Tanzania Should Go Nuclear Sooner Rather Than Later

Global warming is one of the biggest challenges facing the world today. It is caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. Of those activities, energy consumption – comprised of electricity used in buildings, construction, and manufacturing – is responsible for 73% of all emissions.

In a bid to curb greenhouse gases emissions, nations have been racing to adopt carbon-free energy sources, but in so doing, they are committing a serious strategic error, that of assuming that wind and solar energy solutions will solve this problem.

Germany and the Renewable Energy Fallacy

Probably no other nation in the world highlights this issue better than Germany. With over 30,000 wind turbines and 1.7 million installed solar panels, Germany has an annual generation capacity of over 100GWh of electricity – that is, almost 20 times the total electricity consumption of Tanzania – from those sources alone. That is at least 35% of all its electricity needs. Not a mean feat.

However, something is not right. Since there are days without wind and days which are cloudy, the average output is only 17% of the installed capacity.

To manage this fluctuation, nations have to install power storage solutions so that power from good days can be used in bad days and bad hours. And the more comprehensive solar and wind solutions a nation deploys, the more of backup solutions it has to deploy to meet 100% of the expected demand for the bad days.  This is an awfully expensive endeavour, as a result Germany has only installed 2% of its needed power storage capacity.

So, what do the Germans do during the bad days? They revert to stable energy generated from coal and nuclear plants, plus imported energy from France and Sweden. In other words, in attempting to solve the greenhouse gases emissions problem Germany is forced to use a unclean power solutions such as coal and a nuclear solution which Germany is misguidedly trying to move away from.

Wind, Solar and Hydropower Solutions Aren't Enough

The fact is, even with political will, renewable energy won’t be a complete energy solution for the world any time soon, even when we throw in hydroelectric power plants into the mix. Reasons include bad days of limited sunlight and wind, amount of space needed for power farms, issues of power storage, non-availability of hydroelectric power potential in some regions, etc.

If all the roofs in the UK were covered by solar panels, you would only get 5% of UK's electricity needs

Taking the issue of space, for example, it will take a solar farm the size of Texas to meet the power needs of the United States. Similarly, one will need to cover all the roofs in the United Kingdom to produce only 5% of its electricity needs. That’s not practical.

Moreover, while the world’s total feasible hydro potential is estimated at 14 370 TWh/year, the world’s estimated consumption will be 42,000 TWh/year by 2040. That is, even if all the world’s hydroelectric potential was to be exhausted, which is not economical, we still have to find the other two-thirds deficit from other renewable sources, despite the challenges that we have highlighted above.

While there are nations which are naturally endowed for geothermal power, such as Iceland which gets 100% of its power needs from renewable sources, the geological distribution of such sources is not equitable to make it feasible for all nations.

There is another solution: nuclear power.

The Nuclear Power Solution

Nuclear energy contributes around 10% of the world’s electricity. At present 440 nuclear power reactors are in operation and 15 are expected to go live in 2020 – in countries as diverse as China, UAE, Slovakia, India, and Japan. While the number is not big enough to reverse global warming, the fact that all these nations are implementing nuclear fission solutions is a testament to the efficacy of nuclear energy. In fact, the technology is well tested in the world and can provide vast amounts of energy to cater for human electricity needs for centuries to come.

While memories of Fukushima and Chernobyl accidents have caused nuclear energy to go into disrepute, thus its overall adoption in Europe and America has declined, there is a good reason to review nuclear as a solution for global warming and increasing world’s energy demands.

Opponents of nuclear solution argue that their projects are usually too expensive and too dangerous. But with companies such as Bill Gates’s TerraPower working to improve the technology by making it smaller, cheaper, and safer, the world is moving towards a new generation of nuclear plants. Cost-wise they will be cheaper than Tanzania’s Nyerere Hydropower Plant – at USD 3.9 billion dollars.

Nuclear energy is tested, reliable, and vast enough to meet the world's energy needs for centuries to come.

Given such a development, isn’t it high time for nations such as ours to start to seriously consider nuclear power solutions?

Time for Tanzania to go Nuclear?

Many in Tanzania have not forgotten the old days when drought brought severe power rationing. The last such a wave was in 2006. While Nyerere Hydropower Plant promises to be more resilient to such fluctuations, and it is indeed a wise investment, but as we move into the future we surely need to have our priorities right and stop flirting with solutions with dead ends.

Tanzania and Africa have reasons to go nuclear.

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This article first appeared in the Citizen newspaper. We would like to hear your views. Kindly like, share, and leave your comments in the comments section below.