There was nothing remotely progressive that came to mind as we watched the mainly female staff from NuPEA cowering under anything they could get as a mob of unruly men rolled in to disrupt a stakeholder engagement event in Siaya, one of the many candidate sites where Kenya has been working on since 1965 to set up a domestic nuclear technology. Rowdy men hurling projectiles at cowering women chanting threats of violence resonated more with gender based violence than it did with anything intersectional, which is what I expect from progressive ideologies.
What I saw as women and girls with decades’ worth of academic and professional expertise were silenced by threats reminded me more of the description of Genghis Khan given by Voltaire, i.e., “resentful of the superior virtues of the civilization around him and motivated by the basic barbarian desire to ravish civilized women and destroy what he could not understand.”
Anti-Nuclear Opposition and Energy Poverty
But such pro-energy poverty functional illiteracy is not new among reactionary anti-nuclear zealots. A while back, local police in Uyombo had to fire into the air to disperse a horde of men who invaded a construction site, pelting everyone around with crude projectiles while chanting anti-nuclear tropes. By the time the dust had settled, the ultimate victims of bludgeoning using primitive weapons were the local women who had nothing to do with the proceedings.
Immediately after, the high priestess behind it all had whisked herself off to Sweden, a country that ironically produces 30% of its electricity from the six nuclear reactors at plants in Forsmark, Ringhals and Oskarshamn. It was while hiding minutes away from the site of the now decommissioned R1 Reactor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, right across the road from the wealthiest, most exclusive, most sort-out neighbourhood in Scandinavia, that the high priestess of illiteracy issued a statement “fearing for her life” as it dawned on everyone that what had been scuttled was not what is called “pouring of first concrete” in the field but the construction of a weather monitoring station.
Once things had cooled down enough for anti-nuclear zealots to crawl back into the country, I watched with incredulity as they went on a media run to sanitize outright terrorism. According to the terrorists, it was not their fault they had mistaken the commencement of the construction of a weather mast for the construction of the nuclear power plant.
At the turn of the century, the goal of the low-brow terrorists allegedly affiliated with Greenpeace was to sabotage one of the two reactors at the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station about 20 minutes north of Cape Town. The low-budget plan would’ve been successful, had it not been for the foresight of the nuclear engineers who had planned for this exact scenario several decades earlier and put a wall of concrete several meters thick between the reactor and potential terrorists. Defeated by the containment building
designed to take a direct hit from a military jet, the Greenpeace-affiliated terrorists resorted to smearing their stickers with “facts” conjured out of thin air and lying in fetal positions to await their arrest.
Since then, Koeberg has remained operational, keeping the city of Cape Town well lit and the nearby village of Duynefontein as prosperous as one can imagine.
Despite being debunked by history, the same “facts” smeared on the containment building have been adopted by anti-nuclear zealots. Some have been repeated on the floor of the Kenyan Senate and anti-nuclear “fact” sheets that cite the “4.5-billion-year half-life of Uranium” as a justification for the pro-energy poverty, pro-Gender based acts of terrorism that target primarily female staff at NuPEA carrying out their work of informing locals, in their own language, the benefits that communities around the world have reaped courtesy of their proximity to nuclear power plants.
Nuclear Power, Electrification and Rural Communities
Here is the test that actually matters: what does antinuclear zealotry mean for the electrification of poor rural households? What does electrification mean for the girl who spends hours gathering firewood or pushing a 20-liter jerrycan several kilometers while her male classmates are in class learning algebra? What does electrification mean for the child who has to study after dark? Can the rural clinic keep vaccines cold? Can the farmer irrigate, a factory run a night shift or a transport corridor linking North and South Nyanza be electrified? What does the nuclear power project mean for eight in ten households that cook with wood or charcoal, and in rural areas energy poverty runs close to nine in ten homes?
The nuclear power plant in Siaya will come with the same benefits we have seen around the world in societies where the working class has prevailed. Every material improvement working people won in the former Soviet Union, e.g., mechanized agriculture, refrigeration, clean water, public transport and hospitals, came from access to more energy, not less.
Lenin’s famous formulation of communism was “Soviet power plus electrification.”
Today it is China that is practically printing nuclear power plants by the dozens.
Not surprisingly, the pro-GBV, pro-energy poverty, anti-nuclear zealots are actually the same people who fought the Late Raila Odinga tooth and nail to scuttle the Sondu Miriu Power project. Since then, this project they fought with futility has electrified thousands of hospitals, schools and homesteads, literally saving millions who were condemning themselves to respiratory issues later in life.
Had they prevailed, we would have more young women and their mothers condemned to lung cancer as toxic fumes from Koroboi lamps are known carcinogens.
Regurgitation of anti-nuclear tropes copy-pasted from Large Language Models domiciled in nuclear-powered data centers located in the global north is not progressive. Accepting funds from clandestine Malthusian organizations and hiring fuel guzzlers to travel from air-conditioned abodes in Nairobi and romanticize energy poverty in Siaya is not progressive. There is thus nothing progressive about pro-energy poverty zealotry.
Any movement that weaponizes gender based violence by recruiting illiterate men to physically intimidate the few women we can see visibly doing what they can to combat energy poverty must be opposed by all of us.
Its inability to understand nuclear technology is analogous to the opposition to the building of pediatric wards in hospitals because someone doesn’t understand why surgery is a thing.
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