Use of nuclear technology gets green light in Rwanda

https://www.newtimes.co.rw/news/use-nuclear-technology-gets-green-light-rwanda

by ericdanielski • 6 years ago

83 114 6 years ago

newtimes.co.rw

TrainedMonkey• 6 years ago

the Minister said that [some of] the imported foods into Rwanda are preserved using nuclear technology

Huh, anyone knows what this is referring to?

mhh__3• 6 years ago

https://www.fda.gov/food/buy-store-serve-safe-food/food-irra....

Kills the bugs

chmod775• 6 years ago

That or they're just running fridges with nuclear power ;)

bayesian_horse• 6 years ago

That's not that strange or extra-ordinary. Sometimes radiation is used to sterilize food to increase shelf life. It doesn't make the food radioactive though. The sources of such radiation are similar to those used for medical purposes.

If I remember correctly, this is especially useful for spices. But probably other stuff, also.

manfredo• 6 years ago

You can blast foods with gamma radiation and then can it or otherwise put it in an airtight seal. The gamma radiation kills all foods and microbes that would cause it to decay. Gamma radiation is just photons (unlike alpha and beta radiation) so it doesn't case the food to become radioactive.

It would enable canning food without preservatives.

opwieurposiu• 6 years ago

Typically you put the food in the can and the cans the box and then blast the whole box in one go.

Very useful for countries with limited access to refrigeration.

This is also a common method for sterilizing single use medical stuff, band-aids, sutures, iv tubes etc.

ciarannolan2• 6 years ago

What is Russia's geopolitical angle here?

The gulf between peaceful nuclear program and weapons-grade nuclear program is vast and easily detectable.

A Plenary session of the Chamber of Deputies on Monday, June 15, 2020, voted the law approving the ratification of the agreement between Rwanda and Russia, on cooperation in the construction of the Centre of Nuclear Science and Technology on the territory of Rwanda.
The agreement was signed in the Russian city Sochi, on October 24, 2019.
The Centre will develop integrated nuclear energy solutions which the Ministry of Infrastructure expects to be beneficial to the advancement of several sectors of the economy especially agriculture, healthy, education, sciences and industry.

krastanov• 6 years ago

Russian companies build reactors and other similar tech. Like any other country, Russia is helping domestic industry grow. Same thing done by most big European countries, the US, China, etc.

ciarannolan2• 6 years ago

Do you mean they're helping their domestic peaceful nuclear energy industry grow?

atlasunshrugged2• 6 years ago

On top of that, Russia probably is concerned that they have few global strategic partners and is on the hunt for allies wherever they can find them. Although Rwanda probably can't help out in too many places (eg. additional ports in Africa like the Chinese and other are trying to secure in places like Djibouti) it is still part of the UN and could help project power in the region & serve as an example of the kind of support Russia can give to Africa. I think in S. Africa they're trying to engage in military partnerships and recently sent a few bombers down.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/10/21/russian-bombe...

ReptileMan2• 6 years ago

What is Russia's geopolitical angle here?

Nuclear reactors are big and expensive. And Africa will need lots of them for baseload if they are to catch up with the rest of the world economically.

Because unfortunately EU and USA nuclear industry is politically blocked - the competition in Africa will be between Russia and China

dghughes• 6 years ago

Here is the symbol used in the US for food that has been irradiated the process called radurization. I'm not sure how common it is and I've never looked for the symbol. I do recall years ago how people were upset about "radioactive food" due to irradiation. It's done using gamma rays or x-rays not particles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radura

mikedilger• 6 years ago

The color green, the imagery of leaves. This symbol clearly invokes the natural and warm feelings commonly associated with blasting things with nuclear radiation.

saagarjha3• 6 years ago

natural and warm feelings commonly associated with blasting things with nuclear radiation

Try going outside sometime ;)

a_bonobo• 6 years ago

Many if not most modern plant cultivars had at some point irradiation used on them to increase mutation rates to find interesting mutations with higher yield, higher resistance etc.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding

This has worked especially well in rice, chances are between 5% and 25% depending on country you're eating rice from a cultivar that has been bred using radiation.

