Could SMRs End Energy Poverty? The Case for Reactors in the Developing World
With 730 million people still in the dark, small modular reactors are promising a new path to electrification — but the road there is anything but simple.
Picture this: a hospital in rural Nigeria running on a diesel generator that costs three times more per kilowatt-hour than anything its patients can afford. A school in Ethiopia where children do homework by candlelight because the grid, if it exists at all, cuts out for 18 hours a day. A factory in Ghana that could employ a thousand people, but can’t attract investment because power is too unreliable to run a shift.
This is the everyday reality of energy poverty — not an abstraction, not a statistic, but a structural ceiling on human potential that affects roughly 730 million people worldwide as of 2024. Sub-Saharan Africa alone accounts for 80% of the global electricity access gap, with more than 600 million Africans still without power. Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ethiopia together account for over a third of the world’s unelectrified population.
Against that backdrop, a growing chorus of policymakers, nuclear engineers, and development economists is making a bold argument: small modular reactors — compact, factory-built nuclear plants that can be scaled up module by module — could be exactly the kind of technology the developing world needs. The pitch is seductive. Lower capital costs than traditional reactors. Shorter construction times. The ability to work with small, fragile grids. Baseload power that never depends on whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. But whether SMRs can actually deliver on that pitch, in countries where financing is scarce, regulatory capacity is thin, and electricity demand is growing faster than anyone can keep up with, is a genuinely complicated question.
The scale of the problem, and why conventional solutions aren’t enough
The numbers here are worth sitting with. The IEA’s October 2025 data shows that 730 million people lacked electricity access in 2024 — a decline of only 11 million from the year before. That pace is slower than before the pandemic and is nowhere near what’s needed to reach universal access by 2030, which requires progress roughly ten times faster than the current rate. In sub-Saharan Africa, population growth continues to outpace new electricity connections in many countries, meaning the absolute number of people without power is rising even as electrification rates technically improve. 🌍
Sub-Saharan Africa now accounts for 85% of the global population without electricity, up from 50% in 2010
Africa’s electricity demand is projected to grow at 4% annually through 2026, the fastest of any region
18 of the 20 countries with the largest electricity access deficits are in Sub-Saharan Africa
The World Bank and African Development Bank’s Mission 300 initiative aims to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030, requiring $90 billion in financing
Solar and wind have made genuine progress — mini-grids and standalone solar systems provided over 50% of new electricity connections in sub-Saharan Africa between 2020 and 2022. That’s real. But here’s the thing renewables advocates sometimes gloss over: intermittency. A solar panel is great until sunset, or until the rainy season, or until the dry-season dust coats it and no one has the equipment to clean it. A continent that needs to power hospitals, cold chains, manufacturing facilities, and data centers cannot run on intermittent power alone. It needs baseload — reliable, dispatchable electricity available 24 hours a day, every day, regardless of weather. ☀️
That’s the gap SMRs are designed to fill. And it’s a real gap.
What SMRs actually offer developing countries
A small modular reactor is, by definition, a nuclear reactor producing up to 300 megawatts electric per unit — roughly a third the output of a conventional plant. The “modular” part matters: these reactors are designed to be factory-built and shipped in standardized components, then assembled on-site, much the way you’d deploy a fleet of identical trucks rather than custom-building each one from scratch. That matters enormously for countries without the deep construction expertise needed for traditional nuclear megaprojects.
The advantages for energy-poor nations are specific and worth stating clearly:
Smaller footprint: SMRs can work with low-capacity grids that would be overwhelmed by a full-scale 1,000 MW reactor
Incremental deployment: A country can start with one or two modules and add more as demand and financial capacity grow
Passive safety: Many designs use gravity and natural convection for cooling, eliminating the need for active backup power systems — critical in places where grid reliability can’t be assumed 🔬
Site flexibility: SMRs can be sited in remote areas, including repurposed industrial sites, without the extensive infrastructure that large plants require
Baseload power: Unlike solar and wind, an SMR runs day and night, in any weather, for 60+ years
Ingrid Kirsten and Tony Stott, Senior Research Associates at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, have noted that to equal nuclear’s power output, solar panels would need to cover vast land areas, creating significant environmental challenges of their own. The baseload argument isn’t just a nuclear talking point — it’s an engineering reality that grid planners in Nigeria and Kenya are grappling with every day.
Who’s actually moving on this, and how fast
This is where the story gets interesting. As of 2025, the developing world is not waiting passively for Western countries to figure out SMRs and eventually export the results. Countries across Africa and Asia are actively pursuing deals, feasibility studies, and regulatory frameworks right now. ⚡
Ghana is the most advanced. It has operated a nuclear research reactor since 1994 and in 2024 signed a framework agreement with U.S.-based Regnum Technology Group and NuScale Power to deploy up to 12 NuScale VOYGR-12 SMR modules — a total eventual capacity of nearly 924 MW. Ghana also launched Africa’s first NuScale Energy Exploration Centre in Accra, a regional training hub for operators and regulators across the continent.
