Peter Mwaura
10 October 2008
opinion
Nairobi — It is said that the amount of electricity you consume shows your standard of living.
At the national level, an increase in productivity and standard of living is accompanied by a rise in individual energy consumption.
For example, Namibia consumes nine times more electricity per person than Kenya, while its per capita gross domestic product is nearly three times Kenya's.
We consume about 148 kilowatt-hours per person, which is 18 times below the world average and seven-and-a-half times below that of developing countries. Botswana, for example, consumes nearly 10 times more per person than Kenya.
We will not achieve the goal of a middle income country, as set out in Vision 2030, without the generation of more energy and an increase in energy consumption per capita.
In his message at the opening of the national energy conference on Tuesday, Energy minister Kiraitu Murungi put it even more bluntly: "There is a looming power supply crisis in the country. We have a chronic power shortage due to the inability to keep pace with demand."
To meet the rising demand, he said, we have to double our generation capacity to 2,030 megawatts by 2012 and raise it to more than 10,000 by 2030. One way of doing this is go for nuclear power. According to Energy permanent secretary Patrick Nyoike, a South African expert is to advise the Government on generation.
The world is increasingly turning to nuclear power to generate environmentally clean and cheap electricity. Currently, there are over 430 nuclear reactors in the world generating more than 16 per cent of the world's electricity supply.
More than 260 more have been proposed for construction. France has 59 reactors which generate 80 per cent of its electricity, and has decided to go all-nuclear.
Kenya can request assistance from Article XI of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN agency that regulates nuclear power, stipulates that any member wishing to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes may ask for its help, including making arrangements to secure funding from outside sources.
The IAEA is already working with Kenya and other African countries in other areas of peaceful uses of nuclear power.
For example, it is using the tools of nuclear science and biotechnology to produce "golden wheat", a new high-yielding variety that is resistant to drought.
It is also helping to eradicate rinderpest and the tsetse fly, and to establish national cancer management programmes that include prevention, early diagnosis, treatment and palliative care.
But what is in doubt is Kenya's capacity to operate a nuclear programme in view of the safety concerns associated with the reactors. There is also the issue of the cost of building and operating a nuclear plant, including waste disposal.
Leading Kenyan businessman and scholar Karanja Kabage believes Kenya can and should go nuclear, arguing that third-generation nuclear power plants are substantially cheaper and safer than the second generation ones now in operation.
The safety issues, he says, "cannot militate against the use of nuclear energy."
He concludes in his law degree dissertation that Kenya must go this direction because it is vulnerable to the vagaries of weather and cannot depend on hydro-power alone.
"If the country is going to be an investment-friendly destination to both local and foreign investors, the Government must make a strategic decision to be a nuclear energy-dependent nation," he writes in his 2002 Dissertation on Nuclear Energy for Peaceful Purposes: A Case for Kenya.
He proposes that initially the first nuclear plant be state-owned owing to the project's sensitivity and located "in the vast desert in North Eastern Province, which is sparsely populated" because of the safety concerns associated with nuclear fuel as well as waste handling, storage and safety.
He further proposes that , as a prerequisite to going nuclear, the country must acquire a research and training reactor to facilitate capacity building in nuclear science knowledge with the help of the IAEA.
The Institute of Nuclear Science of the University of Nairobi, he suggests, should be a full-fledged university.
He adds that the country needs "a pool of highly trained nuclear scientists and engineers to constitute the core human capital."
The thesis is a ready-made blueprint with a proposed legal and institutional framework for the country to go nuclear.
Mr Kabage provides a draft for the Atomic Energy Act, which includes provision for a regulatory commission, a national secretariat and other safeguards.
Thus, if Kenya is to go nuclear, it must carry out the best practices and do it right.
gigirimwaura@yahoo.com
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