Partnership to support nuclear deployment in Africa

[NNadir]

Partnership to support nuclear deployment in Africa

Subtitle:

World Nuclear Association and the African Commission on Nuclear Energy (AFCONE) have signed a memorandum of understanding to support the economic growth and sustainable energy development of the African continent through the use of nuclear energy.

Excerpts:

"This cooperation confirms the shared commitment of both organisations to proactively facilitate the wider understanding of civilian nuclear energy and support the development of nuclear energy in African States," World Nuclear Association said. It added that the purpose of the MoU was to support information sharing and exchange, networking, capacity building, and training.

The agreement comes ahead of African Energy Week 2023, which takes place in Cape Town from 16-20 October.

As the organisation representing the global nuclear industry, World Nuclear Association said it was in a unique position to share common messages and best practices from the global nuclear industry with African countries interested in nuclear energy.

Currently, Africa has two nuclear power reactors in operation at the Koeberg plant in South Africa, and four reactors under construction at the El Dabaa plant in Egypt. Meanwhile Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria have already made their national decision to deploy nuclear energy and are progressing with plans. African countries exploring the use of nuclear energy include Algeria, Ethiopia, Morocco, Niger, Namibia, Rwanda, Senegal, Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, and Zambia. The World Nuclear Association Nuclear Fuel Report - published in September - estimates that by 2040 Africa could have 18 GWe of nuclear power based on current member state plans...

..."Nuclear energy has been identified among the viable clean energy sources for addressing Africa's energy poverty," added AFCONE Executive Secretary Enobot Agboraw. "The relative advantage of nuclear energy lies in its ability to provide base load, its long-term cost effectiveness, its environmental resilience, and the long operational lifespan of nuclear power plants. Considering Africa's steep population growth, AFCONE is striving, inter alia, through partnerships with key industry players, such as World Nuclear Association, to urgently expedite the process of deploying nuclear energy capacity in Africa..."

[Hermit-The-Prog]

1. The headline scared me.

[NNadir]

2. It thrilled me. I want Africa to defeat poverty by a different means than that employed...

...by China and India, in a way that doesn't involve fossil fuels.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

3. With all the crap going on, my first thought was about another "nuclear".

We are way behind on weaning ourselves from fossil fuels. It can't happen fast enough to suit me.

[NNadir]

4. The weapons being used in the "other crap going on" are dangerous fossil fuels diverted to...

...weapons of mass destruction.

They hare killing people right now in Ukraine and in the Middle East.

There has been exactly one "nuclear war." It was fought 78 years ago, and frankly, it started, at least where the United States was concerned, as an oil war, since the attack on Pearl Harbor was designed to strike at the flank that might prevent the Japanese from taking the oil fields of what was then the Dutch East Indies, and the oil fields of Java and Borneo.

People spend a lot of effort carrying on about the technology of wars that could kill people and are spectacularly uninterested in the technology of wars that are killing people.

Africa deserves and needs nuclear power.

[relayerbob]

5. Inflammatory and inaccurate headline

Deployment, in this day, age and context, almost almost means deployment of military assets. Not development of nuclear energy resources. Very counterproductive.

[NNadir]

7. Bullshit.

One of the best English professors I have had made the statement that what one takes from reading is what one brings of oneself to the text.

I am not responsible for the mentality that only sees opportunities for bloodlust.

I think about nuclear issues for much of the day, and to the extent that I consider weapons at all, it is only to consider how valuable the materials within them would be if they were disassembled and the materials therein deployed to fight climate change.

The article is quite clear about what is being discussed, fighting poverty with clean energy.

[relayerbob]

11. CAll your own bullshit

For what it is. You knew EXACTLY what you were posting and why.

[NNadir]

12. I simply repeated the article title as written in the news source.

The text of the article should be clear to anyone who can read what it's about, and once again, I cannot be responsible for narrow minds, including those who insist on imparting motivations to someone who they do not know and are not likely to know.

For the record, the deployment of air bags is not a military maneuver, deployment of software is not a military maneuver, deploying industrial equipment is not a military maneuver.

Now, if one is rather narrow, and linguistically challenged, one might believe that the word is limited to military purposes, but when I saw the title of the news item, which I had nothing to do with writing and to which I merely pointed, I knew exactly what it was about, since I am familiar with the broad use of language.

I have been following energy issues in Africa for sometime because, well, I give a shit about poverty and having met African scientists and engineers, I am pleased that they plan to deploy this technology.

JFC.

Have a nice life.

[slightlv]

6. The headline scared the crap out of me, too...

All I could think of was nuclear weapons deployed on yet another continent. I'm not against nuclear energy, as long as it's done responsibly and without cutting the corners that big corporations seem so intent on to save money in the building of the units. It would deliver education and good jobs in a part of the world that desperately needs it. But with China having made such inroads already, and all the different terrorist type groups, security would have to be top priority... both for the continent's and the world's safety.

