Lady Barbara Judge has an extremely broad and successful international career in multiple public and private sectors, including law, finance and nuclear energy. She has made significant contributions working at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, for which, in 2010, she was awarded Commander of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. An outspoken proponent of nuclear energy, she gave an inspiring speech at Columbia University's Earth Institute that aimed to present the main developments and the importance of nuclear energy for our world. In her speech, she emphasized how energy is one of the world’s most pressing concerns and, in particular, the question of whether we have enough energy to last us in the future. One of the main points made is that, right now, nuclear energy contributes 20% of the world’s energy. What Lady Barbara Judge also emphasizes is that, at this moment in time, scientists have not yet found a way in which renewable energy can be efficiently stored or transported, meaning that alternative energy cannot be considered a replacement of nuclear power. In her speech, she notes that nuclear energy acts like a base load generator that has unlimited capacity and that generates energy at a pretty low cost, which does not have to fluctuate like in the case of oil and gas prices. Lady Barbara Judge reflected on the various concerns which, for decades, have prevented people from accepting the potential of nuclear energy. As she points out, nuclear power remains a political issue, which needs to change if we want to learn how to use it in a smart and efficient way. The politics of the past can no longer dictate how nuclear energy is perceived by the general public. According to her, the press has an important role to play when it comes to changing the narrative around nuclear power. The media must be engaged in the process and understand the issues around nuclear energy in order for us to see a shift in the public perception of the nuclear sector. As an Honorary Visiting Professor at several academic institutions, including Cass Business School, Lady Barbara Judge has emphasized the importance of providing comprehensive education to students by the revitalization of nuclear departments in universities. The successful operations of the future nuclear plants depends on providing the new generation with the right training and resources.

1. Keynote speaker Lady Barbara Judge talks about nuclear energy at the
Earth Institute, Columbia University, 28 March 2008
Where are we on nuclear? Well, as we know the great problems of the world are
first, or at least partly, energy. Partly it’s about security of supply: do we have
enough energy to go forward into the 21st
century?
Probably, we do – probably there is enough gas, there is enough oil, there is
enough coal, there are enough resources which will produce energy in the world.
The problem is that most of them are in unstable places. There’s some in Russia,
there’s some in the Middle East and they have to travel across other reasonably
stable or unstable places in order to get to us. There is some in America but
basically there is lots of coal, but as we know – oil, gas, coal, all have some similar
problems in that they omit CO2 into the atmosphere.
And what we really want to do is deal with the second problem in this conference,
which is climate change – those emissions that we’re putting out into the
atmosphere which are going to make the atmosphere less and less hospitable for
our children and our children’s children.
So, we have to deal with these big problems – security of supply and climate
change. And what are we going to do to deal with them? Well, let me tell you
about what I do. I’m Chairman of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. What does that
do? Well, it did a lot of things in the past. It has a glorious past, which was we
built nuclear power plants; indeed, we developed them. But at the moment we
don’t do that. What do we do? We decommission old nuclear power plants; the
ones that are all around the UK. We decommission those nuclear power plants
because they are old and at the end of their useful life; it’s time to take them
apart.
Now at the moment - I’m going to talk to you about Britain because that’s where
I’ve lived for the past 15 years - at the moment, nuclear contributes 20% of
Britain’s energy. It contributes about 20% of the world’s energy. If we just keep
decommissioning all those old nuclear power plants in the UK, by the year 2020,
we’ll deliver 2% of the UK’s energy by nuclear. And frankly, no one has told me
that we need 18% less energy in the year 2020.
People say “we can fill this gap, we can have solar energy, we can have wind
power”. But frankly, it doesn’t work. First of all, it’s not always sunny. Second of
all, even in Scotland, it’s not always windy. People often say to me oh that’s true,
sometimes we have cold, dark, still nights in Scotland and what’s going to happen
when you turn on the lights? No lights.
One of the problems with alternative energy is that it’s top-up energy. It’s energy
that comes and goes when the wind comes, when the sun shines. They are trying
to figure out how to store that energy, but we haven’t figured it out yet and science
hasn’t gotten that far. It will but it hasn’t. Also, how do you transport it? Most of
the world’s countries’ grids do not transport renewable energy.
