MCSLARROW: Bob (Dr. Robert L. Pfaltzgraff), first let me just say
thank you to you and the Institute for helping organize
this as well as the Fletcher School. I’m delighted
to be here and I’m proud of really the role that
a lot of people have played in pulling all of this together
to celebrate what was really in retrospect such a great
event in world history and certainly in the last 50
years touching on some of the greatest issues that we
face.
And I do want to particularly
recognize Lynn Brooks, our Undersecretary Administrator
of the National Nuclear Security Administration and
his organization, Bob Card who is here, who is our Undersecretary
for Energy Science and Environment and their teams,
Ray Orbach and Bill Magwood and others who have contributed
not just their talents and their willingness to speak
later but also financially to this conference.
And reflecting the secretary’s
belief that this was something that was important to
do, not just in the sense of a debt of gratitude but
in a sense that this was an opportunity to look forward
as well and learn from the last 50 years, starting with
the “Atoms for Peace” speech. I also want
to say a special thanks to Jack Marburger and just say,
we obviously have a special relationship with Jack.
He’s part of the Department of Energy family and
I personally witnessed what a great advocate he is for
science, whether it’s in the budget discussions
at the White House or elsewhere and he’s been
a great friend, although I must confess that when he
described making a wooden cyclotron as a child my immediate
thought was, “What a fun child. I would have liked
to have known him then.”
I am proud to be here
and if I can be so bold, part of the reason is I believe
the Department of Energy reflects in some important
ways, in our everyday work, the vision and the challenges
that were set forth by President Eisenhower in the “Atoms
for Peace” speech to the United Nations 50 years
ago today, or next month, really.
From our work with the
International Atomic Energy Agency to safeguarding fissile
materials to our critical work with Russia to our generation
for advanced reactor work to the far-reaching science
on nuclear energy that our national labs and other conduct,
the nucleus, if you will pardon the pun, of the Atoms
for Peace Initiatives find their home at the Department
of Energy and I suspect you’ll hear more about
this later from our other speakers.
What struck me about the
speech when I thought about it was, that it must have
been or should have been seen as almost incredibly,
naively optimistic. Imagine a day when this speech was
given before civilian power was a reality, before nuclear
energy was providing 20% of our electricity that we
take for granted, in a day when people, basically, if
they thought about the atom at all, they thought about
it with horror or fear.
But President Eisenhower
with that speech, forced us out of the darkness into
the brilliant light of the possible. Now the next four
decades saw an incredible rise in civilian nuclear energy
production. But it also saw a steady nervous fear of
the arms race. The Non-proliferation Treaty helped in
the limited sense of containing a challenge and a problem
that no one really knew what to do with.
And then, suddenly, the
Cold War was over and the nuclear superpowers stepped
back and joined hands. People reflected that decades
had passed since Three Mile Island and certainly worse,
Chernobyl. And so today we should be pushing on an open
policy door. But that’s not the case and I think
most of the people in this room understand that because
there was a time, of course at the beginning, when nuclear
energy was entirely a matter of defense. And then there
was the time when it was presented as two distinct issues
to be dealt with separately, one defense, one a matter
of civilian power, was followed by a time when the Non-proliferation
Treaty essentially enshrined a technological reality
or belief that the policies of nuclear defense and civilian
energy could be separate.
But today we face a threat
that forces us to realize that the Non-Proliferation
Treaty’s grand bargain, the bargain, if you will,
of access to civilian nuclear power and disarmament
by the nuclear power states on the other hand, is not
quite good enough. It forces us to realize that we cannot
separate the two sides of the nuclear coin and that
we must recognize that the bargain of access to nuclear
energy poses challenges perhaps not fully appreciated
in the latter half of the 1960s and the early seventies
when the NPT was being ratified.
Now I know that others
will address these issues but to my mind, we are in
a position not to dissimilar from that of President
Eisenhower but with this difference. When he gave his
speech, I would submit, we knew too little. And now
as we celebrate the speech we perhaps know too much.
What it requires is the same optimism that informed
his speech before the United Nations and it’s
a challenge that we must meet.
