Though the Committee, which has former Governor of Oyo State, Senator Rasheed Ladoja, as chairman and former Managing Director of the defunct National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) and also one-time Minister of Power, Alhaji Bello Suleiman as the Vice-Chairman, has not announced what its report contains, many Nigerians have the hope that the report would include a revolutionary solution – nuclear power – to the nation’s electricity power crisis.
Five years ago on these pages, around the time late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua gave marching orders to all power sector stakeholders to give the nation at least 6,000 megawatts (MW) by December 2009 and 10,000 by 2011, we had argued that various factors have converged to contribute to our abysmal performance in the power area. We had then argued that nuclear power is the way to go, since militants will continue to vandalise gas pipelines and go scot-free (and they are still at it, amnesty and derivation notwithstanding).
Despite the billions invested (and stolen) in the power sector since the return of democracy in 1999 (when we were promised stable power within six months), the power situation has not significantly improved. Throughout this decade-and-a-half (1999-2104), power generation has continued to hover around 4,000 MW, in spite of all the billions of dollars thrown at it (or, perhaps, because of that).
In Ramadan 2009, at a public lecture organized by the Muslim Media Practitioners of Nigeria (MMPN) Abuja Chapter, then Iranian Ambassador to Nigeria Khosrow Rezazadeh, urged Nigeria to consider nuclear power, as his country is doing despite Western outrage. The Ambassador said it is unlikely that Nigeria will have adequate power supply until the Federal Government considers building nuclear power stations. Mr. Rezazadeh further said Iran was then generating 40,000 Megawatts (MW) of electricity, while Nigeria was still targeting 6,000 MW.
According to the Iranian envoy, nuclear power is the sure banker towards ameliorating our power deficit. And we should have listened to him. One cannot agree more, then and now. But it is not too late if, as we have been made to believe, that results from the National Conference will be sacrosanct – that it will certainly be honoured. If so, the Energy Committee should include the Nuclear Option, if it has not done so already.
And it is not as if Nigeria is not thinking of the nuclear power option; it is, but as a long-term, future option. As recently as last month, it was announced that the country’s first nuclear power generation unit is expected to provide about 1,200MW and it is originally scheduled to come on stream in 2020. It was also projected that nuclear technology would contribute at least 4,000MW to the country’s total national electricity supply by 2030. All of which is good. Except that, for Nigerians, 2020 and 2030 are just too far.
And as part of the capacity building process for the commencement of the project, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has commenced training of Nigerian experts in areas of nuclear safety at the Nigerian Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NNRA) in Abuja. According to Abida Khatoon, nuclear safety specialist at IAEA and team leader of the trainers of NNRA staff, countries such as Sudan, Kenya, Egypt and a number of others are already embarking on nuclear power programmes. And we had read elsewhere that, despite its considerable fossil fuels reserves, Saudi Arabia is also going nuclear.
Nigeria needs electricity. And the way to go today, and the seemingly only way, is nuclear. We have the resources (our foreign reserves are almost forty billion US dollars). We have the need. This country has apparently woefully, abysmally and sadly failed to utilise its plentiful fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal. Nor can we ever reasonably expect our unplannable, NFA (No-Future-Ambition) nation to one day utilise the other plentiful renewable energies such as solar or wind power. We need another fuel. And should the government need to gauge public opinion, let INEC conduct a referendum.
Nuclear power generation is so simple, really. We learn from www.wikipedia.org that “nuclear power involves the controlled use of nuclear fission to release energy for propulsion, heat, and the generation of electricity. Nuclear energy is produced by a controlled nuclear chain reaction and creates heat—which is used to boil water, produce steam, and drive a steam turbine. The turbine can be used for mechanical work and also to generate electricity.”
As for safety, contrary to the beliefs of many, www.uic.com.au/neweconomics says “nuclear energy has benefits which can fall into two categories: national (price stability and security of energy supply) and global environmental (near-zero greenhouse gas emissions). Today, given the urgent environmental imperative of achieving a global clean-energy revolution, public policy has sound and urgent justification for placing a sizeable premium on clean technologies [such as nuclear power].”
Further, www.world-nuclear.org/education/intro.htm posits that “nuclear energy has distinct environmental advantages over fossil fuels, in that virtually all its wastes are contained and managed – nuclear power stations do not cause any pollution. The fuel for nuclear power is virtually unlimited, considering both geological and technological aspects. That is to say, there is plenty of uranium in the earth’s crust and furthermore, well-proven (but not yet fully economic) technology means that we can extract about 60 times as much energy from it as we do today. The safety record of nuclear energy is better than for any major industrial technology.”
So if you are thinking about safety and Fukushima and Chernobyl, forget it: it does not happen every day. Concerned about nuclear waste? Remember Koko? Where were you when waste from other lands was offloaded in our Niger Delta some decades back? Concerned about the high cost of construction? Or terrorist attacks? Look, we are in worse situations than that. We need light. We should hold at any straw. Nuclear energy does seem a strong one at present.
Yes, nuclear plants do cost a bit to build, and they take ages to come on stream. But the only reason why nuclear power plants cost so much is because, in the capitalist West, expensive and sometimes unsustainable loans are taken with prohibitive interest rates to build them. To prove this, www.21stcenturysciencetech.com says “nuclear power plants that should have cost between $500 million and $1 billion had their final costs escalate several times up due to [these] reasons…”
A simple, modern nuclear power plant could be planned and constructed in four years or less (42 months for some). A simple plant, which may provide upwards of 1,000 MW, may be built for less than $1 billion. Therefore, with $10 billion (a quarter of our current foreign reserves), we could have 10 reactors providing 10,000 MW by 2018, if we start now.
Now comes the question of management. Since we didn’t even use to trust local coaches with our Super Eagles, we should never trust any local engineer with our nuclear power plants. We should just go ahead and employ foreign managers, and include Nigerians in the Diaspora savvy in nuclear and particle physics and other such high sounding esoteric sciences to come and man them.
And for where to situate the reactors? If we plan to build ten reactors of 1,000 MW each, each geopolitical zone should have one, and the remaining four situated around the Federal Capital Territory. That way, should there be any problem, it will have a Federal Character.
