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Rosatom believes it can capture a significant slice of this market — speaking in Russia's parliament this month, the group's director-general Alexey Likhachev said he considered Africa a “point of growth” for nuclear technology.
Last week, Rosatom announced it had signed nuclear energy “co-operation” agreements with Mali, Burkina Faso and Algeria during the two-day Atomexpo energy conference, held in the Russian city of Sochi. This entrenched an earlier agreement, announced in October, in which Rosatom said it would build a nuclear power station in Burkina Faso, a country in which the World Bank estimates only 19 per cent of the population has electricity.
Hartmut Winkler, professor of physics at the University of Johannesburg, wrote in December of the danger of African countries borrowing money from Russia to develop nuclear plants. Egypt, for example, borrowed $25bn from Russia to build the El Dabaa power station, which is meant to be paid off over 35 years at a 3 per cent interest rate per year.
“The drawback is that the country develops a strong long-term dependence on Russia to meet one of its most basic needs: electricity provision,” he wrote. The fallout from the Ukraine war could then lead to “disruption and ultimate termination of projects already in place”, given that it typically takes more than a decade to build a nuclear plant.
https://www.ft.com/content/4f1d0d1d-3a98-4b03-8771-54d88ed0a023