The Fletcher School

The search for alternative sources of energy is hardly in its infancy. Solar panels, hydroelectric inverters, wind power -- for decades, these and other solutions have been proposed by scholars and activists as the best ways of curbing the world’s dependency on carbon-based, pollutant sources of energy.

Not good enough, says John Ritch. His solution? Go nuclear.

Ritch, a former ambassador under President Clinton to the International Atomic Energy Agency and other United Nations Organizations, and current Director-General of the World Nuclear Association, addressed concerns of global warming and promoted his nuclear solution to a room full of Fletcher students, faculty, and staff in a lecture entitled “The Coming Nuclear Century.”

Nuclear power, Ritch said, is the only comprehensive solution that will meet the world’s energy needs through clean and sustainable methods. Thus to solve the world’s pollution problems as a whole, Ritch said, people must embrace the potential of this “quintessential sustainable development technology”, and “discount the notion that we will meet our sustainability needs through conservation, solar panels, and windmills.”

Throughout his talk, Ritch emphasized the urgency of implementing a broad-based solution to global pollution and warming. “The tide of history has brought us to an existential crisis in the most literal sense,” he said. “Your generation must confront an unprecedented question: whether humankind can maintain, or whether we will destroy the civil atmosphere.”

Ritch began by describing factors that have contributed to the current crisis. Among them: the unprecedented, exponential explosion of the world’s population in the last few decades; the corresponding universal run on potable water, nutritious food and adequate housing; and the imperative to harness enough energy to serve this burgeoning human need.

To Ritch, however, the greatest culprit in causing this crisis seemed to be the simultaneous destruction of natural resources and exponential increase in consumption of traditional energy sources. “In the next fifty years, we will use more energy than has been otherwise used in all of human history combined,” he said.

With increased carbon-based fuel use comes increased pollution. Experts cite the current rate of global carbon dioxide emissions in the range of 20-25 billion tons per year. In the United States, the sum is particularly egregious: approximately 125 pounds per person per day. By the end of the 21st century, buildup of greenhouse gases is expected to cause global temperatures worldwide to rise from 1.5ºC to 6ºC.

“Global warming will reach a point of irreversibility” when temperatures rise by 2.6ºC, Ritch warned, criticizing environmentalists and policy makers of operating in a state of “psychological and political denial” for pursuing clean-energy options that can at best, he claimed, provide small-scale solutions that cut the emissions of only a small percentage of the population.

However, Ritch suggested nuclear energy would be up to such a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Ritch listed the many attractive qualities of nuclear energy: it is available, safe, does not pollute the atmosphere, its costs are competitive and declining, and byproducts and waste can be securely managed over the long term.

Anticipating criticism, Ritch hastened to preempt any potential rebuttals by addressing and explicating some of his assertions. He spent the most time defending his assertion that nuclear energy is in fact, safe.

First, Ritch assured the audience that the threat of proliferation and illicit nuclear activity would not arise from civil appropriation of nuclear energy. “Nuclear technology doesn’t in any way abet abuse,” he said. “In fact, a global system would strengthen our ability to monitor nuclear activity where it may be ongoing.”

He then discussed the safety of power plants themselves, in a post-Chernobyl world. “We have 12,000 reactor-years of experience generating nuclear energy around the world,” Ritch offered. A nuclear power facility would even be impregnable to terrorist attack, he said. “Even an extreme, worse-case assumption, would result in no harmful release.”

Ritch closed his comments on safety addressing the issue of waste. “The entire amount of nuclear waste produced from current plants would only fill one 2-story high basketball court,” he said, inviting the audience to compare this model to the landfill acreage that has been devoted, or destroyed by, storage of traditional waste. He explained that current plans for storage of nuclear waste include designs for “geological repositories” deep in the earth and separated by multiple barriers for the storage of radioactive byproducts.

The assembled audience was receptive to Ritch’s comments, but still had concerns. Delphine Hou, a first-year MALD candidate, wondered who would ultimately be responsible for taking care that plants and their waste are properly maintained and dismantled. Ritch dismissed the concern as being a basic business concern of outlining a decommissioning process, not unique to nuclear processes.

Beth Chalecki, a doctoral student studying environmental issues, questioned whether the virulent nature of nuclear waste made the relative smallness of the amount that is produced irrelevant. She cited isotopes, like plutonium, that have half-lives of thousands of years.

Ritch responded, saying that in general, people should get more comfortable with nuclear waste. “Everything around us is radioactive,” he replied. “Something that decays slowly isn’t venomously radioactive…and in repositories, the waste won’t harm anyone.”

Another member of the audience asked Ritch to discuss the legacy of the issue of safety. Ritch admitted that, in the past, mistakes had been made.

“A lot of people over fifty think the word ‘nuclear’ is inherently evil,” he said. “But none of the horror stories relate to the 21st century way of doing nuclear power plants.”

Ritch balanced the discussion of fears by discussing alternate benefits and advances that have been made using nuclear power. Nuclear energy has already been used to modify food – mostly grains – in order to make seeds more useful in various climates and parts of the world. “There is nothing harmful in this process,” Ritch asserted, unlike genetic engineering. “About half of the pizza and pasta in Italy already comes from nuclear-modified wheat.”

Ritch closed his remarks with a quote from Orwell: “Life is a race between education and catastrophe.” By developing and accepting nuclear energy, he said, we can win that race.

Article by Karoun Demirjian, MALD '06