Good morning. It is a great pleasure and a great privilege to be with you this morning to discuss what must be done to ensure that nuclear energy realizes its full potential and truly becomes a sustainable energy option.

The prospects for nuclear energy today are more promising than they have been for many, many years—since the energy crises of the 1970s, in fact.

In the United States, thanks partly to the investment stimulus provided by comprehensive energy legislation passed this year, we have nine companies, consortia or joint ventures moving forward with plans for 12 to15 new nuclear power plants. The first of these will start to enter service around 2015. I would not be surprised to see at least 20 new nuclear plants in service in the United States by 2020 or 2025, and another 30 under construction. And we see the same movement globally.

This renaissance is the product of two major forces.

In part, the renaissance is driven by brute economic imperatives: Rising fossil fuel prices ... increasing concerns about oil and natural gas supplies around the world ... growing foreboding  that spare oil production capacity around the world is at dangerously low levels (in fact, a new phrase, “peak oil” is creeping into our vernacular) ... mounting concerns about the environment and the emissions associated with burning of fossil fuels—both greenhouse gases and the more conventional pollutants. This business environment highlights the unique attributes of our nuclear power plants—the ability to produce large amounts of baseload electricity safely and reliably ... the price stability that protects consumers from the punishing price volatility we see with fossil fuels ... and, of course, the clean air value.

The renaissance of nuclear energy also is the product of sustained hard work over many years by many people in this conference hall and by many, many others around the world who are operating our plants safely and professionally. You are the ones who have built the compelling case for nuclear energy with political leaders and policymakers ... who have articulated nuclear energy’s unique combination of valuable attributes. You are the ones who have demonstrated that fuel and technology diversity is the core strength of any nation’s electricity supply ... who have persuaded governments that providing investment stimulus and other forms of financial support for nuclear power development is sound public policy and serves the common good.

And all of us might be forgiven for thinking that we can relax a little because the hard work is behind us.

But that is not the case. The hard work lies ahead, and that is what I want to talk about today. To borrow Winston Churchill’s famous phrase, we are not at the end of our work. We are not even at the beginning of the end. If we are to build a sustainable nuclear energy business, we are perhaps only at the end of the beginning.

In the next few minutes, I will offer some thoughts on the work ahead, an agenda of what we must do to realize the potential of this remarkable energy source.

Item No. 1 on our agenda: We can never, ever lose sight of our responsibility to operate our nuclear power plants at the highest possible levels of safety and reliability.

As electricity markets become increasingly competitive, we must resist pressures to shave investment in staff, in training, in equipment, in maintenance. As our operating plants age, we must devote more attention to materials issues, and anticipate potential degradation long before it can have an impact on plant performance or regulatory and public confidence. In the United States, we have had a few surprises in this area, and our industry cannot tolerate surprises.

To ensure sustained safety performance, we must maintain and cultivate channels of communications across the global nuclear enterprise. Using established institutions like the World Association of Nuclear Operators, we must share experiences, good and bad, and learn from them and from each other.

In the United States, we enjoy strong public support:  83 percent of Americans think nuclear power is important for our energy future ... around 60 percent agree that “we should definitely build more nuclear power plants in the future.” The numbers are even higher among those who live closest to our current operating plants: 76 percent are willing to see a new reactor built near them. But let’s not delude ourselves: Public support can be easily squandered. We operate in an unforgiving public environment where the penalties for mistakes are high and where credibility and public confidence, if lost, are difficult to recover. Nothing will slow—or even derail—the renaissance of nuclear energy more quickly than a lapse in safety or an accident anywhere in the world. An accident anywhere will be perceived as an accident everywhere.

This brings me to item No. 2 on the agenda: We must broaden our cooperation and exchange of good practices beyond sharing of operational information. Despite political and cultural differences, we are a worldwide enterprise, bound together by a common purpose.

We can all benefit from sharing across a broad range of disciplines—training and education ... identifying and filling gaps in our capacity to manufacture critical components ... sharing the best construction practices and techniques.

If we do not address potential shortages or bottlenecks in major component manufacturing systematically, we will end up competing with each other for major components and equipment. This will drive up the cost of the new plants we all hope to build ... damage our credibility ... slow the renaissance of nuclear energy ... and, most important, slow the delivery of badly needed clean, reliable and low-cost electricity to the world’s population.

For some countries (my own, in particular), it has been a number of years since we built new nuclear power plants. I am confident that we can learn advanced construction practices and construction management techniques from our colleagues in Europe and the Far East. We must create mechanisms to facilitate that exchange of critical knowledge. Nothing will damage our credibility more than failure to manage construction well, and to bring new nuclear projects to market on time and on budget.

Item No. 3: We must know where we are going. If we hope to build sustainable confidence in nuclear energy, we must define a long-term roadmap and vision for our technology. The process of defining this roadmap—implementing it, financing it—must be a cooperative global undertaking among nuclear companies, nuclear industry organizations and governments around the world. But the impetus and the leadership must come from us.

Let me offer an example of a possible roadmap, with near-term, medium-term and long-term destinations.

In the near-term, we are approaching a new construction cycle for advanced light water reactors. These reactors are well-suited for bulk, baseload electricity production, and we will build many more of them well into the 21st century.

In the medium-term, starting around 2025, we should have demonstrated and started commercial deployment of high-temperature reactors, with a more varied product slate—electricity, of course, but also hydrogen production and process heat. We can envision high-temperature reactors, using advanced hydrogen production technologies, co-located with oil refineries and coal gasification plants, providing the hydrogen they require to upgrade coal and the heavy crude oils of the future into usable products. We can see high-temperature reactors generating process heat to produce clean drinking water, to extract oil from tar sands and for scores of other industrial applications.