That's done in these cool-looking atomic gardens where you have a radiation source in the middle and then plants are seeded in circles around it. The inner-most circle dies, the outer-most circle stays the same, the middle is interesting to breeders, you can see those on google earth, there's a picture here: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/atom-garden-eden/

It's one of the things the consumer would be very upset about if told, but has been living fine with for decades, like the fact that your insulin, your washing powder, and your contact sense solution is made by genetically modified bacteria.

m4rtink5• 6 years ago

Yep, this is funny - people have problem with GMO where we have atleasts some idea what the modification did but at the same time most of what people eat was created by radiation induced random mutation.

mikece• 6 years ago

“Living near a nuclear energy plant is like living near a nuclear bomb which can explode and cause more damages [said an MP]...”

This is typical of people who aren’t educated about nuclear power. To have a minimally functioning fission bomb you need enrichment north of 98% whereas nuclear power plants use fuel that is only enriched to 2%. It’s like comparing the hydrogen peroxide you but at the grocery store to the purified stuff that’s used in liquid rocket experiments. Yes, there is uranium in a nuclear power plant just as there is in a nuclear bomb but the type and enrichment is so different as to make them practically not the same thing.

patentatt• 6 years ago

To be fair to the MP, however, he said it’s “like” living by a bomb, it was a metaphor. And there are examples in history of accidents at nuclear power plants that have caused damage to their surroundings. So his statement may not be indicative of misunderstanding the fundamentals of nuclear power.

ashtonkem3• 6 years ago

It’s an awful metaphor once you actually look into the statistics.

ekianjo4• 6 years ago

Its as useful a metaphor as saying living next to a pond is as dangerous as living next to an ocean.

Bad analogies are bad.

skissane3• 6 years ago

A time-traveller from a thousand years in the future abducts you. You are informed that you will be dumped at one of two spacetime coordinates, but you'll be allowed to choose which – right outside Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant at 1:22am local time on 26 April 1986, or an equivalent distance from ground zero in Hiroshima at 8:14am local time on 6 August 1945. Which do you pick?

Neither choice is good, but the odds of survival are much higher with the first choice than the second. Nuclear power accidents and use of nuclear weapons are not really comparable – as bad as nuclear power accidents are, use of nuclear weapons is far more deadly.

BurningFrog2• 6 years ago

"Causing damage to surroundings" is to "exploding nuclear bomb" as a broken tail light is to 9/11.

derblitzmann• 6 years ago

Yep. Roughly same source, but a very different "pathway" of energy. Nuclear bombs depend on prompt neutrons, whereas nuclear power depends on delayed neutrons. Hence why the enrichment of the Uranium is important.

And those who bring up the Chernobyl explosion, those were due to Hydrogen gas build up. Which is an interesting case study of Murphy's law.

bvogelzang• 6 years ago

The Chernobyl explosion was a steam explosion caused by superheated cooling water.

You may be thinking of Fukushima which was mainly due to the build up of hydrogen gas.

standardUser• 6 years ago

"This is typical of people who aren’t educated about nuclear power."

This is typical of people who are aware of Chernobyl and Fukushima. There have not been utility-scale many nuclear power plants in the history of the world. The fact that two out of ~600 failed catastrophically makes natural gas, wind and solar look really safe by comparison (especially since they are all cheaper and do not produce radioactive waste that lasts forever). How many catastrophic energy plant failures can you name that were not nuclear?

yongjik2• 6 years ago

Does it have to energy plants, or does general infrastructure qualify? Because,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pipeline_accidents

jdavis703• 6 years ago

Non-renewable plants are still responsible for far more deaths than nuclear plants. The choice is: do we want a safer plant that fails in a sensational manner every few decades or do we want a more dangerous plant that steadily emits lethal pollution?

soperj• 6 years ago

There have been plenty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_...

Worst being Banqiao and Shimantan Dams failure that killed nearly 200 thousand people.

jiggawatts2• 6 years ago

The Banqiao and Shimantan dam failures in China killed ~170K people.

The Machchu-2 dam failure killed 5K people in India.

The South Fork dam failure killed 2K people in the US.

Coal mining directly killed over 100 people annually up until the mid 1980s, and continues to kill 10-30 people annually.

Oil drilling in general kills about 100-110 people annually.

There's not much good data for wind turbines, but generally wind power kills 10+ people annually, either due to fires in the turbine housing or falls.

There have been a number of deaths at various power plants, often due to electrocution or steam boiler explosions.

The only truly safe power utility-scale power source in widespread use is solar.

BTW: Fukushima killed 1 person directly due to the nuclear material. Even Chernobyl only killed between 30 to 80 people directly, depending on how you count it.

If you want to count indirect deaths due to Chernobyl and Fukushima, then you also have to compare that to indirect deaths due to traditional power. You don't want to know how many people diesel, oil, and coal kill annually!

