Are there any countries that have maybe you think have indicated interest to get in this
technology? Maybe insider information? Well, I don't know if it's if I have anything
insider. I think everything can be that's that's a nice thing about this map is if you want to
verify any of it, you can. Welcome to today's episode of the Afrinuq podcast. Today I'm joined
with Jake Kinza and a spot in the energy for Groot Hub from United States Washington DC.
So today he's going to be telling us about advanced nuclear map. So Jake, I got a reference to get in
touch with you from Dr. Todd and when I was having the conversation with him, he felt it very important
for us to discuss about your work in the organization and thank God that you are here with us. So
please, can you tell us a bit about you and what you do in energy for Groot Hub?
Yeah, of course. And thank you for having me on. I'm very happy to be here. So my name is Jake
Kinza. I'm a policy analyst for Nuclear Power at the Energy for Growth Hub and I do work with Todd
Moss. So my work is fairly wide ranging at the Energy for Growth Hub, but one of my
bigger projects is besides nuclear power in general is the advanced nuclear markets map
where we try to sort of understand the market, the potential market size for advanced nuclear
technology. Okay, so I was wondering what was like the line of thoughts like,
I know Energy for Growth Hub tries to adapt policies to developing countries and while some
other organization in the States try to make policies for its own country. So you guys try to
adapt it to how it can be applicable to the developed world. Am I right? Yeah. So I was
wondering what was your line of thoughts in trying to develop this advanced nuclear map?
You never had anything like the normal nuclear like, okay, I know the categories of nuclear is
Gen 3, Gen 3 plus Gen 4. And I want to think that advanced nuclear means maybe between Gen 3 and
Gen 4 or Gen 3 plus to Gen 4 and stuff like that. Maybe the SMRs falls into this category. I'm sure
if we go into the details of the links to the advanced nuclear map, we can get details about
the the nuclear technology captured in this map. So can you tell us what was the line of thoughts
on trying to draw up this map in the first place? Because you know, when people want to draw a map,
if I want to go back to history, people try to maybe there was a dispute or maybe there was a
misunderstanding just to delineate and make a very clear distinction. People come up with maps. So
what was the case for this advanced nuclear map, please?
Great. Yeah, that's a good question. So not a dispute, but I think there is sort of a prevalent
misunderstanding, I will say, that nuclear power is only for rich countries. So when you think of
nuclear power, you think, you know, France, the United States, China built a lot of nuclear power.
But historically, that's actually not the case. And my colleague, Jessica Levere,
wrote a blog post and has done a lot of work on this, that nuclear power is actually prevalent
in all countries across the world. So even at the time when they were first building the nuclear
power plants, Pakistan, India, etc. Bangladesh today would be another example of a non high-income
country building nuclear power plants. So what we really wanted to try to do is kind of show that
actually nuclear power isn't just for wealthy developed countries. It's also for there's a
great amount of interest all around the world, including Africa, South America, of course,
and East Asia and South Asia, especially. And secondarily, we really wanted to show beyond
this interest that there was a great need in these areas. So one of the stats that came out of this
project is that we projected electric growth and electricity demand until through 2030 and 2050.
And we found that about 90% of all demand growth is going to be outside of high income areas.
So, you know, places like, you know, Germany, France, the UK really actually aren't nearly as
important as Indonesia, Nigeria, Bangladesh. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, so I was trying to see how you came
up with those little metrics that contributed. You were trying to talk about the energy demand
come 2030. And this rightly, Thales, was it the UN goal you had in mind to make this 2030 or 2050?
