Africa and Nuclear Energy: Who's Building, Who's Planning, Who's Watching
A continent with 600 million people still without electricity is now the world's most contested nuclear battleground — and the race is just getting started.
Africa holds roughly 18% of the world’s uranium reserves, according to a 2025 study published in ScienceDirect. It produces about 14% of global uranium output, with Namibia, Niger, and South Africa among the top mining nations. All that fissile potential sits underground while more than 500 million people on the continent still have no reliable electricity. The gap between what Africa has and what Africa needs is so absurd it almost reads as satire.
That’s starting to change. More than 20 African countries are now exploring nuclear power in some form, according to the IAEA’s June 2025 Outlook for Nuclear Energy in Africa, developed specifically for South Africa’s G20 presidency. Some are building. Some have signed agreements and are planning. Others are circling the idea, watching their neighbors move, and keeping their options open. Understanding who is where in this process matters enormously — both for the countries themselves and for the SMR vendors, financiers, and technology suppliers trying to figure out where to focus.
This is the current map. 🗺️
Egypt: the one that’s actually happening ⚡
If you want to see Africa’s nuclear future in concrete form — literally — you look at Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, about 320 kilometers northwest of Cairo. That’s where the El Dabaa Nuclear Power Plant is under construction, four VVER-1200 reactors built by Russia’s Rosatom at a cost that has climbed to roughly $30 billion. Russia is financing approximately 85% of the project through a state loan, which is the kind of arrangement that secures influence for decades.
Progress at El Dabaa has been steady and significant through 2025 and into 2026:
The reactor pressure vessel for Unit 1, weighing 340 tonnes and manufactured over 41 months in St. Petersburg, arrived in Egypt in late October 2025 and was installed in November
As of mid-2025, more than 25,000 workers were active onsite daily, the majority Egyptian nationals
The inner containment shell for Unit 2 has progressed through multiple tiers of installation
A new on-site training center has opened to begin building Egypt’s operational workforce
The World Nuclear Association reports that Rosatom’s director general expects all four units to be operational by 2030, with the first unit beginning commissioning in 2026. When it comes online, it will be the first Generation III+ reactor on the African continent. Egypt is not dabbling in nuclear. This plant is happening.
What’s interesting is that even as El Dabaa progresses, Egypt is already looking sideways at SMR technology. Egypt’s Prime Minister met with Rosatom chief Alexey Likhachev in April 2026 and specifically noted Egypt’s interest in expanding cooperation to include small modular reactors, according to Daily News Egypt. A country building one of Africa’s biggest energy infrastructure projects is already thinking about what comes next. That’s not a bad sign at all. 🔬
South Africa: the experienced hand making a comeback
South Africa is the only African country with an operating commercial nuclear plant. The Koeberg Nuclear Power Station near Cape Town has been running since the 1980s, and both units are now cleared to operate until 2044 and 2045 respectively, following licence extensions approved in 2025. No other country on the continent has four decades of operational nuclear experience. That’s a significant asset.
But Koeberg is old technology, and South Africa’s government is now moving aggressively to build on that foundation. The country’s Integrated Resource Plan 2025, approved in October 2025, calls for 5,200 MW of new nuclear capacity by 2039, with the first 1,200 MW online by 2036. The site at Duynefontein, adjacent to Koeberg, has received full environmental approval. That’s a $128 billion national energy investment framework with nuclear at its core.
The most fascinating piece of South Africa’s nuclear story is the revival of the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor program. South Africa originally developed the PBMR — a helium-cooled, TRISO-fueled high-temperature SMR — from the 1990s until 2010, when the government cut funding and put it into care and maintenance. In November 2025, Cabinet lifted that status and transferred the technology from Eskom to Necsa, the country’s nuclear energy corporation. Necsa immediately announced plans to identify an international partner to co-develop and operate South Africa’s first SMR demonstration reactor at Pelindaba.