There are many examples,
and I’m not going to steal the thunder of other
speakers who are going to go into them, but let me just
give you one example of why we believe that it’s
so important that we continue our commitment to civilian
nuclear energy. As most of you know, we’re on
the threshold of finally passing an energy bill. And
so there’s been a lot of debate, not just these
last three years but really for the last several decades
about our reliance on foreign energy if you will. Now
we are never going to get to a day where we are independent
of energy that supplied from abroad and I would argue
that we don’t want to be. We are a trading nation;
it’s part of what’s made us great.
But when you look at how
we use energy and you reflect that, in terms of electricity,
almost of all of our nuclear energy, which of course
is domestically supplied, goes to generation of electricity
and that’s about 20%. Almost all of our coal usage,
which is domestically supplied goes to generating electricity
and that’s about 50%. An increasing share of natural
gas is going to the generation of electricity and then
renewables and other forms of electricity production,
again, domestically supplied. And you switch and you
look to the transportation side of the ledger, and you
reflect that almost all of that is energy that’s
based on petroleum of some sort. And of that well over
50% and, frankly in the last few months, well over 60%
is imported oil.
Now there are many arguments
about how much is too much, but the Energy Information
Administration projects that in the next 20 years, our
dependence on foreign oil is going to be upwards of
70%. I have yet to meet anybody, no matter where they
are on the political continuum who will argue that that
is a good place to be. So part of what the Bush administration
has been pushing before Congress and what I believe
will be enshrined in the energy bill and what we’ve
already started doing at the Department of Energy, and
there are a lot of people in this room who are already
hard at work, is trying to shift our domestically available
resources out of just simply providing electricity into
the transportation account and the catch word there
would be hydrogen.
And people have heard
the President talk about hydrogen in his State of the
Union speech last year. Also want to acknowledge the
fact that Jack was instrumental in helping us get to
that point. But the point here is that you can-- Hydrogen
is an energy carrier. You can produce hydrogen many
different ways. But if we’re talking about a world
where we want to economically produce hydrogen, taking
into account that we want to rely on abundance and clean
energy, nuclear energy has to be central to that vision.
And nuclear energy, whether
you are splitting water to create hydrogen or some other
way, should be and in our mind is part of our plan to
be part of the energy mix in the future, whether it
stays at 20% or is more, I don't know. And we still
have a lot of work to get to that vision. What I do
know is that we have a lot to do and we’re not
necessarily working in a climate where everybody is
standing up and cheering us on.
So, if I can brag on President
Bush and Secretary Abraham for a second, there’s
a lot to do. On the non-proliferation side, Secretary
Abraham has worked very hard with the International
Atomic Energy Agency. He has addressed the General Assembly
three times. I think he is the only secretary to actually
address the Board of Governors and he has initiated
and had accepted his calls for a number of far-reaching
initiatives. He’s developed an incredibly close
working relationship with Rumyantsev of the Minister
of Atomic Energy in Russia. They, working together with
Ambassador Brooks, have accelerated many of the programs
for disposition of fissile materials for two or three
years.
And then, on the civilian
side, through the President’s leadership, Secretary
Abraham, Bob Card and others have insured that this
energy bill will probably have a Price Anderson liability
fix, which is so necessary to the future of nuclear
energy. Through the President’s leadership, following
on the recommendation of Secretary Abraham, we’re
moving forward although we still have a lot of work
to do insuring that we have a national repository at
Yucca Mountain. And Bill Magwood is leading the charge
on Nuclear Power 2010 to make sure that we can advance
the ball in siting(?) and licensing and R and D for
civilian nuclear power. So there’s a lot to do.
So when you reflect on
the challenge before us, we can’t forget the fundamentals
and I would say when I reflect again on President Eisenhower’s
speech, we have to remember the backdrop and recall
that it was only a little while before he gave the speech
that John Foster Dulles, then Secretary of State, had
delivered his speech on massive retaliation and on reliance
on deterrents.
I believe that President
Eisenhower understood very well that the foundation
for "Atoms for Peace" relied on deterring
war, that we can regard the Cold War as history, that
we can see the success of the Atoms for Peace Initiative
is due in large part to President Eisenhower’s
skillful blending of security and peace and we owe him
a great deal.