Was it the picture you had in mind to make this projection? Why would you want to use the demand
gap for 2030 or 2050 and not 2020? I mean, like, there might be 2025 or something like that or
something else. Right. So when we were making the map, it was 2020. So there was something
that was just quite easy about having one decade and three decades. Of course, 2050 is quite an
important date because that is the year that most countries around the world, I believe,
are targeting as net zero. And that's really one of the important things when it comes to nuclear
power is that it is one of the many available truly clean energy solutions that has little to
zero, little to no emissions. So there was a there was a good sort of parallel there with kind of
trying to line up everything with 2050 and understanding kind of, you know, the scale of
the challenge in a lot of these countries, which is quite large. Okay. So coming to the map,
there are two indicators that you highlighted. There's the energy electricity demand gap in
2050 and the nuclear readiness score. So why are these, why was it just these two indicators? Like,
what are the relevance of these two metrics in this map? Yeah. So the question that we were
trying to answer is what is the potential market size for advanced nuclear technologies around
the world? And to understand the size of a market, we have it's sort of a twofold issue. One is how
big is the possible demand? So all of the potential electricity needs that will need to be met by 2050.
And we found that there was really quite large. So between now and 2050, it will approximately
double around the world. In many places, it will grow much faster than that, especially in many
African nations. The second part of the problem, though, is, you know, who is actually going to
be prepared to adopt this technology? It doesn't really matter how big your needs are if you aren't
ready for it. So the second part was we took, we made a checklist. This is a very difficult
problem to try to figure out, you know, how ready a country is for nuclear power. But
we made a 10 point checklist that we graded pretty much every country around the world. That's over
a million people on and it had, you know, sort of readiness indicators like does a country have a
regulatory body? Do they have a policy authority in charge of nuclear power? Do they have research
reactors already? Many countries already have those, which research reactors are very small
reactors used mainly for medical or agricultural or just research purposes. And then we also looked
at, you know, what are the interests do these countries have in nuclear power? So do countries
have agreements with supplier countries like Russia, China, Korea, even the United States,
whether those are, you know, soft, just technical assistance or hard, which is an actual agreement
to build a reactor or to supply a reactor. And so when we combine these things, we got a pretty
good sense of where we thought countries were on the scale and we made it a four point scale,
which is they're ready by 2030. So essentially, they're ready now if they want to be. So this is
every country that has a nuclear reactor or is currently constructing one or has an active tender
to build one. And then there is the potentially ready by 2030 group. So that's the light green on
the map. I think of these countries that have taken very substantive concrete steps towards
building a reactor. So they have agreements with supplier countries, they have policies stating
that they want nuclear power. So in Africa, these are countries like Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria,
the Sudan. And then last, the last two groups are just potentially ready by 2050, which are
countries that have taken some very basic steps to get there. And unlikely to be ready by 2050.
So these are countries that are essentially have made no progress or have shown zero interest.
Okay, so when you combine these two things, you get sort of a sense of how big is the market in a
given country and how ready is it for nuclear power? Yeah. Okay, so I'm kind of in between two
kind of I'm battling between two ideologies right now, because I'm a little bit constrained to think
that the US that developed this map, energy for growth, have been in US, although doing it for
the developing countries, hopefully to lift the technology from US to other countries or claims.
But most of these countries you listed, having agreements with non US, I mean, not with US
countries like Russia, China and stuffs like that. So I'm a little bit concerned, like, do you think
that the aim of this map is going to be achieved for the purpose it was designed, or you are just
making it a very liberal publication that will be available to any person that or country that want
to use it to advance their maybe, maybe goals or mission as a country. So because I'm sorry to say
more maybe I'm a little bit ignorant, if not the UAE, which adopted the technology from Korea,
which is a little bit like a conduit from US, I don't see any other country,
apart China, where they were trying to build the AP1000 and right beside it, the Chinese people were
also implementing their technology using their own method of reverse engineering, if I may say.
So I wonder like, what's your hope that this map will achieve beyond just selling the US technologies
to advanced countries and also maybe to African countries if they come to take it, but very few
of African countries as I know, have signed agreement with US state, but they have some maybe
agreements in terms of maybe research or technology transfer and stuffs like that. So can you a little
bit enlighten me on what you as a US guy or the country stands to gain from this, if it
becomes a success, will it actually kind of feedback or funnel back to you in reality? I wouldn't
know if I'm getting this right. Right, right. No, that's a great question. So I think the thing
to understand is that these countries, if they decide that nuclear power is going to be part of
the teacher energy mix and is important to their development goals, which several have,
they will get this technology somehow. Russia is very year to export nuclear power plants.
