On the day news broke of the government’s intention to dissolve the Nuclear Power and Energy Agency (NuPEA), the nuclear industry was as bullish as it could get.
There had been a significant number of public announcements, primarily by Prime Cabinet Secretary Hon Musalia Mudavadi, of Kenya’s intention to pour first concrete on a 1GWe nuclear plant by 2027 with commercial operations postulated to begin in 2034.
At COP29, Kenya and Nigeria had declared their support to the resolution passed a year earlier by 50 states to triple the world’s nuclear power capacity by 2050.
From OpenAI’s embrace of Oklo Inc’s Aurora microreactor to Alphabet’s partnership with Kairos Power to commercialise Molten Salt Reactors, the Silicon Valley led “nuclear renaissance” was showing no sign of abating.
Awareness of the computation-nuclear positive feedback loop had prompted even JP Morgan, and other such financial institutions that are by default averse to financial risk, to lift moratoriums on funding nuclear projects.
The recently sworn in President Donald Trump had just rescinded his predecessor’s executive order that he said wrapped AI development in the USA in a straitjacket. Flanked by senior personalities from OpenAI and Oracle, he then announced the Stargate project that seeks to invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure over 4 years.
Starting with Texas, each of the five “Stargates” will need 5 GWe available 24/7 thus disqualifying wind and solar. Two such “Stargates” on Kenyan soil would max out Kenya’s 10GWe geographically fixed geothermal potential.
A week earlier the Ministry of Information, Communications and Digital Economy had published its draft of the Kenya National Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategy. One of the caveats rightfully identified were the “primary and supporting infrastructure constraints” like “insufficient computing power” and “energy efficiency.”
While leaders in Silicon Valley are showing with their actions their commitment to use nuclear to address such constraints, leaders in the Silicon Savanah are signaling the opposite.
Demoting NuPEA into a committee or department within a ministry sends the wrong but crystal-clear message to investors who are aware of what is going on Silicon Valley and our partners whose development trajectory we have been trying to emulate for decades Korea is such a partner in our slow albeit steady progress towards domestication of nuclear technology.
Reading The Miracle of the Han River, Kim Yong-shik is often referred to as the “Minister for Atomic Energy” because as head of the Atomic Energy Bureau, he was directly answerable to post war President Park Chung-hee.
More recently, the voice on our late president Mwai Kibaki’s panel of advisors that added pith and substance to our latest push to explore our nuclear options, belonged to Dr Kun-mo Chung.
Now well in his 90s, Dr Chung is part of the generation that used what was once dubbed as the “too cheap to metre” power option to transform South Korea from the war-ravaged country poorer that Kenya in 1963 to the success story we see today.
Starting out as the Nuclear Electricity Project Committee (NEPC), NuPEA has been in existence in one form or another since 2010. The State Corporations Act of 2012 turned NEPC into the Kenya Nuclear Electricity Board (KNEB) before the Energy Act of 2019 transitioned it into NuPEA, with the mandate of implementing our Silicon Savanah’s nuclear power agenda.
The proposed dissolution of NuPEA thus attenuates 15 years’ worth of time invested and momentum gathered exploring how such technology can be used to urgently address the crippling energy poverty afflicting our young population.
The legislation required to dissolve parastatals set up by acts of parliament aside, all this is the opposite of what Rwanda, for example, is doing to attract the attention of the investors in the physical infrastructure on which AI and the digital economy promised to Kenyans need to run.
The writer is BRICT Young Expert Group Member (Nuclear Science and Technology). Email: [email protected]
