Background:

Nautilus Institute is pleased to announce the “Asian Energy Security Workshop 2006”, to be held in Beijing, China, from the 6th to the 7th of November, 2006.  This year, the Asian Energy Security workshop will share a one-day Scenarios event on the 5th of November with Nautilus’ East Asia Science and Security Collaborative project.  As in previous years, the Asian Energy Security and Scenarios workshops are being organized by the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability of San Francisco, California in collaboration with the Energy and Environmental Technology Center (EETC) at Tsinghua University.

In keeping with the theme of the ongoing Asian Energy Security (AES) Project the November 6th to 7th workshop will emphasize collaborative research, involving groups from each of the countries of Northeast Asia (including, the DPRK, the ROK, the Russian Far East, China, Japan, and Mongolia) on different paths to address energy security issues in the region. Collaborative research under the AES project looks at on both national and regional approaches to energy security concerns. A main focus of the AES2006 workshop will be on different “paths” for nuclear power development in those countries in the region where nuclear power is used, including paths where future development of nuclear generation capacity is at “minimum” and “maximum” plausible levels.   Ramifications of nuclear energy choices for national and regional nuclear fuel-cycle arrangements will also be discussed.

Given, as in previous AES workshops, that participants from all of the Northeast Asian nations, as well as from Australia and the United States, are expected, the Workshop will provide an excellent opportunity for an informal exchange of views.

The AES workshop will start, as in previous years, with a day of updates from participants on the overall energy, energy policy, and energy security situations in their countries, as well as updates on their work in modeling different energy futures (including paths that include regional energy cooperation strategies) for their country using the energy/environmental analysis software tool (LEAP more information available at: www.energycommunity.org) that all groups have been working with for several years.  The second workshop day will focus on modeling of nuclear energy paths, where applicable, and on plans for future collaborative work and for dissemination of Project results.

This work will draw and build upon work in previous Asian Energy Security (AES) and East Asia Energy Futures (EAEF) project workshops held in Beijing (co-hosted by the Energy and Environmental Technology Center at Tsinghua University), in Canada (Co-hosted by the University of British Columbia’s Liu Institute for Global Issues) and at Nautilus Institute in California.

The one-day “Scenarios” workshop will precede the main AES workshop. This small-group exercise will be devoted to exploration of an issue related to the nuclear energy paths explored in 2006 under the AES, project, focusing on the theme “Will the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) Reduce WMD Proliferation in the Asia-Pacific Region by 2030?”  GNEP is an effort lead by the US Department of Energy and partners to develop and implement new nuclear fuel cycle and related technologies, as well as policies related to the nuclear fuel cycle.

To request further information, comment on this document, or to ask a question about the Nautilus Institute’s Asian Energy Security Project please e-mail nautilus@nautilus.org.