They're very active in it. And the thing that Russia is able to do is when they sell a nuclear
power plant, they don't just sell the power plant, they also bring the financing a lot of times.
It can come with other security deals. And that's something that frankly the US is not currently
able to compete with or at least wasn't when we were looking at the map. So part of this is to
just show worldwide, there's a lot of demand here and there's a huge development need that
could hopefully be met. The second thing is it was intended a little bit also for people in
the United States to see this is a real market that you are sort of missing out on right now.
So up until last year, for example, the US Development Finance Corporation had a prohibition
on finding any projects to do with nuclear power. So that was actually one of the ideas we had when
creating the map is being able to show people that this is a really relevant policy field that we
need to be proactive in. One thing that, and by the way, the prohibition did get lifted last year
in July. So hopefully there will be some activity there. So the one thing that I think the US can
really offer is we have a very active advanced nuclear industry coming up with a lot of really
promising new technologies. So things like new scale, Oclow, etc. that have sort of smaller
reactors. So like 60 megawatt scale are just much more appropriate for an emerging market
context in a place like Ghana or Nigeria. So I think it's something where the US has really
receded in this field over the past couple of decades. And if these technologies live up to
their promise, I would love to see that turn around. But it's up to us whether that happens or
not. Okay, so in this map, you have like seven filters that you are judged to be what you rightly
used to make people see the metrics that are important as the case may be. So there's this
filter about the water stress in 2040. And what was it pointing to? What's the aim that water
stress aims to achieve? Like why do you have to include it among the filters? Why is it important
for nuclear advanced nuclear? Yeah, that's actually so that we had the idea. So this is the first
iteration of the mapping the global market for advanced nuclear. And we are doing a second
iteration with third way that I believe that they will release in late 2021 that digs in a
little bit deeper on these issues. So water stress is thinking about primarily the desalination
energy needs, but also climate change impacts broadly. So desalination is something that has
already begun in a lot of countries. South Africa, I believe a year or so ago, had to set up a number
of temporary desalination plants to meet water energy needs. And I think that's one of the
things that we need to do. And the thing about desalination is, one, it's going to be needed
more in the future. Populations are going to grow. Water supplies are going to become more
stressed, especially in places like Southeast Asia and the Middle East. And the second thing is
it is highly energy intensive. And that's just pretty much the physics of it. So you need a
large consistent energy source in order to efficiently run a desalination plant, which, in
a nuclear power plant, is actually really perfect for something like that. The second part of this,
though, is just broadly adapting to the impacts of climate change requires a lot of energy. So
producing enough concrete and steel for dams and other adaptation needs requires a ton of energy
and gauging what areas of the world are going to be impacted most, I think, can help visualize
where we'll have the greatest needs. Okay, so thank you for that insight. I was kind of wondering
the nuclear security aspect seems to be a very great metrics that you included and also part of
the filters that you have there. Like the Nuclear Trade Initiative do have index that they release,
I think, every year to show how countries are compliant to nuclear security measures. So I
wonder, why did you have to include it as one of these filters or one of the parameters you needed
to make this map like what we should consider in this map? Yeah, so the reason we introduced this,
so just to be clear, the NTI index actually doesn't factor into our readiness checklist,
but we did include it on the map itself as a filter, because one of the sort of greatest
criticisms of the idea of exporting nuclear power and one of the reasons that the United States has
kind of gotten out of the business over the past couple of decades is proliferation risk,
both proliferation risk as well as just the risk of nuclear materials falling into the wrong hands.
So we included this as a kind of way to say, okay, so if you want to look at these two
metrics from NTI and just remove every country that scores low, what does it look like then?