And in the long-term, within the next 30 to 40 years, we should see deployment of advanced technologies to partition used fuel into its constituent elements ... to recover the uranium and plutonium and recycle them into fresh fuel ... to recycle the long-lived minor actinides into fuel ... to transmute the fission products into shorter-lived elements ... and to deploy new-design fast-spectrum reactors capable of burning the actinides.

This leads to item No. 4: We must ensure that our roadmap squarely addresses major concerns about nuclear energy, so that our political leaders, policymakers and the public accept that the roadmap is a legitimate, necessary and credible undertaking.

If the renaissance of nuclear energy now in progress around the world is to be sustainable, it must involve a lot more than simply building hundreds of new nuclear plants. Sustainability requires a long-term vision of nuclear energy technology that’s acceptable to our political leaders and policymakers, and also to the man and woman on the street.

New nuclear plant construction on the scale required by the world over the next 50 years implies a significant increase in the amount of spent fuel we envisioned a few years ago ... and, unless we develop next-generation reprocessing technology, an unacceptably large number of storage and disposal facilities for nuclear waste. So we must make plans to close the nuclear fuel cycle in the long-term, using advanced fuel processing technologies and techniques that do not exist today.

I’ve described a roadmap in which we develop and deploy technologies to recycle the fissile materials ... uranium, plutonium and the minor actinides ... then treat the remaining fission products. If we are successful, we could have a nuclear energy enterprise with waste by-products that, after several hundred years, are no more dangerous than the uranium ore with which we started.

That is a sustainable business and technology model. Our political leaders and policymakers and the public will embrace that vision.

We must develop and deploy technologies to reduce the long-term toxicity of the waste by-products we produce, and we must reduce the volume of material requiring long-term isolation in order to reduce the number of permanent disposal facilities necessary to isolate those waste by-products. Today’s used fuel reprocessing technologies do not achieve that.

Item No. 5: We must be certain that our political leaders understand the time and cost and implications of this long-term technology roadmap. We must be certain that they understand their essential role in providing the sustained political and financial support necessary to allow the long-term vision to develop and mature.

To succeed in this endeavor, we must create broad-based international governmental commitment. We must have sustained governmental and industrial support. A program that is subject to starts and stops due to short-term political influences may not succeed.

We must make a compelling case for long-term planning and long-term technology development programs. My own country’s energy policy is a case study in the dangers of short-term thinking. Over the last 15 years, 90 percent of the new electric generating capacity built in the United States was fueled with natural gas—because 10 to 15 years ago, natural gas was cheap ... because gas-fired plants could be built quickly ... and because they represented the smallest investment risk at a time of great uncertainty in the electric industry.

The result: The United States placed unsustainable pressures on natural gas supply and price, made worse by the recent hurricane damage to our own oil and natural gas infrastructure in our Gulf of Mexico region.

Fuel costs for the U.S. electric sector have increased from approximately $68 billion in 2004 to $92 billion this year, much of that driven by higher natural gas prices. Some of our utilities are warning their customers of 30 percent to 40 percent increases in electricity costs this winter. Annual energy expenditures as a percentage of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product have increased from a little more than 6 percent in 2003 to approximately 8.5 percent today. That’s a staggering blow, even to an $11 trillion-a-year economy.

The impacts from 15 years of shortsighted behavior and lack of planning are tearing at the fabric of the U.S. economy. Because of higher natural gas prices, the U.S. chemical industry has lost $50 billion in business to overseas operations since 2000, closed more than 100 chemical plants and laid off more than 100,000 workers. Other industries that depend heavily on natural gas, either as a fuel or a feedstock, also are suffering—plastics, packaging, steel, automobile manufacturing. Wall Street today is warning investors away from these sectors.

America’s current energy situation is a chilling reminder of the dangers of shortsighted behavior and lack of planning. Shame on us if we cannot persuade our political leaders, policymakers and the public of the insurance value provided by long-term technology development programs.

This brings me to item No. 6: Although we must plan for the long-term, we must continue to act in the short-term.

The long-term technology roadmap is essential, but we cannot allow ourselves to be paralyzed in the short-term. We must have political and public support for our legitimate near-term needs. Where we have that support, we must maintain it. Where we lack that support, we must create it.

We cannot, for example, allow the long-term promise of advanced nuclear fuel processing and recycling technologies to distract us from the necessary short-term imperative: Developing centralized storage and disposal facilities either for used nuclear fuel, or for the waste by-products from today’s reprocessing plants.

No matter how much we believe in eventually closing the nuclear fuel cycle ... no matter how great the long-term promise of used fuel reprocessing and actinide recycle and transmutation of fission products and fast reactors ... this technology development is at least 35 years from fruition. And even if we develop these technologies successfully—and I’m confident we will—we will still need permanent disposal facilities.

In the United States, for example, we must continue to develop the permanent repository planned for Yucca Mountain in Nevada. We must have a credible program to develop centralized storage and disposal facilities in the near-term if we expect to retain federal, state and local support for building new nuclear power plants and renewing the licenses of our existing plants to operate for an additional 20 years. I suspect many of you are in the same position.

We are on the verge of a major new expansion of nuclear energy around the world ... nothing less than a renaissance.

And the organizers of this session were precisely correct: Ensuring that this renaissance is sustainable will require a “determined effort” on the part of all of us in the nuclear industry around the world to build confidence among our political leaders and the public.

I have suggested a short inventory of the work still to be done.  It may not be the right inventory. It is certainly not complete or exhaustive. But unless we come together and develop an integrated agenda for the future, I fear we will not realize the full potential of the uniquely valuable source of energy that brings us together today.

Thank you, and best wishes for a successful conference.