Rwanda is a small country, about the size of the Massachusetts state in the US, but with double the population. It's in the mountains, lots of forests and lakes. No deserts. Not a lot of unused land where you can mount solar panels. Nuclear makes sense for them.

Rwanda is roughly 6.5 million acres in size. Half of its roughly 200MW of total generating capacity comes from hydro and solar, the other half coming from natural gas and biomass thermal generation. To replace existing thermal generation would be ~12k acres of solar, and another ~12k acres for every additional 100MW in solar generating capacity desired (or inter connectors to other grids in the region). I also assume that rooftops are available for solar.

Their current generating capacity is not coming close to meeting their needs, with around 85% of it's energy use coming from firewood.

Your point is taken. I think it's incredibly valuable the fuelwood used for cooking and lighting is deprecated for off grid solar solutions, not only for health reasons but to stem the deforestation Rwanda faces from it's reliance on fuelwood for its energy needs.

> ~12k acres for every additional 100MW in solar

On paper lots of things look easy. Rwanda has 12MW of solar as of now [1] and doing feasibility studies for 30MW more. Feasibility studies, not ongoing construction. For one reason or another, they don't find it that easy to install hundreds of MW of solar.

On the other hand, it doesn't look like this green light for nuclear technology is directed towards power generation. Russia will provide a 10MW reactor, but it appears Rwanda is more interested in non-energy applications, like medicine, or food sterilization.

[1] https://www.mininfra.gov.rw/index.php?id=85

Nuclear is not cost competitive against renewables and storage, correct. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a role in the generation mix as a small baseload component, but that role will require subsidies based on nuclear’s low carbon footprint.

https://www.lazard.com/media/451086/lazards-levelized-cost-o...

Nuclear actually doesn't have a role as baseload in a cost optimized grid, especially in a country at low latitude.

I'm a big fan of Russia's floating nuclear plants [1]. Wouldn't they be able to just... mass produce this exact same design like the Model T and tow them to customers?

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49446235

The cheapest grid scale electricity generation option are dams in this case on the Ruzizi.

Dams have their own consequences. Downstream flow change, deep water de-oxygenation, reduction in silt flows (they can be beneficial)

Not that anything is without its costs/benefits basically.

Renewables are simply cheaper than nuclear at this point.

(Downvoted by someone who doesn't know the data.)

Even if this is true (which we cannot know since there is no pipeline of projects - so no economies of scale for nuclear) you deeply discount the price of reliability.

We need batteries that are order of magnitude better to have something that could produce 5GW of energy for weeks on end.

You grossly overstate the cost of storage needed to back up renewables. And you ignore that batteries are not the storage of choice for weeks of backup -- hydrogen (burned in CC or OC turbines) would make much more sense for that. The efficiency is lower, but for weeks of storage capital cost is much more important than efficiency.

BTW, we very much can know that nuclear is more expensive than renewables. The attempts to build reactors in the west have been disastrously more expensive. It's not even close. It's because of this failure to compete that the pipeline is bare. And nuclear has historically shown lousy experience effects, so what economies of scale?

If you want to talk about woulda-coulda-shoulda cost numbers for nuclear, instead of the actual demonstrated numbers, then you must do the same for renewables, especially renewables that could be built in a year or two a decade from now when any reactor started today could come online. Unlike nuclear, renewables have shown Silicon Valley-style relentless cost decline.