(Updated: 28/04/2015) The IAEA's efforts to help nations meet their development goals has received a major boost from the United States and Japan, which pledged a total of $75 million to strengthen their support for the IAEA's Peaceful Uses Initiative.
The U.S. and Japanese plans were announced at the IAEA's High-Level Event on Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Technology, held on the margins of the 2015 Review Conference of Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in New York, by Stephen G. Burns, Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Ambassador Toshio Sano, Head of Japan's delegation. In later sessions, Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. will contribute $50 million to the Initiative while $25 million was pledged by his Japanese counterpart, Fumio Kishida.
Since its launch in 2010, the Initiative has delivered projects worth more than 60 million euros for Member States that seek to employ peaceful nuclear applications to meet their development objectives. Such projects include strengthening Africa's regional capacity for diagnosing Ebola and other zoonotic diseases, improving sustainable water management in extremely arid regions, boosting developing nations' capacity to fight cancer, and studying the impact of ocean acidification caused by global warming.
"People are often surprised at some of the things we do," IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said at today's event, titled 'How the Atom Benefits Life'. Taking one example, he noted that in Kenya, drip irrigation made possible by nuclear science has increased production while saving water. "The yield of tomatoes almost tripled as a result of this technique, while water use was reduced by half," he said. In Tanzania, "the technique led to the yield of tea crops increasing four-fold compared to that of non-irrigated tea."
Today's event featured several distinguished speakers. Besides Burns and Sano, they included Taous Feroukhi, President of the 2015 NPT Review Conference; Ethiopian First Lady Roman Tesfay; and Rachmat Budiman, Ambassador and Resident Representative of Indonesia to the IAEA.
Feroukhi noted that, with regard to post-2015 development priorities, "nuclear science and technology will have many substantial contributions to make in meeting basic human needs and improving the quality of life of millions, potentially billions, of people around the world."
Tesfay said that Ethiopia, which has several IAEA-sponsored technical projects, has benefited from an initiative to use the nuclear-derived Sterile Insect Technique to suppress the tsetse fly, a scourge to human and animal health in many African countries. "It helped to remove tsetse from most of the project areas," Tesfay said. "As a result, the project has benefited substantial numbers of communities by increasing their livestock population, milk and meat production, and household income."
Indonesia's Budiman spoke of the tangible socioeconomic impact of many of the PUI programmes. "Exemplary works include mutation breeding programmes to produce improved and highly productive varieties of food crops, which have benefited hundreds of thousands of farmers in the country and have helped strengthen our national feed stock," he said.
Japan also "highly values the effectiveness and flexibility of the PUI," Sano said. The nation "has supported IAEA activities such as cancer therapy, water management in Sahel region, and Ebola diagnosis, through our financial contribution to this initiative of more than $13 million."
One key Peaceful Uses Initiative project was launched last year. The renovation initiative known as ReNuAL is aimed at modernizing the Agency's nuclear applications laboratories at Seibersdorf outside Vienna, Austria. While the labs provide important research and scientific services for Member States, at more than five decades old, they are showing their age. ReNuAL seeks to establish fit-for-purpose labs by 2017 to meet Member State needs for the next 20 years.
In his address today, Amano renewed his appeal to Member States to contribute to ReNuAL. In addition to the U.S. pledge announced by Kerry, Burns also said the U.S. would contribute $2 million to ReNuAL.
Nuclear science and technology will have many substantial contributions to make in meeting basic human needs and improving the quality of life of millions, potentially billions, of people around the world.