But nuclear, nuclear energy is a base load generator. Once you build the power
plant, it just keeps generating energy. And it generates it at a pretty low cost. So,
when you turn on the light on a cold, still night in Scotland, guess what? The light

2. bulb goes on. Because nuclear is a base load generator at a reasonable cost and
it’s a cost that doesn’t go up and down like oil or gas.
Okay, so here we are in nuclear and I’m saying to you that it is not THE answer,
it is an answer. It is part of the mix of what we have to do with the problems of
security supply and climate change.
So, what are the issues around nuclear? It is a cleavage issue, an issue that divides
people. Why is that the case? Well, the fact is that nuclear has a lot of different
issues around it which started about 50 years ago when we started building
nuclear power plants around the world. And funny enough, after all the time that
I’ve been talking about nuclear, I seem to see the issues in terms of a pod of a lot
of “Ps”, the letter P, so see if you can spot all the Ps in this dealing of issues.
The first P is politics. The issues around nuclear about politics. As you know,
nuclear is a political issue; there are people that are for it, there are people that
are against it. About 20 years ago, most of the world’s countries stopped building
nuclear power plants. Look at Germany; they have good nuclear power plants in
Germany that are delivering a lot of their energy and in the politics, the Greens
are very important in the political coalition. They are starting to decommission
power plants that are in fact doing a very good job of delivering energy to the
country. So, you have to deal with the politics of nuclear. Now why is politics an
issue in nuclear?
The politics is an issue because of the past. Remember the P’s? Okay, what
happened in the past? Well, as I said to you before, originally in the 50s and the
60s we started building nuclear power plants. Indeed, we started at Harwell,
where I am Chairman now.
In those days, in the 60s and the 70s, if you graduated from a university like this
and if you graduated in physics, you might have been a nuclear physicist. And we
used to say when we were going out with boys in college, “A nuclear physicist?
My God, are you a rocket scientist?” - we were very impressed by people that did
science in physics in nuclear.
Now if we have any physicists at all, they’re not in nuclear that’s for sure. If they
graduate in physics, they go right to Wall Street, where they make a lot of money
until a few weeks ago, or they go to the city if you live in England.
Okay, so what happened then? Well, what happened then is two things: we had
some nuclear accidents. We had two big ones actually which is what basically
changed the course of nuclear’s future.
First, we had Chernobyl – now everyone’s heard about Chernobyl whether you
were alive at that time or not. And Chernobyl was an accident waiting to happen.
What happened in Chernobyl is that we had Russian technology, Soviet
technology. Soviet technology that was old technology, it was creaking, everyone
in the nuclear community knew that it hadn’t been well kept up and that the people
weren’t sufficiently trained to run the power plants as they existed. And not only
that, it didn’t have a containment mechanism. It didn’t have that heavy
mechanism that would keep the problems inside. So what happened? There was
actually a Bond movie about this some years ago. What happened was, there was

3. an accident, there was an accident, there was a meltdown, there was no
containment, and not only that, the Soviets didn’t tell anybody. They didn’t tell
anybody for at least 10 days. So, all the problems that were happening within this
reactor were spreading outside of the reactor. And that was the Soviet accident of
Chernobyl. It was a problem, but it was about the technology and how it was kept
up and how old it was.
Then we had Three Mile Island right here in our own backyard. But Three Mile
Island wasn’t a disaster. In fact, in my mind, it was a success. Why was it a
success? Because although there was a meltdown inside the power plant, there
was a containment mechanism. There was a big containment mechanism, which
kept the problems inside, kept the radioactivity inside, and nobody died. Not one
person.
Why did we all get so excited about Three Mile Island? Because, six weeks before,
there was a movie. A movie with beautiful Jane Fonda in it and it was about, guess
what? A nuclear reactor that exploded. And the movie, “The China Syndrome”,
made everyone believe that this problem was about to happen. And guess what?
We did have a problem, so the magnification of the movie made us believe, and
still to this day, that Three Mile Island was a disaster. But I promise you, it wasn’t.
