The world has in recent months witnessed a dramatic turnabout on the future of nuclear energy, mainly in the developed countries.
This is on the back of the Russia-Ukraine war which has seen post-pandemic energy shortages turn into a full-blown energy crisis.
According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), nuclear power plants slated for closure across Europe have been given “an 11th hour reprieve.
Japan has announced, after a decade of paralysis, that it plans to restart many of its reactors, which have sat idle since the nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi.
France, which had launched plans to reduce its dependence on nuclear energy during President Macron’s first term, reversed course and now, plans to build at least six new reactors and a dozen smaller modular reactors.
The UK on the other hand recently launched an ambitious plan to build eight new reactors and16 small modular reactors.
Even anti-nuclear Germany has conceded to geopolitical energy realities and extended the life of the nation’s last three operating nuclear power plants.
“The turn back to nuclear energy has been a ray of hope in an otherwise dark geopolitical landscape. Despite significant progress on the cost and feasibility of renewable energy, the energy crisis reminds us just how dependent the world remains on fossil fuels,” IMF says in a report.
Europe, arguably the wealthiest and greenest precinct of the global economy, and a region that has invested trillions over the past two decades to transition its energy economy to wind and solar energy, has been forced to engage in a wild scramble to replace Russian oil and gas with alternative sources of fossil fuel, importing liquefied natural gas from the US and other regions, fast-tracking new pipeline projects from North Africa, and firing up mothballed coal plants to keep the lights on and its factories humming.
The picture is still darker across emerging market and developing economies as Europe has been accused of buying its way out of the energy crisis.
Many other regions of the world do not have the resources to do so.
Soaring energy prices have resulted in shortages, blackouts, and protests across the developing world and have pushed hundreds of millions back into extreme poverty.
Meanwhile, the resulting spike in fertiliser prices has threatened harvests and raised the specter that famine, largely banished from even the poorest regions of the world in recent decades, might be back.
The limits of renewable energy in Africa
Taken together, these developments suggest two interlinked conclusions.
First, the world remains far too dependent on fossil fuels. Progress to reduce dependence on them and cut carbon emissions is real.
But that progress has been limited to rising shares of renewable energy in the power sector, which accounts for only about 20 percent of energy use and emissions globally, along with incremental improvements to energy efficiency across the rest of the global energy economy, which remains powered almost entirely by fossil fuels.
Second, wind and solar energy alone will not be sufficient to break that dependence.
Even in the power sectors of the wealthiest countries in the world, no economy has succeeded in getting much more than about a third of its electricity from wind and solar combined.
Nuclear energy represents a potential solution to both problems, providing a firm source of electricity that can complement the variable sources of renewable energy on electrical grids, as it does in Scandinavia countries of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark.
It also features the ability to produce carbon-free heat as well as power for a range of industrial and other energy-intensive activities—from refining and fertilizer manufacturing to steel and hydrogen production—that are difficult to fully electrify.
However, for nuclear energy be relevant beyond generating electricity, the technology used to harness the power needs to evolve.
Large light-water reactors, which have dominated the nuclear power generation sector are effective but complex technologies, requiring highly trained personnel to maintain and operate them, IMF notes.
They have a large amount of fissile material in their core and so depend on a multiplicity of active safety systems to ensure safe operations.
These, in turn, require sophisticated regulatory capabilities to ensure that the plants are operated safely.
Large light-water reactors also need to be refueled regularly, every 18 months or so.
This makes it more difficult practically to decouple reactor operations in any given locale from the nuclear fuel cycle, which raises a range of nuclear proliferation concerns.
Light-water reactors operating at lower temperatures cannot meet heat requirements for many important industrial uses and so are limited to use primarily in the electricity sector.
And even in that sector, they have limited ability to ramp up and down and so are not optimised for grids that have significant amounts of variable wind and solar generation as well.
Refining nuclear energy in Africa
For these reasons, the nuclear sector will need to evolve in important ways if it is going to play a major role in addressing energy security and climate challenges in many parts of the world and beyond the power sector.
IMF notes several new advanced reactor technologies are under development that are better suited to industrial uses and are being targeted to replace existing coal-fired energy production.
China has connected its first high-temperature gas reactor to the grid, and it envisions that it will ultimately be a drop-in replacement for existing coal-fired power plants while the US has committed to building two advanced demonstration reactors this decade.
Innovation will be necessary if nuclear is going to play a significant role in many developing economies, and beyond the power sector, and extend well beyond the technologies themselves.
New business models; new and more flexible regulatory, licensing, and export rules and a revised global nonproliferation framework will be needed to fully realize the potential of these new technologies to provide low-carbon heat and power consistent with displacing fossil energy at global scale.
And while wind andsolar energy have begun to gain a foothold in many poor countries, it is stillvery small and will do little to help these countries build passable roads, manufacture steel orfertiliser, or build modern housing and infrastructure in rapidly growing cities.
Powering Africa
Experts at IMF say that Africa is well poised to pursue an all-of-the-above energy agenda.
Kenya,Ghana, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia have in recenty ears expressed significant interest in developing new nuclear plants.
Kenya aims to have its first nuclear power plant up and running by the year 2038 to cater for growing power demand in the country.
According to the Nuclear Power and Energy Agency (NuPEA), the planned plant will have a capacity of1,000 megawatts.
The country will also be looking to build more reactors to avoid future power supply shortages and curb emissions and accelerate nuclear power and hydro projects.
To help in the drive, the country has signed an MoU with China, Russia, South Korea and Slovakia for nuclear training of its personnel.
Kenya and the US are also eying a nuclear cooperation deal.
South Africa, which is the only country in SSA to have active nuclear plants, generates about five percent of its electricity from the two nuclear reactors.
The country plans to build 1 GW of new nuclear capacity by 2030 as it extends the lifeline of the two reactors by 20 years.
Meanwhile, Egypt awarded a $25 billion contract to Rosatom, a Russian state corporation that develops nuclear power, to develop a 4.8GW plant at El Dabaa.
Power consultants, Energy for Growth, indicate that seven African countries could be ready for nuclear by 2030: Algeria, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Sudan and Tunisia.
According to experts, any long-term pathway toward a prosperous and modern African future is likely to need nuclear power.
This, as Africa’s population is expected to double by the year 2050,making it one of the most populous regions in the world.
The region uses about the same amount of electricity as Spain despite having 18 times its population.
More than 600 million however lack access to electricity, clean cooking fuels, and modern transportation.
The entire continent has only two factories capable of producing ammonia, the critical precursor of synthetic fertilizers, and lack of access to affordable fertilisers punishes small farmers, whose yields are five times lower than US or European farmers.
“Nuclear energy, like wind and solar, is not a panacea and can’t solve all these problems. And new nuclear technologies designed and scaled to Africa’s needs are at least a decade away,” IMF notes.
No less than in the richest countries, fossil fuels across Africa and much of the rest of the developing world are likely to remain a fact of life for many decades to come.
Accelerating a transition away from them globally will require putting new low-carbon options on the table, not taking them away.
“Nuclear energy is without question one of those options. As the rich world reconsiders the value of the atom, a reconsideration of its potential to address the global development challenge, as well as the global climate challenge, is long over due,” says IMF.
