Luke Williams opines in early 2106 that in his finale of a 4-part series on the nuclear industry, he assesses the benefits of the Uganda planned nuclear program as the country seeks to reduce its power deficit and power an industrialized economy. Before talking about reactor designs and nuclear fuel supply contracts, Uganda must firstly establish precisely how much uranium it has. One cannot just assume that the uranium prospects found to date are guaranteed to translate into commercially viable uranium reserves, let alone that there is sufficient quantities to generate the 24,000 MW of nuclear energy as stated in Vision 2040.
A detailed assessment of prospects is therefore required to establish both the technical (i.e. average and cut-off grades, depths and types of mining methods, processing requirements, environmental aspects etc.) and economic (i.e. capital expenditure, operating expenditures, life of mine, mining capacity, output tonnages, potential revenues, tax, royalties etc.) parameters . Only when this information is available and made public can Uganda genuinely start talking about next steps. Uganda currently has one of the lowest electricity consumption rates in the world with 215 kWh per capita per year. Sub-Saharan Africa average is 552 kWh per capita and the world average is 2,975 kWh per capita, more than 10 times that of Uganda. One 1,000 MW (1 GW) nuclear power station would produce 4 times as much power as the 250 MW Bujagali Hydroelectric Power Station (currently Uganda biggest) and more than the entire of Uganda current 822 MW capacity. This amount of power would sharply reduce the country power deficit bringing much needed energy to Uganda.
Nuclear energy is undeniably reliable, providing on-demand baseload energy 24-hours a day, the average nuclear facility is on line 90% of the time. If Uganda uranium prospects turn out to be significant and and economically feasible to extract, then maybe nuclear power plants as well. But, read on....Original URL: https://allafrica.com/stories/201601060884.html
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