Student knocks on the Professor’s office door.

Professor: Come right in.

Student: Good afternoon, professor. Am sorry I have no appointment; but can I see you for a minute?

Professor: Of course you can. You know I have an open-door policy. Come in and sit down. What’s on your mind?

Student: I’ve been mulling over a problem for some time, and I’ve concluded that I’ll profit from discussing it with someone more knowledgeable than I. It’s not really a problem as such. But thinking about it worries me.

Professor: Just go to the point.

Student: Recently, I read that our country is planning to build a nuclear power plant to produce electricity. Is that so?

Professor: I’ve heard that too. I understand the Federal Government of Nigeria has contracted with the Russian Federation to build it. Why is this a problem for you?

Student: I’ve read so many nightmarish accounts of nuclear power plant accidents that I resolved to learn more about power plants.

Professor: Actually, the decision to build a nuclear power plant is a political one, so I hope the president will educate the Nigerian public on the pros and cons of nuclear power and why he thinks Nigeria needs one now.

Important potential

“But as a citizen I commend you for striving to be better informed about such an important potential undertaking by our government. The professor then goes on to explain as follows: As you know Nigeria is plagued by absolute and relative lack of electricity depending on where you live. Power outages are the norm rather than the exception even in affluent neighbourhoods. Many institutions can hardly operate fully in Nigeria in part because of erratic electricity supply.

Companies that do establish in Nigeria do so at their own risk because many as well as some private individuals have to resort to private generators for their electricity needs. Schools, hospitals, clinics and other essential services are obliged to operate with suboptimal levels of electricity.

At night especially in the villages the country is covered by a blanket of darkness from as early as 6:00 pm in some areas, and many people make do with lanterns and kerosene stoves. You’re already familiar with all these, so let’s go back to power plants.

Yes, nuclear power plants can be used to generate energy and many developed countries use nuclear energy from such plants to supplement their electricity needs. Fossil fuel from coal and oil, the traditional sources of electricity contributes about 80% of global carbon dioxide which has been implicated in the undesirable warming of our planet.

In contrast uranium fission or the splitting of uranium atom which is critical to energy production in nuclear power plants does not produce any carbon dioxide. This is one reason why many countries turn to nuclear energy as source of clean environmentally friendly energy source for electricity.

In France nuclear power accounts for as much as 80% of her electrical energy needs. However in this regard she is an exception rather than the rule, because nuclear power contributes less electrical energy in other cultures. In fact the proportion contributed by different fuels to a country’s electricity output differs from one country to another.

In the United States 49% of her electricity is from coal; 22% is from natural gas; 19% is from nuclear energy and the rest is from ancillary sources. In the United Kingdom the corresponding numbers are 40%, 33% and 19%, respectively. In Italy 80% of its energy is from fossil fuels and 20% is from hydroelectric and renewable energy sources.

Student: Why is nuclear energy not more widely used to generate electricity?

Professor: That’s a good question. But let’s first briefly and simply review how energy is derived from nuclear power plants. The chemical element uranium is very energy dense as the amount of free energy it contains is millions of times the amount in a similar mass of chemical fuel such as gasoline. Consequently uranium is utilized by most nuclear power plants as a source of energy.

Within a nuclear reactor in a power plant the uranium atom is split into two by a chemical reaction and the process results in the release of energy in the form of large amounts of radiation and heat. Some of the heat is used to generate steam which in turn is used to drive the turbines that produce electricity as in fossil fuel plants.

Student: So the main difference between a nuclear power plant and a fossil fuel plant is that nuclear power plants in addition to producing energy in the form of heat also produce radiation.

Professor: You are perfectly right, and that is a big difference. It is this undesirable bye product, radiation that has made nuclear power such a controversial method of producing electricity. In fact most of the disadvantages of nuclear power plants relate to the deleterious effects of radiation on humans and animals.

The opponents of deriving electricity from nuclear plants are fearful that nuclear power plant accidents will result in catastrophic effects because of enormous release of radiation into the atmosphere where it can cause genetic mutations and cancer in humans and animals including fish.

Understandably young growing children are particularly vulnerable to the deleterious effects of nuclear accidents. The radiation can be carried by the wind to faraway places so that the deleterious consequences of nuclear accidents are not limited to nearby areas.

These fears were substantiated by a serious nuclear power accident in Chernobyl (Ukraine) in 1986. In this disaster radioactive fallout was not limited to Chernobyl area but radioactive material also contaminated large areas of the then Soviet Union and even parts of Eastern Europe.

Thousands of people were evacuated from the most contaminated areas leaving behind several ghost towns. One gets an eerie feeling while viewing these ghost towns in you-tubes currently posted in the internet. Reports of the total number of fatalities due to the Chernobyl accident vary.

In one account, after the nuclear disaster 47 people died, 28 from acute radiation exposure. Another report predicted 60,000 deaths from cancer as a result of the disaster. So many more people may yet die due to the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

The answer to your last question is now obvious. Nuclear energy is not widely used for electricity generation because many people are fearful that radiation from a nuclear accident will result in horrible genetic mutations and cancer in humans and animals as well as contaminating farmlands and the food they produce.

Student: It is no wonder that the Japanese have been demonstrating against nuclear energy since their recent nuclear plant accident.

Professor: Yes, as you know in March this year an earthquake hit Japan and set off a tsunami that damaged nuclear power plants in Fukushima, Japan and this caused the spread of radiation into the atmosphere, the soil and the Pacific Ocean.

Nuclear disaster

While we await full report of the effects of this nuclear disaster, its consequences are already being felt around the world. For instance, Italy has since extended the moratorium it imposed on nuclear power plants construction after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. And recently the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, announced that her government will phase out all of the country’s 17 nuclear plants by the year 2022. Although the Chancellor did not expect in Germany the type of natural disaster that hit Japan in 2011, her government took their decision as anti-nuclear protesters demonstrated in several cities in the country.

The German chancellor said she was dismayed by the helplessness of a technologically advanced nation like Japan after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. She decided to abandon nuclear energy in order not to inflict on her people the type of humanitarian disaster caused by the Fukushima nuclear accident. I shudder to think what the Nigeria of today would do if faced with a nuclear plant accident in which massive amounts of radiation are released into the atmosphere.

Student: Why is Nigeria continuing with the building of nuclear power plants?

Professor: It is a truism that when nuclear disasters occur most governments step back and reexamine their own nuclear ambitions because of the possibility of disastrous exposure of people, animals and farmlands to radiation. This is why it surprises many people that instead Nigeria appears to be heading full speed towards nuclear energy especially at this time.

Remember that in the beginning I told you that the decision to build a nuclear power plant is a political one. So only the president can truly answer your question.

Professor: It should be a common practice that before embarking on building and operating a nuclear power plant governments should first exhaust the use of safer and traditional methods of generating electricity and have in place essential public infrastructure such as efficient healthcare services, motorable roads, clean water and schools that can produce indigenous scientific and technical manpower.

Furthermore, before establishing such a complex money guzzler as a nuclear power plant, Nigeria is obligated to consider seriously her past and present experiences in handling large sums of money that are meant for essential public services.

Student: Thank you so much professor for your help.

Professor: You’re welcome, and if you need additional help or a reading list for the subject we discussed, don’t hesitate to come back.