Those are the only two big nuclear accidents that have ever occurred. There was
also one in England, which was about ponds and decontamination, but it was much
smaller, there was a fire, nobody got hurt. So here we are. We are today looking
at two big nuclear accidents and they’re about 20 years ago.
Frankly, I think it’s more dangerous to get on trains in the UK, than to go work at
a nuclear power plant. To get on the streets of any big city and drive your car, to
get on an airplane – life is about risk guys and you have to decide what you want
to do and how much risk you are willing to take. But as far as loss of life, more of
it happens in the transportation industry than every happens around nuclear
power plants.
We’ve talked about politics, we’ve talked about past. Now we have new nuclear
technology. It’s not the same as the old technology. We used to build big power
plants, indeed, we used to build new ones all the time. When we were in England,
we built a beautiful power plant and then the next one would be an advanced
nuclear power plant and then the next one would be a little different, and a little
different.
In today’s world, we’re trying to take all those power plants apart but nobody can
quite remember how to take them apart. Fifty years ago, we didn’t keep the plans
and they’re like a big Lego set, where somebody threw away the instructions. And
because they weren’t standardized, each time we do it, we have to learn again.
But new nuclear is not like old nuclear. Technologies have changed,
standardization has come, power plants are smaller, and they have much less
waste to deal with.
Because the other problem of the past that people talk about with respect to
nuclear, is nuclear waste. Nuclear waste is around – there’s lots of it around

4. actually. But the new power plants contribute only 10% to the waste problem of
the old power plants.
And frankly, it’s not about power plants at all. Ninety percent of the waste that
we’re all talking about when we talk about nuclear waste has nothing to do with
civil nuclear power plants. It’s about the weapons industry. It’s about the Cold
War. It’s about the fact that we were building nuclear weapons and have been,
(remember those submarines?), for many many years.
The waste burden that we have is here with us. We have to clean it up and there’s
a big issue in this country about Yucca Mountain, you will all know more about it
than I do. The fact is that the waste burden is something that the country has to
confront, the world has to confront, whether or not we build new nuclear power
plants.
The good news is that we have the science to do it. By now, after all these years,
scientists who spend a lot of time trying to throw the nuclear waste up into the
sky, put it below in the sea, deal with it in vastly different ways. In the end
basically science today says that what you do with nuclear waste is you put it in
something called deep geological storage. Deep geological storage is just what
you think it is. Actually, I went to see one. The world’s first nuclear storage facility
for high-level waste is being built today in Finland. So, I went last year to Finland
to go and see it, and it is what you think it is. It’s a big tunnel down into the
ground. They’ve picked the right kind of ground, which is basically not very porous
and they built what you think it would be, a big cavern which is lead lined, and
lead lined, and lead lined and into that you lower in the nuclear rods and you close
it up, and it’s meant to be safe for a thousand years. Now, maybe a thousand
years isn’t forever, but when I lived in Hong Kong, we thought a 99-year lease
was practically forever. And frankly, because of where we are in the world, we all
believe that in the next thousand years, science will move along, so that maybe
there will be a better thing to do with the waste. Which is why we have deep
geological storage, remember I called it that, but it’s called “with retrievability”
because the answer is we also can open it up, take out the rods and do something
else with them.
Okay, so now we’ve got the waste problem at least discussed, we’ve got the past
discussed, now we have to go to the present. So, what’s happening in the present?
Well, in the present we have this 20% gap that I was talking about and people
are thinking about nuclear. And they’re thinking about nuclear everywhere; the
politics is changing. In the US, three applications are going through right now the
Nuclear Regulatory Authority and the Chairman Daniel Klein told me that those
three applications will be approved. And I just read in the paper about other
consortiums of groups within the US who are forming up to build new nuclear
plants and as you know there was a big energy bill a number of years ago which
gave subsidies to new nuclear builds here. I’m not an expert on that, but I can tell
you what’s happening in the UK because I know a lot about that. In the UK, nuclear
is back on the agenda. A small group of us have been around the prime minister
from Blair to Brown, John Hutton made a big speech - Secretary of State in the
UK – yesterday, saying we want to be in the UK among the leaders of new builds
of nuclear power plants. We believe that new nuclear is in fact an answer to the

5. world’s big problem, the energy crisis. So you’ve got to get your government in
gear, and what we’re going to do is set up a framework to make the private sector
come in and build the nuclear power plants. We don’t intend to use any
government money.