Or if you want to look only at countries that score highly on supporting global efforts,
for instance, what does it look like then? What's the market like? And we found that
in most cases, it's actually quite still robust. So Indonesia scored very highly,
have a lot of needs and have a demonstrated interest in nuclear power, for example. So this
was kind of our attempt to preempt some criticism of the entire idea of exporting nuclear power.
Cool. Okay, so the global market for nuclear power is going to rise, obviously,
following both the demand and also increasing population and everything that ties to that.
So you are more optimistic about the advanced nuclear than the traditional, maybe large,
maybe 1,000 or bigger already established technologies. But don't you have some concern that
since these technologies are not yet proven, I mean, like it's not been tested anywhere, although
you have labs in the US where you get to test them. But these countries where you want to sell
them to, especially in Africa, don't you have concerns they might have, maybe
fears that these things have not been tested and maybe may not be more predisposed to get
in this technology? Is there anything that is in place to alleviate such fears if there are?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's a great point. Ghana is not going to build a nuclear reactor
that wasn't first built in the United States. I just don't think that that's going to happen.
I'm using Ghana as an example, but no country is going to want to be, for lack of a better word,
a guinea pig, right? Which is why I think the test demonstrations in the United States
are so critical. So I believe Natrium just announced one. I believe Oklo and Newscale are also building
reactors in the United States first, a new scale I think in Idaho. And I think that's critical.
I mean, you have to demonstrate that this technology functions safely before you have any help with
exporting it. And that's something that I think the United States should support companies in
doing. And I think we do actually support for the most part. But yeah, that's absolutely a good
point. And to your broader point about the traditional large light water reactors that are
gigawatt or two or three or four in scale are already proven technologies. But for a lot of
emerging market contexts, it kind of just doesn't really make sense. So if you take the reactor that
Egypt is building with Russia's help, it's 4.8 gigawatts. It will cost $30 billion. And it's
probably a perfectly fine project. But if you try to move that and do it in a context like Nigeria,
Nigeria's installed capacity is something like 12 gigawatts. So integrating a 5 gigawatt reactor
is just prohibitively difficult, just from like an infrastructure perspective, from a demand
perspective. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it just would be so transmissions and the distribution network,
we have to be overhauled. And yeah, I get your point. Right. And of course, you don't just have
demand pop out of nowhere instantly. So it will take even longer to pay it back. And financing
that $30 billion project is just going to be more difficult in some countries. And that's just how
it is. So if you have a project that's like a small modular reactor, that's 60 megawatts or 120
megawatts, it can be financed for on the order of millions rather than billions. It's just a much
easier project at that point. That's cool. So are there any countries that maybe you think
have indicated interest to get in this technology, maybe insider information?
Well, I don't know if I have anything insider. I think everything can be, that's a nice thing
about this map is if you want to verify any of it, you can. You can go out and find the information.
It's all very publicly available. But yeah, in Africa, there's quite a bit of interest, I think.
So there's two countries that we rate as green, South Africa, which of course already has commercial
nuclear. Egypt, which I just mentioned, is building, it's currently constructing a reactor,
although it has now been delayed from 2026 to 2028 into 2030. But I believe that's mainly
due to political concerns with Russia. But we rate a number of other countries that's very
interested. So I believe Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, especially Kenya,
Nigeria, Ghana, they all include nuclear power in their projections for their future energy
mix in the 2030s. And it's appeared to have every intention to build nuclear reactors. Now,
I think none of them are in a particular rush, but they're engaging with IAEA, they're engaging
with supplier countries. And I think it's not at all unbelievable that in 2035, one of these
countries could have built a advanced nuclear power plant. Of course, outside Africa, there is
Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, I find are very interesting. Indonesia specifically
has very interesting energy needs, just due to its sort of island nation context that SMRs could
be particularly useful for, and they seem to recognize that as well. And the last thing
I think people should watch for is coal replacement. So nuclear power for a lot of reasons is a really
ideal replacement for coal power. And two of the countries that I think are most interesting,
because it's good, firm power, it's clean. And in a lot of cases, you could even just plug it
directly into the grid where you have the coal power plants. And South Africa is very big on coal.
Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, South Africa is I think 86% coal or something like that. I mean,
very, very high. And they're having a lot of trouble with their new coal plants as well. So
places like Poland and South Africa that are relatively developed economies could absolutely
handle nuclear power plants and have a huge decarbonization need. Even if they don't have
huge new energy needs, they have big needs for decarbonization. And I think you could see a
lot of coal replacement there. So I believe those are places to watch as well.
It's cool. So thank you so much for this explanation, because some people might be looking
for how to get really these two kind of indicators that you have highlighted. Some people might want
to wonder like, okay, so what's the readiness of this country? What's the energy demand and
stuff like that? But when you come to a country like Nigeria, where I am, we consider a lot of
things and it's not that there are no solutions available, but some pressing unique challenges
tends to make those solutions unreachable or something kind of a high-rich kind of task.
So I wonder like, do you have any way of making some country specific adaptations so that some
really varied kind of factors can be kind of tinkered on to see how you can make it a little
bit more contextual, contextually important to some specific like a place like Nigeria, for example.
It's not that we've not had good plans or stuff like that, but you find some political changes
and some maybe things coming up to scuttle those really nice plans. So I wonder like, do you have
any way of like mitigating because if companies that want to build these plans comes to the
country, they need to be sure that they have the enabling environment to get the reward from their
investment. So is there any way that you kind of open the gates, making it a bit open source to
tink around this value so that some contextual points can be filtered into it to actually give
the rightful this thing and also extending it to other countries or maybe climbs where they may
have different opinions about maybe policy implementation or things that affect policy
implementation. I think it's somehow important to include this into this metric. So I wonder,
is there any room for that or it's something that is open for future kind of improvement or
stuff like that? Yeah, so the short answer is we didn't really do anything like that for this
exercise. We cover, I believe, 148 countries. So doing a kind of country by country judgment call
is not really in the cards for an exercise like that. But I mean, it is a good point. The thing,
I try to stay optimistic and hopeful. So my sort of thinking is, okay, is Nigeria maybe not ready
for nuclear right this second? Maybe not. It could political things happen that changes the
situation? Absolutely. But I mean, we're talking about 2030 and 2050 even here, a lot changes in
three decades. So it's more of, you know, it's not so much what's the, you know, what is going to
happen as what could happen, right? And Nigeria is making the right steps, you know, so every
country is going to have its own political political issues and specific circumstances that's going
to make it easier or harder. And of course, the one thing to know about this map is, for any given
country, we're not going to be exactly right. But we think as a broad picture, it's a pretty
reasonable representation of what the future could look like. That's great. I sincerely
appreciate your explanation. And I just want to wind down the beat towards the conclusion of this
discussion. You've really explained a lot about this map. And I'm really very pleasantly impressed
about what details you've considered to come up with this really expository map on the market for
advanced nuclear. So but there is one point I just want to like ask you, like, what if
the stuff that you consider, like, what are the like, the fallback, do I say, I don't know,
what are the fallback mechanisms you have, should those things that we are considered to develop in
this map, do not hold any longer? Take, for example, now, the new drive by the UN or organizations
associated with it to including renewables and stuff like that. And they are really sounding
very low key on when it comes to nuclear. So I wonder, like, do you have any way of like,
convincing or buying, buying kind of buying them into the idea of including nuclear, or you just
want to show them, and then they will convince themselves if it is appropriate or not? Yeah.
So I think one thing to the answer is that I'm, we're hoping to just show that there is actually
real interest in real demand for this technology. But, you know, the approach that we take and are
the energy for growth hub takes and also I personally take is we're very technology neutral.
We don't really, like, ideology try to drive us towards a favorite technology. I mean, the thing
is this whole map is predicated on advanced nuclear technologies living up to their promise of being a
certain price and a certain functionality. And if they don't, then they don't. And that's how it is.
