WHY WE MUST NOT COUNTENANCE NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!

In a www.ghanaweb.com general news web-page story of 2011-04-05 entitled: "Ghana Targets Nuclear Power By 2018" the Director General of the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission, Professor
Edward Akaho, was quoted copiously, in an interview with Public Agenda. Amongst other things, the Public Agenda story also said: "In the wake of Ghana's energy crisis in 2007, the then President John Agyekum Kufuor set up a Nuclear Power Committee to prepare pre-feasibility studies on the country's chances of expanding its power generation by including nuclear energy.

The committee, chaired by Prof. Daniel Adjei Bekoe, after close to five months of work presented to government a roadmap for adopting nuclear power by 2018."

With respect, Professor Edward Akaho has a vested interest in a nuclear power plant being built in Ghana - nuclear science is his professional life. And was personal interest not the abiding .determinant, in virtually all that Kufuor & Co. ever did, whiles in office - so why should this dangerous idea from an era of self-seekers be cast in stone, I ask? It is typical of the bankruptcy of thought and the foolishness, which so many amongst our nation's educated urban elites are guilty of, that at a time when virtually all the developed nations of the world, and even the Chinese (with their economy's voracious appetite for electric power!), are having second thoughts about building planned nuclear power plants, vested interests in Ghana, are rather asking Ghanaians to accept this folly.

Why, is this still not a nation in which, as a result of corruption at all levels, there is scarce a project in which all design specifications are followed to the letter, in the execution of contracts - because individuals lacking integrity, in supervisory roles at various levels, see turning a blind-eye to corner-cutting by contractors, as a sure-fire means of self-enrichment? Are we still not a nation that has virtually no maintenance culture to speak of - because of the selfsame corruption and the unparalleled incompetence, of so many of our self-seeking professional classes?

Are we not even overwhelmed by the relatively simple task of the disposal of household and industrial waste? Is it therefore not madness to build a nuclear power plant in such a nation - and condemn generation after generation, for thousands of years to come, to the harmful effects of radiation: from an accident, which is bound to occur, at some point, after the commissioning of any such plant, from human error, as sure as day follows night, this being Ghana?

Perhaps I had better get into active politics as quickly as I can organise myself, and operate as an independent pro-Ghana politician - and do everything I can to help overthrow any government of Ghana so foolish that it will allow itself to be talked into giving the go-ahead for the building of what will turn out to be an unmitigated disaster for our homeland Ghana. And all this pure nonsense on bamboo stilts, because vested interests want to benefit from the usual "chop-chop" kickbacks, which invariably go with such large infrastructure projects in Ghana. It won't happen. Period.

Who is to know that the decision to build a nuclear power plant, apparently taken by the Kufuor regime before it left office, was not influenced by the same selfish disregard for the common good, which was the hallmark of Kufuor & Co.? Was their unfathomable greed, not responsible, for example, for that outrageous and nonsensical deviation from the original design plans, for the Tetteh Quarshie inter-change?

Did that monstrosity not occur in the end, just to enable the selfsame President Kufuor and his family clan, as well as their cronies, to put up commercial structures for themselves - in their ruthless and determined quest to send their individual net worth to stratospheric heights, at all costs: even though engineers and consultants supervising it, all knew it would create insurmountable traffic management problems for ordinary private motorists, and the travelling public, I ask?

If even nations light years ahead of us in terms of science and technology, as well as being far far wealthier than Ghana will ever be (given the mostly-moronic individuals who pepper our ruling elites!), are now realising the cost of failure of even one reactor in a nuclear power plant (since that terrible recent Japanese super-quake damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant), and are consequently seriously looking at alternatives to nuclear power, such as renewable energy, why don't our feckless and incompetent educated elite, not simply think of rather building the world's biggest wind-power farm along our entire coastline - in partnership with the biggest and best-resourced state-owned Chinese giant wind-power plant builders: to produce say 20,000 megawatts of electricity?

Would the government of China not willingly and happily fund such a mega-project, in exchange for one of the bigger state-owned Chinese oil companies being allocated a bloc in an oil afield off our shores, dear reader?

Isn't that infinitely better than waiting for another sly rogue to become president, and end up employing sleight-of-hand shenanigans to get one allocated to his fronts-men, courtesy a foreign oil company run by super-clever crooks? Talk about a nation in which creative thinking seldom features in the national political discourse: because of a dearth of creative and lateral thinkers. Hmm, Ghana - eyeasem oo!
Would such a wind-energy mega-project not be an iconic one that will put us on the world map, and for all the right reasons, for once - and unlike nuclear power won't have any attendant radiation dangers associated with it? Ghana must not go down this road-to-hell-paved-with-good-intentions type of project, which will end up spawning a Frankenstein monster, under any circumstances. Period. A word to the wise...

