OPINION | DAVID HESS
Building equitable nuclear access
Truly sustainable development is crucial to all of the world’s population and
nuclear is widely acknowledged as a key technology to achieve that. But the stark economic division between the global North and the South is also reflected in the division of access to nuclear technology. That needs to change
David Hess, Senior VP DeepGeo
HERE IS AN ECONOMIC LINE that splits the world in two. On one side of this line are the wealthy countries which make up the global North. On the other are the developing and least developed countries that together constitute the global South. Which side
of this line you live on has a large impact on how close you probably are to a nuclear power plant. From another perspective this line is actually a cliff. The Northern countries have for decades benefited from high energy use and resource extraction and enjoyed elevated quality of life as a result. Those in the South are hungry to join the abundance club, but find the development ladder is now being pulled up out of reach. Climate change, they are told, means they need to limit their fossil fuel consumption. Lack of readiness, they are told, means that they can’t build nuclear power plants.
Elites at international bodies – such as academic institutions, think tanks, financing institutions, multilateral organisations – offer strong support for renewables and pretend that they are enough, but of course they are not. Africa, Asia and South America deserve more than just intermittent energy ‘toys’. They deserve a reliable, resilient energy system made up of multiple diverse sources of generation, just like their wealthier counterparts. Their sovereign rights to determine their own energy mix must also be respected. Adding insult to injury, many of these countries have helped supply the resources that enabled the North to flourish. To expect them to forgo developing them for their own benefit because of largely rich-world created environmental issues would be the height of hypocrisy. This is in truth a wicked problem. Sustainability issues
©Alexy Kovynev
are real and many people in the South care about them too, but the stakes are also more personal. It is easy call for dramatic climate action when you have a MacBook, infinite internet and a caffe latte in hand, it’s another thing entirely when you are experiencing blackouts on a daily basis.
This, by the way is the reality in much of Africa today.
In Accra, for example, daily load shedding for hour long stretches has become the norm. The phenomenon has its own name – Dumsor (off-on) – and become a national joke after the president described the problem as solved, only for the power to go off mid-broadcast. Climate resilience is now every bit as important as
climate mitigation and this entails energy resilience. This is especially true for the countries of the Global South.
Those working in the energy sector know that climate
“ Are you ashamed that there are almost no nuclear power plants in Africa?”
14 | June 2024 |
www.neimagazine.com
change and economic equality are two sides of the same coin. You can’t solve one without also solving the other. Energy usage is more-or-less directly correlated to GDP, and the energy system as a whole dominates global greenhouse gas emissions. This climate calculus is simple and remains fundamentally unaltered, even acknowledging that some countries have made progress with energy ‘decoupling’.
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