Princy Mthombeni, Advocate with Africa4Nuclear, August '23
Princy Mthombeni, Africa4Nuclear Founder
Princy Mthombeni seeks to advocate for nuclear energy across Africa as a way of addressing energy poverty and facilitating development. Partially due to Mthombeni’s online communication on social media, multiple African leaders are pushing for nuclear.
meet Princy Mthombeni, the self described “Nuclear Goddess” fighting energy poverty in Africa
Since forming advocacy group Africa4Nuclear in 2021, Princy Mthombeni has become a premier advocate for nuclear energy on behalf of Africa. A skilled online communicator, Mthombeni utilizes Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube to explore nuclear energy issues from an African perspective.
Mthombeni began her activism efforts in her native South Africa, the most affluent nation on the continent and the only country in Africa with an operating nuclear plant. Mthombeni said the most pressing challenges to nuclear development in Africa include poverty, lack of industrialization, and inequality.
As a featured speaker on several international conferences, acting as the voice of Africa, Mthombeni has argued nuclear energy offers abundant, clean, reliable, and cheap energy.
“I believe that development starts with addressing issues of energy poverty, and you address them by building more nuclear power plants,” Mthombeni said. “Energy should be decided based on science, and not ideology, which is what is happening now.”
According to Mthombeni, the key to nuclear activism is education and building understanding. Mthombeni said the world has come to “a crisis” because leaders listened to environmentalists that fundamentally did not understand how nuclear plants worked.
Princy Mthombeni delivers a speech in March 2023 at the South African Young Nuclear Professional Society summit “Role of Nuclear Energy in Just Transition: Transitioning with Youth”.
Mthombeni said she is proud of the platform she created for herself and that an audience grows, both in Africa and across the world. Before her advocacy work, many South Africans did not know they received 5% of their electricity from nuclear energy, according to Mthombeni.
In part due to the efforts of Mthombeni, several countries in Africa are pursuing nuclear development and support for the source of energy is growing. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said he wants nuclear as part of the energy mix and identified a site to build a plant. Zimbabwe and Ethiopia signed an agreement to collaborate on nuclear energy. Rwandan President Paul Kagame called for small modular reactors to be added to the grid. Kenya, Ghana, and Tanzania have all also demonstrated interest in a nuclear path forward.
In South Africa, a country plagued by loadshedding (scheduled electrical blackouts), Mthombeni believes one of the only ways out of the crisis is through building more nuclear plants.
Currently, the overburdened grid cannot provide power to the whole country at all times. A roadmap for the future envisions adding 2,500 Megawatts of nuclear capacity, supported by the Minister of Energy Gwede Mantashe. This would more than double the clean electricity delivered by the sole nuclear plant, Koeberg, which has a 1,854 Megawatt capacity.
“As long as that 2500 megawatts capacity is still part of the energy roadmap, then it gives us hope,” Mthombeni said.