But if they do, and everyone should hope that they do, because it could be, you know,
very key in the fight against climate change and also very key in the development of countries,
then this is what we're looking at. So we're not saying anything like, oh, we should focus more
nuclear and less on solar or anything like that. We should focus on everything to the greatest of
our ability. So, you know, if nuclear power, advanced nuclear doesn't live up to its promise,
that's just how it is. But we're just trying to point out, you know, don't close any doors or
write anything off, because there really is a real need and a real demand here for this.
All right. So just the second to the last point, you know, you've raised the point about finance
to bring in new nuclear builds. And that really kind of fails in terms of the established
large light water reactors. We have not really kind of deployed this new advanced nuclear builds,
like you listed or enumerated, but they have been tested in Idaho and other labs or sites in the US.
I don't know, because even the light water or larger reactors, they never envisaged the great
cost overruns they were they are currently experiencing. I don't know if there is, if it
is right to ask in the first place, if they consider the likelihood of cost overruns, because
if you come tell me that, okay, hey, give me 100 million, and then I give you an advanced reactor
in your backyard. And then when you have given you the 100 million, you go, I'm sorry, we did not
consider this. Oh, we did not envisage this. Oh, I'm sorry. It is now 250 million, you know.
So and it doesn't sound any different from the already established light water reactors that
brings us with this kind of story. I wonder if there's anything that maybe I'm not sure if you
are amassing the right person, but there's anything you have put in place to kind of
forestall this kind of occurrence in the future. I wouldn't know if there is anything like that.
Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's a really good question, a really common sort of objection
when it comes to nuclear power. The issue, and I touched on a little bit earlier, the issue with
nuclear power today, whether it's the plant in Georgia or that has experienced overruns or any
of the numerous other large light water plants that have become delayed or extensive overruns,
is that it's not really a nuclear technology thing. It's that building large infrastructure
projects is very difficult. It's very expensive. They almost always go over budget. They almost
always go over time. So the solution is make them smaller. It's a lot harder for, you know,
a 60 megawatt plant to go over budget versus a 5 gigawatt plant. And the other thing is,
if companies are able to begin what they hope to do, which is manufacture these things in
sort of a factory setting, it's not going to be a matter of, okay, we're going to experience cost
overruns trying to build this brand new thing out in the desert in Egypt. It's more of, you know,
okay, we already, these just come off the factory line already built. There's just much less risk
there, right? So hopefully that solves that problem. I mean, it might turn out that they end
up being very expensive to do that way, and it just doesn't work. But hopefully, ideally, that
finance aspect will be solved with these new tech. Okay, that's really great. I sincerely like super
appreciate the great time we've had to make this conversation. I wonder if you have any very salient
points you want people to actually maybe have off their sleeves while looking at this map,
I'm going to put the link to the map in the episode notes. So is there any particular place you want
people to be fixated on or to actually keep a watch on so that they will actually use it as maybe
a fulcrum to navigate the advanced nuclear space as the map elucidates? Yeah, yeah. So keep an eye on
the map itself. Hopefully we will get to do an update for it as well. But really, what I think
people should walk away with here is that, you know, a couple points, the there is a huge amount
of energy that will be demanded over the next 30 years, double the amount that we currently build,
which is something like adding five United States worth of power. Number two is there's a lot of
countries that are very interested in this. So I think something like 20 or more that do not
currently have a nuclear power plant that either that are ready and could be markets very soon.
So, you know, just keep an eye on Africa, South Asia, East Asia. That's where you're going to
see these markets. This is where you're going to see the demand and the desire for this technology.
Thank you so much, Jake Kinca for this insightful expose on the advanced nuclear
market map. And I hope that our listeners will be able to glean the red gem subsumed or captured
in this wonderful tool that energy for growth hub has given to the world in partnership with
Third Way. So I sincerely appreciate the time. And I hope that we can have some time to talk
again in the future. Yeah, of course. Thank you very much for having me on. Appreciate that. Thank you.