So, what are we going to do in the UK? Well, before we get to that, let me tell you
about the politics in the rest of the world. Nuclear is on the agenda. The genie is
out of the bottle.
In Turkey they are just now writing the laws in order to have a beauty parade to
build three new nuclear power plants in Turkey.
In Abu Dhabi, where I was about a month ago, Sarkozy had just been around
there selling the French technology and signed a new agreement for three new
power plants in Abu Dhabi.
The GCC countries, the rest of them, have set up a group to talk about what they
are going to do about civil nuclear.
We have a new power plant that has already gotten started in Finland, the first
that’s actually broken ground in Europe in 20 years.
We have a new one being talked about in France, I’ll tell you about France later.
We know that in China there are 20 that are being discussed and three that have
been ordered.
We know that America is right now talking to the Indians who at least want 10
and that’s all the ones that I can remember at the moment.
I forgot, there’s one in Korea that we’re helping with, my particular organization
is.
So the politics of nuclear is that nuclear is back on the agenda. Now what are we
doing about it in the UK, which is quite useful because we are dealing with all the
problems.
What’s the next big issue with nuclear? Where do you put the plants? The
“planning issue”. The planning issue is that most people think “not in my
backyard”, nobody wants a power plant next to them. Wrong, totally wrong. We
know where to put the power plants. The new plants are where the old ones were.
Let me explain it to you; in Dounreay, where I live in the UK, we have a big power
plant at the top of Scotland. The place is called Dounreay. Before we got there 35
years ago when they built it, there was nothing in Dounreay. It was a desolate,
boring place to live. Now it’s a vibrant place with education, with culture, with life.
The people in Dounreay are really panicked that we, the people in my organization,
are going to decommission the power plant out of existence. And if we
decommission the Dounreay power plant and bring it back to a green field or
brown field site, then Caithness, the area, will suffer. They understand, those
residents of Caithness, just exactly what infrastructure money does for a
community. They understand that it brings jobs, that it brings schools, that it
brings cultural activities. They don’t want us; they keep telling us to go as slowly

6. as possible in decommissioning that power plant because they’re afraid. What they
want, is a new nuclear power plant, right next door. And what I say about the UK,
and I’m sure it’s true elsewhere, is that the people who live around nuclear power
plants have voted with their feet. They haven’t moved away. They know what it’s
like, they bought their houses there, or they kept them there. They want the
infrastructure money that nuclear power brings. It’s funnily enough that people
outside the ring who say “there’s a power plant way over there and we’re not sure
we want that there”. So, the planning issue is the big one and in the UK what
we’re doing is basically putting in a new planning bill which is going to say that
there’s going to be a governmental agency that’s going to determine planning on
a national level and that the little local communities are only going to have to deal
with local issues. They’re not going to rethink the issue of whether England needs
nuclear power every time we build a power plant. Okay so it’s a planning issue.
The next issue is the people issue. The people issue is: who’s going to run those
power plants? We really do have a big problem in terms of education. For so many
years, we have not been educating nuclear physicists, or people that just run the
power plants that go in every day and open them up. We are going to have to
train a whole new generation of people to run power plants because we have an
aging workforce. But universities like Columbia and Manchester University in the
UK and various other universities around the world are revitalizing their physics
departments. They’re revitalizing their nuclear physics departments and people
are understanding that there will be jobs, which is what the problem was before.
I ought to go back to France for a minute. Let me just tell you about the French
experience. It’s a little off my trend but you need to hear about it because the
French did it differently than everybody else. Okay, so what happened in France?
Because here we are, the rest of the world, we’re deciding whether we put nuclear
back on the agenda. Do we educate a whole series of nuclear physicists? Where
do we put the power plants? All those issues that I was talking about.
Not so in France. What happened in France? Remember the first oil shock? Are
any of you old enough to remember? I lived in America then, you used to line up
at all the gas stations to get the gas to put in our cars and for a while we lowered
the speed limit to 50 and we, for a moment in time, built smaller cars. Just
remember back to that. Well, what happened in France is that they didn’t like it
at all. They didn’t like the fact that for the first time they realized they were
dependent on foreign oil to run their economy because they had none. And so
what happened? The President I believe was Pompidou at the time. The French
did a typical French thing. I hope there are some French people in the audience.