The long-term ambition here is striking. South Africa’s energy minister has stated publicly that the goal is for South Africa to become a leading supplier of SMRs across Africa, replacing decommissioned coal units and powering off-grid industrial sites across the continent. A country that runs its own nuclear plant and owns the IP on a mature SMR design is not the same as a country that just signed an MoU with Rosatom. South Africa has real options — and a genuine shot at becoming Africa’s nuclear technology hub rather than just another customer. 🌍
That said, the PBMR still needs another estimated R30 billion ($1.75 billion) to commercialize, on top of the R10 billion already spent. Environmental groups have challenged the expansion plans in court before and may do so again. The path is clearer than it’s been in 15 years, but it isn’t straight.
The serious aspirants: Ghana, Kenya, and Rwanda 🚀
Three countries stand out in the second tier: not yet building, but meaningfully further along than most.
Ghana probably has the most credible near-term SMR story in sub-Saharan Africa. The country operates a research reactor, has developed nuclear regulatory infrastructure with IAEA support, and in 2024 signed commercial agreements with both US-based NuScale (for its VOYGR-12 SMR) and China National Nuclear Corporation (for a large reactor), giving it a genuinely diversified technology portfolio. In January 2025, NuScale opened an operator training simulator center in Ghana — the first of its kind on the continent. Ghana is also part of the US-led FIRST program (Foundational Infrastructure for Responsible Use of Small Modular Reactor Technology), which helps countries build the regulatory, workforce, and supply chain foundations for SMR deployment. The World Nuclear Fuel Report 2025 forecasts Ghana having 1 GW of nuclear capacity operational by 2038.
The catch for Ghana — and it’s a significant one — is financing. Ghana’s sovereign credit rating and fiscal position mean it cannot fund a nuclear project domestically, and external financing for nuclear in Africa remains genuinely difficult. Ghana may end up being the proving ground where the nuclear finance model either gets cracked or fails visibly.
Kenya is moving with more institutional methodicalness than almost anyone else. Kenya’s Nuclear Power and Energy Agency has published a timeline, confirmed a site in Siaya County, and is targeting construction starting in 2027 and commissioning by 2034. In May 2025, Kenya hosted Africa’s first IAEA-led SMR School — a signal of serious policy intent, not just aspirational rhetoric. Kenya has signed cooperation agreements with the US, South Korea’s KHNP, China, Russia, and Slovakia. By late 2026, it expects to issue a formal Request for Proposal, with multiple major vendors already in the running. Keeping four superpowers at the table simultaneously is unusual diplomatic maneuvering, and I think it’s working to Kenya’s advantage — competitive pressure between vendors tends to produce better terms.
Rwanda is the most interesting wildcard. It has signed agreements with US-based NANO Nuclear Energy, Canadian-German firm Dual Fluid, and Russia’s Rosatom on nuclear cooperation, and as recently as May 2026, Rwanda signed a new nuclear MoU with Russia at the Nuclear Energy Innovation Summit in Kigali. Lassina Zerbo, chair of the Rwanda Atomic Energy Board, was candid with Energy Intelligence at the World Nuclear Exhibition in Paris in late 2025: “None of the African countries today is ready financially to go immediately in implementing the nuclear power plant.” Rwanda’s 2030 target for an SMR is ambitious to the point where skepticism is warranted. But Rwanda is building institutional capacity deliberately, sending students to Russia for nuclear engineering degrees, and cultivating multiple supplier relationships simultaneously. That’s smart positioning, whatever the timeline turns out to be. 💡
The watching-and-waiting group
A meaningful number of African countries — including Uganda, Nigeria, Morocco, Algeria, and others — are somewhere between early exploration and active planning, without the clear execution milestones of the group above.
Uganda acquired land in Buyende for East Africa’s first nuclear plant and signed a contract in May 2025 with South Korea’s KHNP for a 26-month site evaluation to support an 8,400 MW target by 2040. That’s an enormous number for a country whose current grid is measured in hundreds of megawatts. Uganda has ambition; what it needs is a credible financing architecture.
