Holtec and Rwanda advance plans to deploy SMR-300 Nuclear Reactors.

[NNadir]

This one goes back a number of weeks, but I didn't get around to posting it.

Holtec and Rwanda advance plans to deploy SMR-300s (May 20, 2026)

Excerpts, the full article is rather short and sweet:

Holtec International and the Rwanda Atomic Energy Board have signed a development agreement to work together on the deployment of SMR-300 units. Meanwhile, as Rwanda hosts the Nuclear Energy Innovation Summit for Africa, it has signed a memorandum of understanding on civil nuclear cooperation with the USA....

...The conference also saw the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the USA and Rwanda, which the US embassy in Rwanda said "marks an important step toward strengthening cooperation on civil nuclear energy and expanding opportunities for collaboration in support of reliable and secure energy development. The United States and Rwanda are committed to promoting the highest standards of nuclear safety, security and non-proliferation as the two countries advance this partnership".

Nuclear Energy Innovation Summit for Africa

The conference, taking place in Kigali, was opened by Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, who said: "For Africa, energy is not simply a development issue. It is the foundation of industrial growth, and competitiveness. At the centre of this endeavour is the question of investment. Too often, investors hesitate because they perceive many risks in Africa. We must work to strengthen regulation, ensure consistency and accountability, in order to build confidence and attract long-term capital.

"Nuclear energy is increasingly recognized as part of the clean energy transition and that creates new opportunities. What Africa cannot afford is fragmentation. If countries work in isolation, progress will be slow and far more costly. Cooperation on regulation, financing, and regional power integration is essential. This is precisely why NEISA matters. We are moving the conversation beyond ambition to practical coordination, and financing mechanisms that can sustain deployment at scale. Rwanda will continue supporting these efforts, because this is larger than any one country."

Most countries that have built an infrastructure affording reliable electricity after lacking it, built that infrastructure using fossil fuels. This was true in the early 20th century and has remained true into the 21st. The most recent examples are the two most populous nations on Earth, India and China, who provide the bulk of the electricity by burning coal and dumping the waste, pretty much untreated, directly into the planetary atmosphere, leading to the atmosphere's ongoing destruction, and a vast human death toll from air pollution, not to mention destroyed ecosystems.

Recently in this space, I referenced a beautifully written piece by the African pronuclear activist Princy Mthonbeni, which seems to have generated a lot of comments, most of which I can't read when logged in, since I do so love my ignore list which generally precludes me from reading sub threads started by people for whom I have no use.

Atoms For Justice: Dying of Thirst: Dispatches From the Energy Poor in Africa by Princy Mthonbeni.

"Atoms for Justice..." what an admirable string of words that is! It most definitely is.

She has written about energy poverty, what it means, and how it is lived. She does not accept the colonialist paternalism whereby first world types who have lived their whole lives with reliable energy systems talk down to Africans as they seek to build an energy system to provide them with decent living standards. I'm an atheist, but I will briefly suspend my areligious views to offer the nice locution, "Bless her soul." She is not just working for justice, she is demanding justice. Again, bless her soul.

It would seem from the conference being held in Rwanda, and the text therein that Africa is looking to do what the rest of the world did not do when building reliable energy systems, rely on filthy fossil fuels with or without so called "renewable energy" lipstick on the pig.

I will make a guilty confession, I briefly looked in to the Princy Mthonbeni thread from a computer not logged in, because as John Lennon put it, having "...turned away, but I just had to look..."

Sigh...the ignore list is a marvelous feature of DU. I'd get in real trouble if I jumped in to that one:

It's amusing in a way, one antinuke on my ignore list accusing another antinuke on my ignore list of being a "nuclear shill" because the purported "nuclear shill" doesn't hate nuclear energy as much as first antinuke does.

I have spent around 30 or 40 years being accused of being a "nuclear shill" by a set of people who apparently believe that the only reason to do something is for money. This has always struck me as their problem, not mine. This said, I am pleased to say that after all these years, my son and his lovely girlfriend will be nuclear professionals and will make their living presumably from the nuclear industry. They won't be "shills" though; they'll be energy professionals working to save what is left to save and perhaps even restore that which can be restored. My family will have a financial stake in nuclear energy, and I am immeasurably proud of that.

Anyway, one antinuke accusing another of being a "nuclear shill..."

Ummmm....delicious. It couldn't possibly be funnier than that.

I went back to logged in status on my own computer. I just peeked in to say I've been there.

Kidding aside:

I would think it wonderful if Africa, which has suffered so much under colonialism and colonial attitudes that survive right up to this day, chooses to and succeeds at being the first continent in the world to develop reliable energy without coal, in contrast to what India and China have done as recent examples, and uses clean energy and only clean energy, to build reliable and clean energy supply systems.

There seem to be some Africans, President Paul Kagame, and the aforementioned Pricy Mthonbeni, among them, who are working to this worthy goal. Let the old, fat, white, bald, boring atheist I happen to be say it again: "Bless their souls."

Rwanda is a nation with a tragic history, famous unfortunately for the genocide event in not so distant time, and also a nation, along with the better known case of the Katanga region of Congo, at the center of the blood mineral scandal with horrific mining practices that are driven by bourgeois battery, electric car worshippers, claiming that they're all about going "green," this while they obliviously lead to tearing the shit out of the planet for an ignorant and failed affectation. The ineffectual practices carried out with contempt for the inviolable laws of physics, specifically those of thermodynamics, that energy storage is "green" has done nothing, zero, nada, to arrest the collapse of the planetary atmosphere. It's only made things worse by in actual effect, greenwashing fossil fuels. As a result, thousands upon thousands of people are dying these past weeks from extreme heat. It will get far worse before it gets better.