Tel (powered by Tigo - the one mobile phone network in Ghana that actually works! ): + 233 (0) 27 745 3109.

Post Script: Below is an article culled from the March 24, 2011
edition of Business Asia, entitled: "The Business Case Against Nuclear Power" and authored by BENJAMIN K. SOVACOOL. It speaks for itself - and one hopes discerning and independent-minded Ghanaians will mull over its contents, and tell the clowns who run our affairs, that a nuclear power plant in Ghana, will only ever be built over their dead bodies! Read on.

"The relentless media coverage of the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan has centered on safety and reliability concerns with modern nuclear power plants. Such fears have prompted China to suspend its nuclear building plans at least for the short term and will also affect the prospects for new plants in Europe and the U.S. But this safety debate obscures an economic point that already was emerging before the Japan disaster: Nuclear power makes little economic sense.

Modern nuclear plants are among the most capital-intensive structures ever built. Initial construction of a new reactor consumes close to 60% of a project's total investment, compared to about 40% for coal and 15% for natural gas power plants (the remainder goes to costs such as fuel, maintenance and operations). The nuclear industry is typically the most capital-intensive business in any country that builds nuclear plants.

There are several reasons for this. Nuclear plants are more like one-of-a-kind cathedrals than off-the-shelf cellular phones. Key components like computer systems and reactor technologies may be modular but they still have to go in a facility uniquely—and expensively—designed for its site. A nuclear plant requires special cooling systems, emergency backup generators, spent fuel ponds, radiation shields, and firewalls that must all work in tandem to ensure safety and reliability.


Then there's the cost of time. In places like the U.S., it takes on average nearly five years to gain approval to pour the first concrete. The average construction time for all global nuclear power plants built from 1976 to 2007 has been more than seven years. While experts may differ on how much of this is necessary, it's not unreasonable to argue that nuclear plants ought to be subjected to a greater level of scrutiny compared to conventional or renewable power plants given the dangers involved.

These long times place nuclear power plants at greater risk than their conventional competitors for unforeseen changes in electricity demand, interest rates, availability of materials, severe weather, labor strikes and the like—all of which threaten the viability of business plans and contribute to severe cost overruns. One study estimated that between 1966 and 1977, when most of America's light-water reactors were built, in every case the U.S. plants cost at least twice as much as expected. The quoted cost for these 75 plants was $89.1 billion, but the real cost was a monumental $283.3 billion—and that excludes fuel storage and decommissioning. But is it worth it?

The expense continues once the plant has come online. Jim Harding from the Keystone Center, a nonpartisan think tank, found in 2008 that projected operating costs for new nuclear power plants were 30 cents per kilowatt hour of power for the first 13 years until construction costs are paid, followed by 18 cents over the remaining lifetime of the plant. That compares to less than 10 cents per kilowatt hour for coal, natural gas, and even wind, hydro, geothermal and landfill gas generators. Moody's Investor Service projects higher operating costs based on the quickly escalating price of metals, forgings, other materials and labor needed to construct reactors.

So how has anyone been able to afford to build any plants at all? In short, government support. The business model for nuclear power generation relies primarily on extracting huge amounts of taxpayer subsidies.

This has been true since the industry's early days. Nuclear power in the U.S. received subsidies of $15.30 per kilowatt hour between 1947 and 1961—the first 15 years during which nuclear technology was used for civilian power generation—compared to subsidies of $7.19 per kilowatt hour for solar power and 46 cents for wind power between 1975 and 1989, the first 15 years when those technologies came into more widespread use. Nuclear operators are often protected by laws limiting liability that shift most of the expense of serious accidents to the public, thus shielding operators from the costs of insuring a potentially more dangerous technology.


All of this ought to raise questions in a lot of minds in Asia, where nuclear increasingly has been viewed as the next big energy thing. Asian governments purport to have plans to build 110 nuclear power plants between 2010 and 2030. Achieving this build-out would necessitate hundreds of billions of dollars of continued subsidies. Conservatively estimating a per-plant cost of $5 billion, and very conservatively estimating subsidies equal to one-third of project costs (it's closer to 70%-80% in the U.S.), that still works out to around $180 billion in subsidies simply to build the plants, let alone operate them. Can Asia afford that?

Nuclear-power proponents often argue that the market should decide whether nuclear makes sense. They're right. The reality is that but for government support, nuclear is a terrible business proposition. Asian policy makers should take note.

Mr. Sovacool, a professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, is co-author of "The International Politics of Nuclear Power," forthcoming from Routledge." " His article was culled from the March 24, 2011
edition of BUSINESS ASIA.