Back to the Inaugural Ceremony of the World Nuclear University Part Two 

REMARKS BY HANS BLIX
Inaugural Ceremony of the World Nuclear University
4 September 2003

Let me begin by thanking the World Nuclear University's Board of Directors and its Chairman, Zack Pate, for appointing me Chancellor of the new university.

It is a body that links our living tradition of peaceful nuclear energy - now extending for the better part of a century - with our planetary future. It is appropriate that our fledging institution embodies a very modern concept - of the university as a network linking leading centers of learning and research in order to achieve more dynamism, through synergy, in the field of peaceful nuclear science.

The role of universities has always been to maintain and advance the sum of our knowledge by bringing together and confronting experiences and evidence from every new horizon. The Russian writer Maxim Gorky, in his autobiography, called one volume "My Universities". By that he meant the many places across his vast Russian homeland where he studied life and people. Of course, he did not despise academic education: He once tried to get in to the University of Kazan in Russia.

His message was that knowledge always improves when it is broadened. In Gorky's view, the experience of moving to many places stimulates our comprehension and pushes the mind toward comparisons. He was certainly right about that, and we are lucky in our times that this ideal - this idea of the university - can be extended to the benefit of many, thanks to modern technologies of travel and communication. Nowadays, scholars should travel - both in person and electronically - In order to broaden their horizons and to test their knowledge and thereby deepen it.

It is not a new idea for the university to be a setting where virtual travel multiplies our intellectual exchanges. Nowadays, universities around the world have many arrangements for sharing research results, teaching and even students' time.

Certainly the time was ripe for a departure in this new direction on behalf of the world's institutions of nuclear teaching, learning and research.

Our somewhat grandiose-sounding name, World Nuclear University, needs to be understood as an ambition to include people and certainly not as a bid to exclude others. The idea is not to supplant already-developed patterns of exchanges or erect some kind of supervisory body interfering with the activities of free, mature institutions. Our ambition, which is only as great as the participants make it, is to provide a clearing house, an instrument to expand and enrich cooperation among existing institutions.

Our ambitions can be measured by the needs we see. For example, student exchanges are more valuable than ever, not only between what people call the North and the South but also across what they to call the East-West divide.

"Global" is a word that certainly applies in considering nuclear energy, and exchanging experiences is obviously essential about nuclear applications - starting with the construction of nuclear power reactors and the techniques of waste-handling. Joint efforts and burden-sharing across borders is essential - and not only on the groundbreaking new projects such as Tokamak and other nuclear fusion designs.

To promote this partnering approach, the World Nuclear University is essentially a concept and a practical framework for stimulating new levels of cooperation among existing institutions of nuclear knowledge.

I was reminded of this idea again today when I listened to Susan Eisenhower evoking "Atoms for Peace". It started as a concept in 1953 and then grew over the ensuring years.

We, too, have a concept that can grow: Atoms for Sustainable Development. This theme - our need for energy to save the planet - was the idea that sparked the new university's genesis inside the World Nuclear Association and brought the other founding organisations into this joint effort.

If we are to have a revival - a re-launching - of the nuclear industry, the World Nuclear University can help meet several foreseeable conditions for success. Many of our challenges point up the need for broadening cooperation in learning and research about nuclear energy.

First, the safety culture must draw on knowledge and experiences from a global array of nations. That lesson has been shown by two other institutions associated as founding sponsors of the university: the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Association of Nuclear Operators.

A second important function for the university centers on the need to attract talented students into nuclear studies as a worthy and prestigious subject and career. A new generation is needed to preserve the lessons and carry forward the teaching that has flourished in the half-century since the launch of Atoms for Peace.

Still another feature of the university's focus must be more attention to the social aspects of nuclear energy. This dimension has been neglected. More time and study must be devoted to it. New curricula must teach nuclear practitioners more about how to explain the advantages of this energy and gain public acceptability for it.

As science and technology increase our ability to change and transform the world, as James Lovelock just explained, we must integrate questions of the acceptability of the changes to those affected by them. This means, for us, learning how to explain these changes.

So far, we have failed to do this with regard to energy and the change of the climate.

A final challenge is the need to ensure that the practical problems encountered by the nuclear industry in all facets of its operations are given attention in the work at universities. We must pursue close contact between the academic institutions and the industry, and try to see that the institutions of nuclear learning are not in ivory towers but are in contact with those who need the benefit of research and academic views - and who are in a position to deploy this knowledge.

This idea - cross-fertilization - has been a thread running through my remarks about the university's character.

In conclusion, I want to stress another imperative for this body: critical thinking. It is a time-honoured university role - bringing to bear our critical faculties, in the best sense, on the issues confronting us. In situations where it is important to seek the truth, to work out the most economic solution, to settle on the safest outcome - always when pursuing answers of this nature - we must adhere to standards of reasoning, of questioning proposed answers, of examining each other's findings.

This calibre of critical thinking is established in our universities. Today, it is a standard requirement - in defending one's thesis to subject it to critical examination, or to submit articles for peer review, or to disclose data openly for open scrutiny.

It was not always so, even in learned circles. There was a time in Europe when a leading institution explained the Black Death as the result of a constellation in the stars.

Today, this critical thinking is demanded as a matter of course in courts of law when weighing evidence. It is called cross-examination, and we take it for granted as a way of proceeding and we should.

But I would submit that our societies need more of this critical thinking in more of our public affairs beyond the confines of the courts and the universities. When critical thinking is replaced by its opposite - by what is called "spin'' - society loses. Facts can be lost sight of. Credibility risks being squandered.

We are familiar with this damage in the nuclear sphere. James Lovelock talked about Chernobyl and the widespread belief that thousands of people had died in the accident. The reality was horribly bad, but not as bad as described in the spin. The exaggeration, the oversell on these serious matters, still distorts people's views on nuclear safety.

Spin, in politics, is used to sell positions that are based on very uncertain input. Of course, governments sometimes, perhaps often, have to act before all the facts are known.

True, but all the more reason in such cases to examine carefully the facts you have.

In the case of Iraq, one cannot avoid the impression that exclamation marks were too often used in places where there should have been question marks.

Whatever the short-run gains of spin that overwhelms critical thinking, in the long run there is a loss of credibility when, fortunately and rightly, the public starts to discover the spin and react. Then people feel that they have been misled or at least not fully informed.

The risks of such reactions are obvious in crises involving the choice of war or peace. But the value of critical thinking has much broader implications - notably when we deploy new peaceful technologies. The public needs to be correctly informed about the basis for decisions and about the risks of action - or inaction.

We need this quality of communication - critical dialogue and not spin - when our societies assess the risks of our energy options and weigh our energy risks against the risks of global warming.

For my own part, I have reached my assessment. I would be the last person to underestimate the risk of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and particularly nuclear weapons. But I think the environmental risks we face are even greater. In tackling these challenges - whether anti-proliferation measures or energy choices - we need to evaluate the risks with critical thinking to promote a critical dialogue.

There is an obvious synergy between this critical thinking and the cross-fertilization I have talked about, across the borders of academic specialities and of national cultures. Both are prerequisites for informed choices.

As Chancellor, I want to see these values at the top of the agenda for the new World Nuclear University.