The French President took the cabinet to an away day – a corporate away day, a
strategic away day – do you have them around here? And where did he take them?
He took them to a beautiful chateau right outside of Paris. And who did he take
along with him besides the cabinet? He took a labor leader and a psychiatrist. Very
key. And what did this group do in this beautiful chateau outside of Paris? They
spent the whole day talking about how they were going to sell to the French people
the idea that what they needed was nuclear power. And they had the union leader
there because he had to be assured that there would be more jobs and not less

7. jobs. They had the President there who knew what he wanted, and they had the
psychiatrist there who told them how to deliver the message.
Okay, so after their day away, they came back to the Elysee palace and the
President stood on the steps of the palace and delivered the message. And the
message that he delivered was: “We are the French, we are the noblest of all
societies. (Read: We cannot be dependent on a lower order). We are the French.
We must be independent. We must never let what happened to us happen again.
We are not doing that. We are going to have nuclear power plants. We are going
to have nuclear power plants all around the French countryside and you little town
in northern France, you want that school that you’ve been looking to build with
infrastructure money, well you take a power plant and we’ll give you a school and
we’ll give you a road. And you little town in southwestern France, remember you
need a civic centre and you want a pool for your children, and you want some
activity centre and a theatre – have a power plant and a theatre with it.”
Around France they dotted the countryside with power plants, which were always
accompanied with infrastructure money and jobs. Not only did they have
infrastructure money and jobs, but they did it right the French because each one
of those power plants was the same. Remember I said that you want to have the
same power plants so that when you fix them up and you train people, you get
the standardized effect.
Remember also that the French are a society that’s led by scientists - among the
best universities in France are Sciences-Po. The scientists, the physicists, they’re
revered. And so the French did, what the French do well. They figured out how to
take care of themselves. And they did it extremely well.
80% of French energy is delivered today by 59 nuclear power plants. And not only
that, the French don’t have the problems that I’m about to finish telling you about.
They do have physicists, they have a very good technology, they’re working on
generation four of nuclear, and now they’ve got a new president who’s trotting
around the globe with his beautiful wife selling their nuclear power technology to
whoever will buy it. And they just were yesterday in the UK, as I was sitting
listening to this brilliant talk about all the world’s problems yesterday, they were
solving them yesterday because Sarkozy and Brown and John Hutton were talking
and discussing cooperation between the English and the French and building new
nuclear. So, the French is the example.
But back to the rest of us who haven’t been doing that all that time since the 70s.
So where are the Ps? We’ve got planning right, we’ve got people, we don’t have
enough of them, we have physics, but we don’t teach enough of it. Now we have
parts, the parts problem.
Because we haven’t been doing nuclear construction for all these years, we don’t
really have, within the western hemisphere, the parts that we need to build
nuclear power plants. I am told, that in order to build that containment vessel that
I was talking about that’s so key to a nuclear power plant, you need really heavy
gauge steel to build that containment. And the only place in the whole world that
they build that heavy gauge steel containment is in Japan and Korea. And there’s
only two factories in the world. And they are already in a bottleneck. So we’re

8. going to have to confront the people, the physics and the parts, as well as the
plants. But we will, because when the need comes, we’ll start building more power
plants and the steel industry will get revitalized as a result of it.
Okay, so we’ve got the plants, we’ve got the people, we’ve got the price. What
about the price? Nuclear power doesn’t start out cheap. It’s expensive to build one
of those big power plants. It’s not cheap. But today, what’s happened is that the
price of oil has gone up to $100, the price of gas is very expensive. I am told that
nuclear power, even with that upfront construction cost is economic even when oil
is at $40 a barrel. Now I can’t even remember when oil was at $40 a barrel, but
nuclear power is soon going to become the low-cost alternative. Price is an issue
and you have to have somebody to spend that upfront cost in order to build the
power plant. But once the power plant has been built, then the energy that comes
out of it is A) a stable price and B) a low price. And that’s very important.
