Africa is blessed with enormous potential from solar, wind, geothermal and hydro. Renewables can meet 75% of Africa's electricity needs by 2040 and 100% by 2050.

Listen to this article 8 min Listen to this article 8 min On 23 January 2025, Daily Maverick carried an opinion piece by Jakkie Cilliers from the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) which concluded that nuclear power was "a viable future option for many African countries".

This conclusion was based on many false assumptions about nuclear power, and - surprisingly for the ISS - was so devoid of any political analysis that a rejoinder is necessary to illustrate how nuclear power is an extremely poor choice for Africa.

The first point that Cilliers makes is that Africa needs to wean itself off fossil fuels in the interests of keeping "even a 2°C goal alive" by finding alternative means by which to power the continent's economies. On that there is, of course, broad agreement.

Cilliers claims, however, that renewables cannot fulfil this role, which is patently untrue. There is now an overwhelming amount of peer-reviewed evidence from across the globe that widely distributed renewables, managed by "smart grids" and backed up by various forms of energy storage such as batteries and pumped storage, can meet the energy needs of growing economies, including those in Africa.

This is confirmed by...