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.