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Nuclear to the rescue: Electricity is the key to a healthier, more prosperous Third World

Date published: 9/13/2006

BELLEVUE, Wash.--"The only good thing about the good old days is that they're gone." My grandmother's wisdom came from experience. As a teenager in late 19th-century Wisconsin, she had cleared tons of rocks from fields and hauled countless buckets of water on the family farm. If she had to select just one modern technology, she said, she'd choose running water. But electricity was a close second.

No wonder. Without electricity, modern life reverts to her childhood: no lights, refrigeration, heating, air conditioning, radio, television, computers, safe running water, or mechanized equipment for homes, schools, shops, hospitals, offices, and factories.

Incredibly, this is what life is still like every day for 2 billion people in developing countries. Viewed at night from outer space, Africa really is the Dark Continent: Only 10 percent of its 700 million people regularly have electricity.

While 75 percent of South Africa is now fully electrified, only 5 percent of Malawi, Mozambique, and other countries are so fortunate. Much of poor and rural Asia and Latin America faces a similar predicament.

Instead of rolling blackouts, neighborhoods have rolling power. "In the western part of my country, families get electricity maybe three hours every two weeks," says Pastor Abdul Sesay, a Sierra Leone native who now resides in Maryland. "Eastern communities get it maybe once a month!"

Instead of turning on a light or stove, millions of women and children spend their days gathering wood, grass, and dung to burn in primitive hearths for cooking and heating. Instead of turning a faucet, they spend hours carrying water from distant lakes and rivers that are often contaminated with bacteria.

Pollution from their fires causes 4 million deaths a year from lung infections. Tainted water and spoiled food cause intestinal diseases that kill another 2 million annually.

The dearth of electricity also means minimal medical facilities, manufacturing and commerce--and impoverished countries forever dependent on foreign aid.

Abundant, reliable, affordable electricity is thus a critical priority for developing nations. Hydroelectric projects offer one solution, coal-fired power plants another. They aren't perfect ecologically, but neither are wind turbines, which require extensive acreage, kill birds, and provide inadequate amounts of intermittent, expensive electricity that cannot possibly sustain modern societies.

Date published: 9/13/2006