The Current Bizarre Salad Of Legislation In Africa Exacerbate Energy Poverty And Accelerate Climate Change

In his speech given at COP28, Kenyan President William Samoei Ruto reiterated the commitment his government made at the Africa Climate Summit to supply vast amounts of cheap and clean electricity to the Kenyan people. The very ambitious set target to reach about 100 GW by 2050 revealed an awareness by his government about the dire situation in Kenya and most Sub-Saharan African countries where rapid urbanization, exponential population growth and debilitating energy poverty have twisted into a cruel Gordian Knot that is only going to get tighter as the effects of anthropogenic climate change begin to bite.

Energy poverty forces billions of African kids to choose between respiratory illnesses from kerosene lamp effluents and not studying

As a young energy professional back home after years abroad working on energy projects abroad, it is hard not to lend 100% support to such a commitment. This was until I read the Energy Act 2019, whose amendments are currently making their way through Kenya’s legislative process before proceeding to debate in Parliament soon. At COP28 President Ruto vowed to source all the promised 100 GW from “Renewable energy” which in the Act is defined as “non-fossil energy generated from natural non-depleting resources including but not limited to solar energy, wind energy, biomass energy, biological waste energy, hydro energy, geothermal energy and ocean and tidal energy.”

What about Nuclear?

“Nuclear Energy” on the other hand, which the government has been making slow albeit steady progress in exploring, is not explicitly defined in the Act let alone categorized as “renewable.” This is very puzzling on multiple fronts. For one other sources named as being “renewable” can be considered “nuclear.” Geothermal energy for example comes from the nuclear fission of heavy elements within the earth’s crust that then gives steam in geothermal geysers the energy, we tap to spin our turbines. The sun that powers the PV solar cells on our rooftops is a literal nuclear fusion reactor in space converting hydrogen into helium and other heavy elements. The wind i.e. moving air that spins turbines at places like the Lake Turkana Wind Power project is the result of uneven atmospheric heating of the earth’s atmosphere by that same nuclear reactor in space.

Say we assume that the definition of “nuclear energy” in the Act is restricted to the current colloquial use of the term i.e. “energy from the fission of heavy elements in man-made reactors to generate heat and drive turbines for electricity production,” its exclusion from “renewable energy” is even more puzzling. The act uses the phrase “natural non-depleting resources” to qualify sources as “renewable” or not. To get a sense of just how weird it is to exclude “nuclear energy” using this definition we must contrast it to “biomass” – which put bluntly is mainly just a euphemism for “fancy charcoal.”

Charcoal isn't fancy and even if it was, we don't have enough.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the world consumed approximately 25,500 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in 2022 with Kenyans accounting for a paltry 10,008.40 GWh of this (0.3925%). Most current generation of nuclear reactors use uranium as fuel. According to the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), we have approximately 8 million tons of identified uranium resources that are economically recoverable at current prices. If we were to maintain electricity consumption level and source all our electricity from uranium, we currently have enough uranium to meet global demand for approximately 90 years. There are an additional 8.070 million tons of uranium resources recoverable at higher prices and the total amount of uranium dissolved in seawater is estimated to be about 4.5 billion tons! No doubt exploiting these is constrained by economics and technology constraints but that’s not the point.

Doesn't look fancy if you ask me.

If we were to source our power from fancy charcoal however, we currently only have approximately 30 years’ worth of forest based on current estimates and the most popular electricity production- effectively exhausting our global forest resources in less than a couple of decades! Depending on the species of trees, it takes between 10 to 30 years for a forest to become mature further compounding the absurdity of considering burning charcoal for electricity production.

That is even before factoring in the devastating environmental impacts of deforestation like soil erosion, desertification, and the fact that a significant portion of the earth’s land surface already shrinking as climate change bites, would be diverted to electricity production and not the production of food.

A Drop in the Ocean of such Legislation in Africa

The Energy Act 2019 in Kenya is just a drop in the ocean of such legislation in Africa. Others such as the National Energy Act 2008 meant to guide investment and provided the perfect Petri dish where the current monster of "load shedding" mutated and turned the South African Energy mix into the mess it is. Similar legislation at the national level exist in Ethiopia, Rwanda and others.

The argument can be made that the categorization of biomass as renewable is not restricted to African countries and that such also exist in places like Japan, Canada and the US. However, rather than painting biomass with a single brush these countries are very careful to limit the "renewable" label to a select subcategory. African nations on the other hand even have continental-level decrees such as the AU Master Plan for the Development of Renewable Energy (REMAP) that influence which energy projects banks like the African Development Bank can fund and which ones it cannot.

All these mix into a bizarre salad of legislation that not only exacerbates energy poverty but does little to assist African countries in meeting the obligations set by signing on to climate change mitigation treaties.

Nuclear Energy is "renewable" on Steroids

When appraising our uranium supply as we have done above, we have not even talked of reprocessing or mature technologies like fast reactors that have forced genuine critics of nuclear power to stop using the term “nuclear waste” to describe what comes out of a nuclear reactor after the fuel has been used for a couple of months.

Spent fuel safely stored in casks on-site

The term currently being used is “Spent Nuclear Fuel.” Fast reactors use neutrons in the fast spectrum to “burn” the minor actinides in fuel that are responsible for most of the heat load and radiotoxicity in spent fuel. “Burning” minor actinides reduces the size of spent nuclear fuel inventories by close to a sixth. The period for planning that the current already minute spent nuclear fuel would have to be stored for would also reduce from the current 100,000 years to a few hundred years!

The current generation of nuclear plants may be designed to run on the uranium fuel cycle but there are options. Thorium, which is vastly more abundant than uranium in the earth’s crust, can be used in specifically engineered reactors to sustain fission.

Valid concerns for nuclear power in countries like Kenya

That is not to say that there are no valid issues with nuclear power. Under current conditions, the current generation of water-cooled nuclear plants take a rather long period to be constructed, making them only practical in the medium to long term (past 6 years). Close to 30% of the upfront capital investment (CAPEX) required for the construction of a conventional nuclear plant goes into interest, making it very financially sensitive if such a project goes behind schedule.

Small Modular Reactors will harness the economics of mass production to make nuclear reactors accessible to countries like Kenya

There are efforts to address this barrier to entry using the many Small and Modular Reactors currently under development all over the world. My personal favourite is the SMART reactor, a fully mature and licenced technology indigenously developed in South Korea where I built the foundation of my career as a nuclear engineer.

As a pragmatic and rational human being who is aware that we urgently need cheap and clean electricity yesterday, I do recognize that we cannot afford to be Boolean in our attempt at untying the Gordian Knot of our time. There are certain contexts within which even wind power, which has proven to be an obscene waste of money by the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project, has a role to play.

Nuclear Now

It doesn’t make sense to call “charcoal” renewable if we use the definition in the Energy Act to exclude “nuclear energy.” There are no positives in neglecting nuclear power and focusing on burning fancy charcoal for electricity production. It would quickly replace “shooting oneself in the foot” in the English language as a way of describing harming oneself unintentionally.