Politics, planning, price, people, physics, parts. Oh yes, one more issue –
proliferation. I added proliferation lately because people want to talk about it. I’m
not going to talk about the proliferation issue. I don’t shoot guns, I’m not in war,
I turn on the lights. Civil nuclear is about turning on the lights.
The fact is there is an issue about proliferation. There is an issue about if you give
people the understanding of how to build a power plant, it may not be that far to
get from there to start to enrich uranium. But the fact is, at least this is my opinion,
it’s an issue, but it’s an old issue. Once you believe that there already is nuclear
technology around the world, once you believe that Pakistan, another P, has
nuclear technology and numbers of other places that we know, the genie is out of
the bottle. What we really want to do is make sure that people that are building
power plants are building them inside the IEA, they’re building them with all the
restraints that international organizations bring to the problem. We’re not giving
them the power to enrich uranium, we’re telling them to buy their fuel from
authorized fuel sources. If we don’t engage with people that are going to do it,
they’re going to do it anyway, so we really have to find a way to deal with
proliferation by engagement rather than pushing it away.
I was talking in Abu Dhabi to the Crown Prince - remember in Abu Dhabi I told
you that they’re building three power plants and they were dealing with the French
- and what the energy minister and the Crown Prince said is that they want to
build a nuclear power plant within the organizational structures of the OECD,
within the organizational structures of the IEA, the International Energy Agency.
They want to show the world that even that area of the country can deal with
nuclear power in a way that’s socially inclusive and makes people feel comfortable,
rather than uncomfortable. But it is an issue just like the rest of these and I have
to put it in the list. So proliferation is there.
I’ve got two more: one is the press. Now I assume there’s lots of press in this
room, so I’m going to have a plea to the press because the press informs public
opinion. The press has to be engaged in the process. The press has to understand
the issues. I live in England so I’m not talking about what happens in America.
Unless you get the press to understand the problems, and to understand that this
is a solution to the problems and that new nuclear is not old nuclear, the stories

9. about the waste which I was telling you about, you’re never going to deal with
public opinion. The press has to be engaged and frankly, they have to deal with
the issue as a good news story and not a bad news story, as a part of the solution,
not part of the problem. And they probably are, because public opinion is
changing, there’s no question about it. When I started doing this job three years
ago as Chairman, the public opinion in the UK was like this: about 38% of the
population was against nuclear power and 32% of the population was for nuclear
power and the rest didn’t care. Now three years later, it’s 40% of the population
for it, about 30% are against it and the rest don’t care. Which is a slight shift. It’s
not totally one way or totally the other, but the trends are changing and that’s
what we’re talking about. We’re talking about trends changing in a time when
problems are changing, which is where we are.
Public opinion is very important. What I thought was particularly interesting in
another survey I read recently is that people between the ages of 19 to 23, which
is the future for all of us not old ones like me, when they list what problems they
really worry about today, climate change is always within the first three. And
climate change is always within the first three and nuclear is a part of the solution.
So the end of my story, my last P. My last P is plethora. Plethora because nuclear
is not a silver bullet. It’s just part of the package, it’s one part of the package.
What we need to say is that you can’t throw any part of the package off the table
at this moment. At this moment, the world needs every answer it possibly can get
to what is arguably the most important issue of the day. So, what I would say to
the people in this audience is that some of you are in the 30% and some of you
are in the 40% and some of you are in the “don’t cares”. It’s time to take another
look. It’s time to decide if you want to stay in those categories and it’s time to talk
about the issues rather than pushing them away.
So, I know that this is the beginning of the day and there’s going to be lots of
people who are going to be talking about lots of things we can do to make the
planet better. And I congratulate you on having the conversation and hope that
we can put something into the conversation from the nuclear side, so that we can
make people real optimistic. Because it is an optimistic time. We’re about to have
an election in this country and we have three good candidates, amazing. We have
quite good economics in Europe, we have a terrible financial crisis but fortunately
we’re not talking about that and we will get out of it. We’ll get out of the financial
crisis because we know how to do that. The crisis around sustainability is a bit
more difficult.
I wish you all the best of luck and thank you very much for inviting me.”