I know...I know...I know...FUKUSHIMA.

Sigh...

Have a nice evening.

[cachukis]

1. Would change the world.

White paper. The followup extrapolation will be make money or save the planet.

[thought crime]

2. "It couldn't possibly be funnier than that." ??

Nope. Every single one of your posts attacking renewable energy is much, much funnier than that.

[NNadir]

3. There actually isn't very much that's funny about the number of people that antinukes kill each year, each week, each...

...day, each hour with their application of their incredible ignorance and their indifference to fossil fuels, about which they couldn't care less.

As I point out regularly, with a reference to one of the world's most prominent medical journals, the death toll associated with fossil fuels is about 7 million people per year:

For years, I've been quoting explicitly from this reference about the death toll associated with fossil fuels while cultists carry on about Fukushima. I'll do it again, with full text, not that it ever gets through to the abysmally ignorant advocates for ignoring fossil fuel deaths:

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). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.

Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:

The top five risks for attributable deaths for females were high SBP (5·25 million [95% UI 4·49–6·00] deaths, or 20·3% [17·5–22·9] of all female deaths in 2019), dietary risks (3·48 million [2·78–4·37] deaths, or 13·5% [10·8–16·7] of all female deaths in 2019), high FPG (3·09 million [2·40–3·98] deaths, or 11·9% [9·4–15·3] of all female deaths in 2019), air pollution (2·92 million [2·53–3·33] deaths or 11·3% [10·0–12·6] of all female deaths in 2019), and high BMI (2·54 million [1·68–3·56] deaths or 9·8% [6·5–13·7] of all female deaths in 2019). For males, the top five risks differed slightly. In 2019, the leading Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths globally in males was tobacco (smoked, second-hand, and chewing), which accounted for 6·56 million (95% UI 6·02–7·10) deaths (21·4% [20·5–22·3] of all male deaths in 2019), followed by high SBP, which accounted for 5·60 million (4·90–6·29) deaths (18·2% [16·2–20·1] of all male deaths in 2019). The third largest Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths among males in 2019 was dietary risks (4·47 million [3·65–5·45] deaths, or 14·6% [12·0–17·6] of all male deaths in 2019) followed by air pollution (ambient particulate matter and ambient ozone pollution, accounting for 3·75 million [3·31–4·24] deaths (12·2% [11·0–13·4] of all male deaths in 2019), and then high FPG (3·14 million [2·70–4·34] deaths, or 11·1% [8·9–14·1] of all male deaths in 2019).

If so called "renewable energy" worked to address fossil fuels - which it doesn't even remotely - any rational person would support them.

The problem is it doesn't work to address fossil fuels; it entrenchs them.

I was relatively ignorant - as dumb as any fossil fuel coddling antinuke here now - when I joined DU 22 years ago. So I did what zero antinukes here seem to do; I educated myself.

Now, all the religious chanting in the world - and let's be clear, antinukism is a dogmatic quaisreligous cult which denies reality, the reality being that we are using more fossil fuels than ever before - will not change the fact that German antinukes shut their nuclear plants and embraced coal and gas, procuring these from Vladmir Putin's Russia, thus killing people.

The trillions of dollars squandered on so called "renewable energy" did nothing to arrest this vast tragedy, the largest aspect being the collapse of the planetary atmosphere.

Worse, this affectation was built - all the battery bullshit that goes beyond the fast stretches of wilderness torn up to make useless wind and solar industrial plants - on the back of modern African slaves.

The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth

I would not be able to live with myself if I didn't do what little I can to confront the grotesque immorality of antinukes and expose it for what it is.

I have offered up a thread in praise of the magnificent Princy Mthombeni, who offers a clarion call for human decency. All sorts of antinukes are mucking around in it exchanging nonsensical horseshit, ignoring the point of the post, one such antinuke, who thinks that because the person's father is an automotive engineer, the tens, hundreds of thousands of nuclear engineers, working to save a dying world, are irrelevant.

One reads this kind of thing and one is disgusted with the vast ignorance leading to a collapsing world.

I invited people to read Ms. Mthombeni's piece to be uplifted by the fight against poverty to which she calls for nuclear energy to address, but as often the case, the ignorant do their best to assert their ignorance in lieu of decency.

The contempt for human decency rings true every time antinukes open their mouths. I suppose that since the thread has been demeaned by this caterwauling, all that is left is to invite yet another of the antinuke ignorance squad to go over to that thread and shit on it.

The world is burning; people are dying in the streets, in alleyways, in their homes from extreme heat. I'm sorry if that fact doesn't get through to people cheering for bulldozers, chainsaws and mines to advance their "renewable energy" cult in the face of this extreme human and environmental tragedy. I'm not really amused; I'm disgusted.

Have a nice day.

[thought crime]

4. In the face of a climate disaster, dark comedy. Like Dr. Strangelove.

Absurd characters claiming nuclear energy, and only nuclear energy as a possible solution, and doing everything they can think of, which amounts to nothing, against those who are doing good work to develop obtainable and sustainable energy solutions.

Yeah, it’s kind of funny. Not as funny as Dr. Strangelove, of course, because those characters were charming and relatable, but nuclear bros do have a little of that Gen. Jack D. Ripper kind of paranoia that deserves ridicule as well as revulsion. "Anti-Nukes are destroying our world. Anti-Nukes have contempt for human decency. That’s the way your hard-core Anti-Nuke works, Mandrake." Cuckoo.

[NNadir]

5. I am not amused.

More than seven million deaths take place each year as a result of air pollution.

I lay responsibility for that fact at the feet of antinukes.

While I would be inclined to agree that antinukes are clowns, they really aren't funny.

The whole planet is dying.