Reedx• 6 years ago

Nuclear energy is far safer than gas, and about the same as wind/solar:

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#modern-r...

drcross• 6 years ago

While i'm not fundamentally anti nuclear the long lead time and high cost of installation surely makes renewable and battery storage a serious contender against nuclear at this stage, right?

toomuchtodo3• 6 years ago

Nuclear is not cost competitive against renewables and storage, correct. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a role in the generation mix as a small baseload component, but that role will require subsidies based on nuclear’s low carbon footprint.

https://www.lazard.com/media/451086/lazards-levelized-cost-o...

pfdietz6• 6 years ago

Nuclear actually doesn't have a role as baseload in a cost optimized grid, especially in a country at low latitude.

credit_guy2• 6 years ago

Rwanda is a small country, about the size of the Massachusetts state in the US, but with double the population. It's in the mountains, lots of forests and lakes. No deserts. Not a lot of unused land where you can mount solar panels. Nuclear makes sense for them.

toomuchtodo3• 6 years ago

Rwanda is roughly 6.5 million acres in size. Half of its roughly 200MW of total generating capacity comes from hydro and solar, the other half coming from natural gas and biomass thermal generation. To replace existing thermal generation would be ~12k acres of solar, and another ~12k acres for every additional 100MW in solar generating capacity desired (or inter connectors to other grids in the region). I also assume that rooftops are available for solar.

potiuper• 6 years ago

The cheapest grid scale electricity generation option are dams in this case on the Ruzizi.

ggm• 6 years ago

Dams have their own consequences. Downstream flow change, deep water de-oxygenation, reduction in silt flows (they can be beneficial)

Not that anything is without its costs/benefits basically.

Mengkudulangsat• 6 years ago

I'm a big fan of Russia's floating nuclear plants [1]. Wouldn't they be able to just... mass produce this exact same design like the Model T and tow them to customers?

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49446235

pfdietz6• 6 years ago

Renewables are simply cheaper than nuclear at this point.

(Downvoted by someone who doesn't know the data.)

ReptileMan2• 6 years ago

Even if this is true (which we cannot know since there is no pipeline of projects - so no economies of scale for nuclear) you deeply discount the price of reliability.

We need batteries that are order of magnitude better to have something that could produce 5GW of energy for weeks on end.

ekianjo4• 6 years ago

Rwanda is a very interesting player in Africa. They are experimenting with many technologies that the West can only dream of. They use drone deliveries for emergency medicines as well with good success, between plants that manufacture them and hospitals dozens of kilometers away.

Google2342• 6 years ago

I highly doubt your second sentence is true

kolikotime• 6 years ago

They do have a very proactive government that deploys experimental technology in highly public pilots. That you doubt it’s not true is purely because it’s an African country.

BurningFrog2• 6 years ago

Sounds more like Wakanda!

pnako• 6 years ago

In the west we're still primitives, using infrastructure like roads and supply chain logistics to achieve the same thing.

ekianjo4• 6 years ago

That's the point: they don't have resources to have roads like in the West, and they decided to be open about doing it differently.

grecy2• 6 years ago

I spent a month in Rwanda in late 2018, and it's an extremely impressive little country.

It fascinates me that we hear so little of them, our media only wanting to bring us the gripping headlines (which are of course all bad)

- By far and away the cleanest country I've ever been to on the planet (WAY better than Canada/USA/Australia)

- They have a thriving tech sector, developing phone apps, hardware and other software that is in use all over East Africa

- Extremely well educated, kind and considerate population. The young people especially were very eager to speak English and discuss the outside world. They knew more about a ton of stuff than I do (just a simple Software Engineer / traveller)

- Their economy is booming.

I wish them all the best!

stephenhuey• 6 years ago

My trip was in 2014 and I concur with how clean and beautiful it is. In addition to the capital being an impressive city, another amazing opportunity awaiting you there is visiting mountain gorillas. I just uploaded a video of my experience a few days ago:

https://vimeo.com/stephenhuey/gorillas

grecy2• 6 years ago

It's half the price in Uganda!

Here's me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1vhZ03OKKE

gt565k• 6 years ago

Hope that plant gets built, but I mean just look at Bulgaria, where corruption is rampant. We haven't been able to complete the Belene Nuclear Power Plant for 30 years now.

Doubt the Rwandan plant will get built any time soon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belene_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Use of nuclear technology gets green light in Rwanda

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