Mr. President, Time To Go Nuclear

By

Bala Muhammad

balamuhammad@hotmail.com

The other day, President ‘Yar Adua told the nation that the power situation in the country ‘is very serious’. President is said to have said this when receiving the House of Representatives Committee on Power and Steel who paid him a call on this serious matter. Very serious.

There is no greater understatement in the whole wide world today than anyone, even the President, to tell Nigerians that the electricity situation in this country ‘is very serious’. It is not very serious; it is way beyond very serious. In fact, there is no English word yet invented to describe how bad the situation is. Suffice it to list some of the synonyms of ‘bad’ from the thesaurus: awful; terrible; dreadful; appalling; shocking; ghastly; horrific; dire; unpleasant. Mr. President, that is the situation. Not simply very serious. Awful!

To say the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, citizens of this country know that, by Allah, the President does not, cannot, realise just how very serious the power matter is. This is because, as a Governor for eight years, and President since May 29, his immunity against power failure has never been lifted, and it still subsists. As things stand at the moment, Nigerians have given up on power, as they have given up on security, as they have given up on the fight against plea bargain, as they have given up on the lip service allegiance to the rule of law.

The President does not have to go through what many people go through every blessed dark night. For the umpteenth time, the Daily Trust of Thursday 18 October carried a story titled: ‘PHCN Apologises to Customers over Erratic Power Supply.’ The story said that “The Management of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) has apologised to residents of Kano, Katsina and Jigawa states for the erratic power supply in the areas in the last three months…The PHCN appealed for understanding over the failure of the 150 KVA transmitter in Kumbotso, Kano which has affected power supply to the three states…” Appeal for our understanding? Apologies? Regrets? How many times have Nigerians heard such appeals for understanding?

And now the good news! The Triumph of Thursday 15 November reported that, according to the Central Bank, ‘Nigeria’s Foreign Reserve Hits $49 billion’. Alhamdu lillah!

To rewind a little, much earlier, on Monday 13 August, the Guardian ran an editorial titled ‘Nuclear Energy and Adequate Electricity Supply’. The opinion reported that the Directors-General of Nigeria Atomic Energy Commission (NAEC) and the Nigerian Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NNRA) had “briefed the President on the activities and future plans of their agencies. They urged government to include nuclear energy in the long-term resolution of the tormenting problem of inadequate power supply.

“They recommended that nuclear energy would help reduce persistent national power deficit that is likely to be in the range of 11,000mw to 17,000mw of electricity by 2017. Accordingly, they made proposals for the setting up of nuclear power plants to generate 10,000mw of power by 2017 with capacity steadily rising to 40,000mw by 2027.

“The President accepted the need to develop national capacity to utilise nuclear power for electricity generation and directed the Ministry of Science and Technology to align the NAEC programme with overall national policy on power as well as look at the regulatory framework and also consider various options for raising the huge amounts required for funding the planned nuclear plants…”

Key words: ‘raising huge amounts’. Hurray! Without any effort (in Arabic: min ghairi haulin wa la quwwatin), the Good Lord has singularly raised the required ‘huge amounts’ for this country, Glory be to Him on High! We have $49 billion!

Therefore, our intervention today is to advocate for nuclear power in this country of ours. If it is money that builds a nuclear plant, we have it in our foreign reserve. Money is not our problem: the problem is how to spend it! Anything that can take us out of the misery, suffering, pain, distress, agony, torment, anguish and affliction of power failure will be welcome.

 
Forget about Iran. Forget about IAEA. Forget about nuclear non-proliferation. Forget about those governors (and local government chairmen and other potential plea-bargainers) who are clamouring for larger chunks of the oil windfall. Nigeria needs electricity. And the way to go today, and the seemingly only way, is nuclear. We have the resources. We have the need. And should the government need to gauge public opinion, let INEC conduct a referendum.

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.

Lo and behold! We have another fuel: uranium, which we need to power the nuclear plants. This all-important mineral is just across our northern border in the friendliest neighbour Nigeria has and can ever get: Niger Republic.

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 of 2004, nuclear power provided 6.5% of the world's energy and 15.7% of the world's electricity, with the U.S., France, and Japan together accounting for 57% of all nuclear generated electricity. As of 2007, the IAEA reported there are 439 nuclear power reactors in operation in the world, operating in 31 different countries. The United States produces the most nuclear energy, with nuclear power providing 20% of the electricity it consumes, while France produces the highest percentage of its electrical energy from nuclear reactors—80% as of 2006. In the European Union as a whole, nuclear energy provides 30% of the electricity.”

Similarly, www.worldwatch.org/node/1646 says that “by 1999 France was getting more than three-quarters of its electricity from nuclear power. Japan also obtains 35 percent of its electricity from the atom, while China has the world's most ambitious nuclear programme, with plans to have more than 50 reactors by the year 2020.”

As for safety, contrary to the beliefs of the tree-hugging greenies, 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 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. Very serious, even according to the President. 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 many 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 megawatts, may be built for less than $1 billion. Therefore, with $10 billion (only a fifth of our $49 billion God-sent), we could have 10 reactors providing 10,000 megawatts by early 2011, just before the next elections! Papalanto, Geregu!

Now comes the question of management. Since we don’t 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 coaches, ehm, foreign managers, especially Nigerians in the Diaspora savvy in nuclear and particle physics and other such high sounding esoteric sciences to come and man (or woman) them.

And for where to situate the first reactor? Let us situate them where all the nation’s scientific agencies are situated: Gwagwalada. Apart from Gwagwalada being apparently the hottest place in the country, its University of Abuja is also home to two of my best critics: one in Law and the other in Political Science. They wouldn’t mind a little more heat!