Nigeria is the most financially capable of the aspirants but arguably the most organizationally fragmented. The Nigeria Atomic Energy Commission head Anthony Ekedegwa has publicly noted the lack of meaningful US engagement in his country and said that Russia and China are both offering partnerships. Nigeria passed the second reading of its Nuclear Energy Development Bill in late 2025. A minister advocated for SMRs over large reactors in May 2025. The pieces are moving, but slowly and without the kind of centralized coordination that Ghana and Kenya have developed.
Morocco operates a research reactor and has signed agreements with France, Russia, and China on nuclear cooperation. In 2024 it announced plans to cooperate with France on building an experimental reactor. Morocco’s approach — cultivating multiple Western and Eastern partnerships simultaneously — is diplomatically balanced and probably sustainable long-term.
The honest summary of this watching-and-waiting group is that many of them have signed enough MoUs to wallpaper a government ministry, without yet having the regulatory infrastructure, grid capacity, or financing structure to turn those agreements into poured concrete. That’s not a condemnation — this is genuinely difficult work, and nuclear programs routinely take 15-20 years from first serious commitment to first power. But there’s a real risk of MoU fatigue, where agreements pile up without any getting consummated.
Does your country or region have a stake in how Africa’s nuclear race plays out? Consider how the technology choices African nations make now will lock in fuel dependencies, maintenance relationships, and geopolitical alignments for 60 to 100 years.
The geopolitics no one can ignore 🌱
Africa’s nuclear development is not happening in a vacuum. It’s happening inside one of the most active geopolitical competitions of the 2020s, and that shapes almost every decision.
Russia has signed nuclear energy partnerships with at least 20 African countries through Rosatom, according to the Energy for Growth Hub’s June 2025 analysis. The El Dabaa model — Russia finances, builds, supplies fuel for the entire life cycle, and trains operators for the first decade — creates exactly the kind of long-term structural dependency that critics of Rosatom’s Africa strategy point to. Al Jazeera noted in its June 2026 reporting on Rwanda’s Rosatom MoU that Russia’s nuclear outreach is explicitly tied to broader strategy for continental influence.
China approved 11 new domestic reactor projects in 2024 alone and has deals with at least four of the six African countries that have reached IAEA’s Phase 2 nuclear development milestones. At the 2024 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, China and Nigeria agreed to expand nuclear cooperation. China’s Belt and Road Initiative now increasingly includes what Beijing calls “nuclear energy” or “green” components.
The United States has leaned on its FIRST program and the annual US-Africa Nuclear Energy Summit — hosted in Nairobi in 2024 and in Rwanda in 2025 — to compete. The Ghana NuScale agreement is the most concrete US commercial deal on the continent. But the American Enterprise Institute argued in October 2025 that the US is still losing ground to China and Russia and needs to scale up urgently if it wants to remain competitive.
The key financing challenge tying all of this together is stark. The IAEA noted in its 2025 outlook that African clean energy investments account for only about 2% of the global total, constrained by sovereign debt and credit rating concerns. A 2025 partnership between the IAEA and the World Bank offers some hope of multilateral financing beginning to flow. But a 100-MW SMR at current costs of $2–3 million per megawatt runs over $200 million — before the grid upgrades, regulatory infrastructure, and workforce training that have to accompany it. Most African nations cannot self-finance. Whoever solves the African nuclear finance problem owns the market.
The smarter African governments, I think, are the ones playing multiple suitors simultaneously: keeping the Americans, Chinese, and Russians all believing they have a real shot, and using that competition to extract better terms. Kenya is the clearest example of this strategy in practice. The question is whether any country can maintain that balancing act long enough for commercial SMRs to actually become available — which most projections put at the early 2030s at the earliest.
What’s your read on Africa’s nuclear future: will the financing problem get solved in time for SMRs to matter, or will the continent end up primarily connected to large Russian and Chinese conventional reactors by default?