[NNadir]

8. I am aware of nuclear exceptionalism.

Nobody seems to care about using coal and oil and gas because big corporations are intent on saving money by dumping the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere, killing people and driving climate change.

Today, 19,000 people will die from air pollution, more people than died from Covid on its worst day worldwide.

Any concerns about "corporations" and "safety?"

But when nuclear energy is discussed, suddenly this issue of boogeymen "corporations" needs discussion.

Right now, in Ukraine, a war funded by antinuke Germans who bought hundreds of billions of dollars worth of dangerous fossil fuels from Putin, is killing human beings, young and old.

The weapons being used to kill these people are all powered by fossil fuels.

Anyone who wishes to talk about "security" while fossil fuel wars are killing people and wishes it to limit only to nuclear issues is engaging is selective attention of the type that is killing the entire planet, rapidly.

[slightlv]

9. We don't even have to talk about energy to talk about

what corporations think about safety, regardless of what they make. How about killing all the oxygen out of the air in city and suffocating every man, woman, child, and animal? Wasn't that Dow Chemical? Wasn't that in the Sudan? It happened so long ago, my brain rattles trying to remember the exact place. The atrocities are so many.

Yes, you only have to go South in our own country to see what fossil fuel production can do to residents. Of course, it's only POC or extremely poor people who live in those areas, so they don't count generally. "They" (the corporations) killed what I used to refer to as "my Gulf" because for decades I'd wanted to retire in Galveston. No more... not after the oil blowout, and the even worse disaster that the Corexit brought.

No matter what the material... fossil fuels, a damnable piece of wood, nuclear, etc., there are going to be two men somewhere who hate each other enough and for whom that hate is all that matters... such that they would damn the whole area around them to every living hell. All the worse when those two men command armies. Today, we not only have men who command armies, but they command other country's armies through "proxies."

I would love it if we could find a way to magically make a switch to all renewable energies... not only for the Mother; but for my own selfish ideological reasons. But that's not going to happen until we start making it happen. And unfortunately for us, and for the citizens of the world for whom their own hope is peace, our words are lost in the dizzying array of dollar signs floating around the numbers where weapons of ALL kinds are concerned.

But yes, I AM concerned about nuclear safety. I'm not against nuclear energy. But I'm also for holding those corporations, and their "subcontractors" to high standards for the safety of everyone. And yes... that SHOULD have been the case for fossil fuels from the very start. It took many of us a long time to catch up to the damage that was being done by those corporations. Some of us knew in the 60's. Some knew even before that. Most of us were laughed at or worse... and then ignored. We're still being ignored. Should we just repeat the cycle with nuclear in a brand new country to have it? Or should we make sure "they" get it right?

[NNadir]

10. Again, it's selective attention, period.

For the record, I am opposed to so called "renewable energy," since it depends entirely on unsustainable mining and the trashing of wilderness, a point I just made in the Science forum a few minutes back:

Valuing the functionality of tropical ecosystems beyond carbon

I further note that the so called "renewable energy" industry is entirely dependent on access to fossil fuels although the scientifically illiterate fantasy about batteries, or worse, hydrogen - scientifically illiterate because the 2nd law of thermodynamics is not subject to repeal by popular opinion - are very popular, useless, but popular.

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

Anyone who is concerned about nuclear "safety" while engaged in de facto acceptance of the status quo is simply not paying attention to numbers.

The commercial nuclear industry is almost 70 years old. When I hear concerns over nuclear safety here, I make the following request:

Please show me that in the entire history of commercial nuclear energy, roughly 70 years, that the death toll associated with its use (feel free to include the boogeymen at Chernobyl and Fukushima) has matched the death toll that will take place in the next six hours from air pollution, a little over 4500 people.

Here is the comprehensive paper from the primary scientific literature from which my numbers are derived:

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249).

Lancet is one of the world's most prominent medical journals.

Please indicate from this paper or any reputable peer reviewed source that shows that nuclear energy has killed as many people in the last 70 years as will die from air pollution in the next six hours.

The selective attention that kills people is largely based around the extremely dubious contention that nuclear energy, and only nuclear energy needs to be risk free, or systems with vastly larger risks will be allowed to kill at will in massive numbers.

Nuclear energy does not need to be risk free to be vastly superior to everything else. Nuclear only needs to be massively superior to everything else, which it is.

The climate scientist, Jim Hansen as a co-author, back in 2013, made calculations about how many lives nuclear energy had saved, this is an era defined by screaming vituperation against the technology:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

It follows from this paper's analysis that opposition to nuclear people kills people.

People lie, to themselves and to each other, but numbers don't lie.

Have a pleasant Sunday.