Perhaps I'll move through these slides pretty quickly and have a little bit longer for questions, if you find someplace where I've gone too quickly for everyone. There are two handouts, actually. One is the hard copy of the slide show, and then a little handbook, which is really a detail of facts about the nuclear industry, which could be helpful as well when you're considering other issues.
Let me just say, first of all, thank you very much for inviting me here. I represent the Canadian Nuclear Association, which is made up of a series of members; I think it's about 72 or 73. Our numbers are growing now. It's not like the old days, when we were losing members because nothing was happening in the industry. We're extremely busy now. We represent people from private consultants all the way through academia to nuclear generators of electricity, the designers of technology, the processors, and mining companies. So we represent the entire industry, although not all the companies in it. We're very pleased to be here today to speak to you a little bit about the greening of electricity consumption, and certainly that is happening with nuclear.
I'll move through these very quickly. Everybody knows that the pressure of the need for energy, and including in that electricity, and the need for hydrogen and for safe water has pushed the methods of finding those quantities of those entities to consider nuclear, which is extremely good in producing mass amounts of energy, which can then be incorporated into finding new ways of releasing fuels in Alberta oilsands, for instance, or in helping with desalination projects around the world. We're very, very pleased that our technology is being considered in that.
The driver of that, obviously, is the development of the population growth in developing countries. A good part of the world is still without electricity. Some of you have probably heard that several times, but for those of us who have had electricity, and at relatively inexpensive prices for a long period of time, it seems almost unimaginable that there are people who have never had electricity.
That growing need, whether it's in India or in China or in other parts of the developing world, means that they're looking for large producers of electricity, and nuclear is being considered in all of those. Climate change, carbon issues, Kyoto, challenges of energy gap, all of those things, including energy security, are the things that are driving people to look towards nuclear.
I have included next a graph that indicates the interesting phenomenon occurring in this world, and that is that the OECD countries, which are shown as the red line on the graph, are about to be overtaken in the production of CO2 by China and the developing countries. That is an important element for all of us, and I think that for those of us who hadn't considered the types of impacts that are about to occur, that particular graph from IEA World Energy Outlook 2006 is enough to let us know what really is coming upon us.
The next page just cites for everyone the fact that if we're going to wrestle with any of these issues, we are going to have to use a diversification of techniques that will permit us to make the biggest impact. We are not going to be able to do it with one technology at all, but we should make special efforts to combine technologies so that we can get the best out of all of the technologies and permit them to work together so that we can have a symbiotic relationship among all of the technologies that you recognize on that page.
The next graph, again from our friends, talks about aggressive processes that are required if we're going to contain CO2 emissions. The first three lines on the left side of your graph indicate what happens if you have a base case for which no action is taken whatsoever. But as you move into the act scenarios, as they're described in English, to 2050, you will see that there are tremendous impacts to be had if we become aggressive in applying new technologies to the cause of carbon emissions.
Ultimately, if you go to that whole report, which was commissioned in response to the G-8 Gleneagles Summit, you will see the best approach they came up with. Going through all the scenarios was what was called a “TECH Plus” technology application. What that really meant was that there was an aggressive implementation of technology gains rights across the area. It not only includes, by the way, nuclear, but wind, solar, and any number of other options, including conservation and energy efficiency. We're pleased that the world bodies have seen nuclear as playing a particularly important part in that.
As I take a look at the next graph, again, it's a graph that comes from overseas, from the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, actually. It has accomplished something that not many organizations have. They have kept statistics about various kinds of industries for a long period of time, and they have been able to look at the internal and external costs of various types of generation.
Here you see a list, and there must be about 15 or 16 different types of generation, and they have brought together both internal and external costs associated with those generation types. You can see that nuclear fares very well when it comes to the types of externalities that are often measured.
