only in environmentalist fantasy. The important point, Ritch says, is that the strength of a pro-nuclear message today derives not from any well-financed effort to market the message but rather from the intrinsic merits of the case for nuclear power, which governments are examining and finding persuasive.

The data and predictions highlighted in Ritch's overview of the energy-environment debate challenge much conventional wisdom--including the realistic potential for Transatlantic cooperation on energy--and the likely limitations on it. Despite calls for strategic energy cooperation from both sides of the Atlantic, the Bush administration is sticking to its position that new technologies, including nuclear, offer the way forward--and rejecting carbon taxes or any regulatory measures such as caps on greenhouse emissions.

In contrast, the European Union puts its prime emphasis on energy conservation imposed by regulatory measures to control emissions, as seen in its adherence to the Kyoto protocol. One of the reasons some European countries have been able to accommodate the Kyoto targets is that economic recession at the beginning of the 1980s (and the collapse of economies in ex-Soviet-run states) structurally altered economies away from heavy industry towards services. But, as economist Dieter Helm noted this fall in the Financial Times, these industries did not go away--they relocated in the rapidly developing countries of the Far East, China and India. "In importing from these countries, the developed countries are implicitly responsible for the pollution caused in their manufacture." So the U.S. and Europe are actually polluting much more than the crude emissions data indicates.

Ritch predicts a gradual, partial Transatlantic convergence as European countries make a new commitment to nuclear power and, hopefully, as post-Bush diplomacy starts moving toward an emissions regime to succeed the Kyoto protocol when its expires in 2012. Ritch predicts that a new regime will need to be a global system of emissions-trading, which yields worldwide incentives to move toward cleaner energy. This goal may be out of reach, practically speaking, but, he says, even a start in global negotiations aiming at this target would be a powerful signal and incentive to markets--including, of course, the reviving nuclear industry.

Some readers will find Ritch's approach provocative because of its emphasis on the under-recognized role of nuclear energy in recent decades and its confident predictions of massive expansion in the world's fleet of nuclear reactors and renewed competition in the increasingly privatized nuclear industries. But Ritch combines unusual credentials as a policy intellectual, who has genuine expertise and feels free to be remarkably outspoken. He did not come to his current position from a background as a scientist or a nuclear-industry professional. For most of his career, Ritch worked in foreign affairs as an adviser in the United States Senate, where he focused on arms control, notably on efforts to combat nuclear proliferation. In the Clinton administration, he became U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based UN agency responsible for policing the treaty against nuclear-weapons proliferation and for promoting the spread of civilian nuclear technology. During his eight years in the job, he became convinced that, while not abandoning the effort to prevent weapons proliferation, the international community needed an intensive focus on using nuclear energy as an urgently needed tool for global environmental preservation.

Ritch says that his convictions about the need for nuclear and his realization about the extent of confusion about the role of commercial nuclear power prompted him to help create the World Nuclear Association, the London-based organization that serves as a coordinator and advocate for the enterprises that comprise the global nuclear industry. With worldwide membership, the WNA has members in almost every country in Europe and North America and has links with non-governmental and intergovernmental bodies involved with nuclear electricity-generation and other peaceful nuclear applications in medicine and agriculture. The WNA took the lead in founding the World Nuclear University, a partnership that draws on the major intergovernmental institutions like the IAEA and leading national academic and professional resources to provide "big picture" training to nuclear-physics students and young professionals accepted from countries all over the world. It is a part of WNA's effort to prepare a "successor generation" of nuclear leaders as the global fleet of reactors expands dramatically in the coming years.

The WNA's essential message is that nuclear power...