Tunde Akingbade
19 August 2007
opinion
President Umaru Yar Adua recently voiced out the need for Nigeria to use nuclear energy for electricity. The nation's nuclear agency also commenced action in this direction indicating that Nigeria was on the road to using nuclear energy for electricity by the year 2017. While I agree that the developed world (including South Africa) that Nigeria fought with other frontline states to liberate use nuclear power for electricity and other purposes, I beg to disagree with Mr. President and the director general of the nuclear agency on this new romance with nuclear electricity.
Last year, I had also raised misgivings about Nigeria's quest for nuclear power in the media. I would not have deemed it fit to do this piece on the president's current quest had he not focused on a very sensitive area of electricity which our experts have found no solution. To our very dear President Yar Adua, we need to let him know earnestly why Nigeria's electricity generation failed woefully under the administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo. If this is not done, Yar Adua will be on a wild goose chase of nuclear electricity power and environmental catastrophe for a country that found it not only difficult to use hydro power, gas, solar, etc but could not feed its people. I have always, jokingly, told people that Nigeria may not even need a theatre or home video since all that we see in our governance are dramatic performances.
When Wole Soyinka wrote Kogi's Harvest in the 60s, I bet, the professor would not have thought that Oba Danlola who wanted to have his own refinery in the play, as Kongi's Refinery, would be enacted 'before his very eyes' in the year 2007. In this age of privatization, we are on the threshold of another jamboree for nuclear electricity which, sometimes in future, some people or a group of cabal might say, 'why don't we sell?'
In a nation where everything is now being offered for sale, except probably Aso Rock, someone might come, and it could even be in the same party in government, to plead that we sell the nuclear plant to a billionaire and his family! I can predict that even if Mr. President goes ahead to go the way of nuclear electricity; Nigeria will still not have electricity to go round. While one may not be totally against having nuclear energy for other purposes, it is pertinent to state that Nigeria is not environmentally safe, corruption free, security stable and politically ready to have nuclear electricity.
Look at the situation in the Niger Delta. The gas resource which is there is being flared over the years and experts have said the gas we burn away there daily could electrify the whole of West Africa for a year! Yar'Adua was a chemistry teacher unlike the rugged military engineer who just left the turf. As such, I believe he will have quite a number of colleagues who are nuclear experts at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria Energy Centre. And, of course, they network with colleagues at Obafemi Awolowo University Energy Centre and outside the country too. Besides, most of our nuclear experts trained abroad since Obasanjo's first time in government as a military head of state now reside abroad, working in Europe and American nuclear centres. These are not the pre-requisite for having a nuclear electricity project in a nation of hungry and desperate youths who have now taken to kidnapping as a hobby.
These days, grand mothers and toddlers are being kidnapped in the volatile Niger Delta. In Lagos, relations are known to be kidnapping each other for ransom. It's just that they are under reported unlike the situation in Niger Delta. Robbery is the order of the day. Mr. President, you cannot be every where to police the people and what they do with the nuclear materials just as it has not been possible to police a very disorganized organization like the Power Holding Company of Nigeria. You are currently ruling over a people who have been impoverished by corrupt leadership over the last eight years that the corruption under General Sani Abacha has become a child's play.
Corruption in the PHCN is the bane of electricity generation in Nigeria. Whether one trillion Naira or 500 million or 700 million Naira was spent on NEPA, no one has the exact figure. A nation that crudely disconnects energy from erring customers through rented ladders and daily paid workers wants to go nuclear! What has become of Ajaokuta and other grandiose steel projects commenced many years ago? If you want to make a difference in power generation during your tenure, the best you can do is to overhaul PHCN. There you will unearth the demons of electricity blackout and children of darkness. Even if you go ahead with your nuclear electricity project, is not the same set of "power holding" experts who will distribute the nuclear electricity?
Another point which I will like the president to consider is the environmental implication of nuclear or radioactive waste. Developed countries have problems in dealing with nuclear wastes. Nobody wants nuclear wastes in his / her backyard. Remember the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in former Soviet Union. We do not have sanitary or engineered lawn fills in Nigeria whereas Johannesburg in South Africa which we helped to liberate had such fills as far back as the 1980s. How and where will we dispose our own internally generated nuclear waste if and when we begin to operate? It is a known fact that there are Nigerians who by virtue of living on certain rocks get radiated daily in their homes.
What have we done to give these people a healthy living and save them from slow death? Is it when we are careless about these people that we will be able to take care of those who will likely be in contact with nuclear wastes? Greenpeace, the international environment pressure group, has been clamouring for renewable energy. We have them abundantly in Nigeria. We have not even tapped solar energy and we want to go nuclear.
NEPA does not know how to dispose its spent PCBs. So, how will we dispose radioactive wastes when this nuclear project starts? A report by Greenpeace says: "Despite what the nuclear industry tells us, building enough nuclear power stations to make a meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would cost trillions of dollars, create tens of thousands of tonnes of lethal high-level radioactive waste, contribute to further proliferation of nuclear weapons materials, and result in a Chernobyl-scale accident once every decade. It will squander the resources necessary to implement meaningful climate change".
According to the group, in November 2000, the world recognised nuclear power as a dirty, dangerous and unnecessary technology by refusing to give it greenhouse gas credits during the UN Climate Change talks in The Hague. I attended that conference and saw at close quarters the deals as they unfolded. And the world appears to be worse off today.
Let those who are behind the nuclear energy project site it in their backyard and stop looking for land in other places.
* Akingbade is a journalist
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