The Nigerian government has been advised to put its nuclear program on hold until 2020. Professor Georg Erdmann, spoke with the News Agency of Nigeria yesterday in Abuja, stating that with the country’s current electric capacity at only 6,000 megwatts (MW), the nuclear project was not feasible now.
Professor Erdmann states, “A lot of energy is required for the production of nuclear energy. Nuclear power cannot be produced when the country’s over-all installed electricity generating capacity is only 6,000 megawatts.” Also, “I want to suggest that nuclear power should be something that should come up after the year 2020, when the country’s electricity installed capacity must have reached the targeted 60,000 megawatts,” he said.
Erdmann, a stakeholder in the International Association for Energy Economics, highlighted the inadequacy of the local manpower as a major hurdle that needed to be jumped prior to the development of a nuclear energy infrastructure in Nigeria. “We have to discuss the institutional problems, we also have to discuss more of not only how to design the institutions, but also how to make it work properly,” Erdmann said.