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Good evening. It is indeed a great honor to be appearing here to deliver this year’s W.B. Lewis Memorial Lecture.

As I thought about this occasion, and the man who inspired it, I could not help but remember the words of Sir Isaac Newton, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Newton was referring to scientific predecessors such as Galileo and Copernicus. In the nuclear industry, Dr. Wilfrid Bennett Lewis certainly ranks among our giants.

Dr. Lewis and his colleagues here in Canada, and their counterparts in the U.S., saw the tremendous promise of nuclear energy. Standing on their shoulders, we are fulfilling that promise.

Dr. Lewis saw more than just the technical aspects of nuclear energy, however. He saw nuclear energy as a tremendous benefit for humanity.

In reading Dr. Lewis’s biographical material, I saw a quote by his AECL colleague Dr. Ara Mooradian, who said of him, “In lectures, Dr. Lewis argued that mankind had a responsibility to learn how to control the abundant supplies of energy within its grasp. Only in this way could it hope to raise the standard of living and improve the quality of life of millions of people throughout the world.”

The commercial nuclear industry has over the past three decades made increasingly significant contributions to our countries, and to the rest of the world. And now, at the beginning of the 21st century, we are embarking down the path to the fulfillment of his hopes. This new century, I am convinced, will see the realization of nuclear energy’s potential to contribute to worldwide sustainable development – growing the world’s economy, helping to provide electricity to some 2 billion people who do not yet have access to it in their daily lives, and doing so while preserving our global environment.