Kenya, aiming to commission its first nuclear plant by 2034, hosted Africa’s first IAEA-led SMR School in May 2025 in Nairobi, with officials from Ghana, Niger, Nigeria, Uganda, and Zambia attending. Rwanda is exploring partnerships with NANO Nuclear Energy and Canada’s Dual Fluid for microreactor designs. Uganda has designated Buyende as a potential nuclear power plant site. The Nuclear Business Platform projects that Africa could generate as much as 15,000 MW of nuclear energy by 2035, led by Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda.
The geopolitical dimension here matters a great deal, and I think it’s undersold in most coverage. Russia and China are not waiting for the West to act. Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom is already building a $30 billion, four-reactor plant in Egypt. China and Nigeria inked a nuclear cooperation deal at the 2024 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation. China approved 11 new domestic reactor projects in 2024 alone and is on track to become the world’s top nuclear generator by 2030. The U.S. is scrambling to catch up — the Department of Energy’s FIRST program is backing civil nuclear development across the continent, and the U.S.-Africa Nuclear Energy Summit is now an annual event — but the race is real, and the West does not have a commanding lead.
What does this mean for African nations? They have options, which is power. But it also means they’re navigating competing vendor agendas, financing models with different strings attached, and varying standards for nuclear safety and non-proliferation — all while trying to run a coherent national energy policy. If you think that’s easy, you’ve never tried to build regulatory capacity from scratch in a country where the entire nuclear engineering talent pool fits in one seminar room.
The hard problems no one should paper over
Here’s where honesty matters. The case for SMRs in the developing world is real, but the obstacles are genuinely serious — not just talking points from anti-nuclear activists. 💡
Financing is the biggest wall. A single 100-MW SMR can cost over $200 million, at roughly $2–3 million per megawatt. For context, Ghana’s entire national budget in recent years has been under $15 billion. International development finance institutions have historically been reluctant to back nuclear — partly due to lingering prohibitions, partly due to limited in-house expertise in evaluating nuclear projects. The World Bank recently changed its policy to allow nuclear financing, and regional development banks are following suit, but this evolution is slow relative to the urgency. Energy for Growth Hub research identifies three core barriers:
Lack of specific projects mature enough for financing
Limited nuclear expertise within lending institutions themselves
Lingering explicit or implicit prohibitions on supporting nuclear technology
The timeline problem is uncomfortable. Even optimistic estimates from a 2025 ScienceDirect study suggest SMR deployment takes 7–10 years for newcomer countries on a first-of-a-kind basis. That’s 7–10 years before a single kilowatt-hour flows to a rural household. People are living without power right now. Solar home systems and mini-grids can be deployed in months. The honest answer is that SMRs are not a solution to the access crisis of the 2020s — they’re a potential foundation for the 2030s and beyond. That doesn’t make them wrong. It does mean anyone promising a quick fix is selling something that doesn’t exist.
Climate vulnerability is a real issue, and SIPRI researchers have flagged it clearly: many of the developing countries where electricity access is worst already have high ambient temperatures, which reduce the efficiency of nuclear power generation and can clog cooling water intakes. The Fukushima disaster, triggered by an extreme natural event, is a reminder that even wealthy nations with sophisticated emergency response systems can be blindsided. Designing SMRs for climate resilience, particularly in hot, drought-prone regions, is non-negotiable — and it needs to happen before construction starts, not as an afterthought.
Nuclear waste remains a real and unresolved challenge. Some SMR designs, according to research from Stanford and the University of British Columbia, may generate two to thirty times more radioactive waste per unit of electricity than traditional large reactors. That’s not a reason to abandon SMRs — but it means the waste management question needs to be baked into deployment planning, not kicked down the road.
Are you surprised by any of these challenges? Or do they confirm something you’ve suspected about the gap between the SMR pitch and the SMR reality? Either way, engaging with these questions honestly is the only way to build policy that actually works.
A path forward that takes both the promise and the risk seriously
None of the challenges above are arguments for abandoning SMRs as a development tool. They’re arguments for being smarter about how and where they’re deployed. The technology is real — China’s ACP-100 became the world’s first operational land-based SMR in late 2025. Russia’s floating plant at Pevek has been generating power since 2020. The science works. The question is whether the systems around the technology can be built fast enough and well enough to make deployment in developing countries a genuine success rather than a cautionary tale. 🚀
The IEA estimates that if SMR construction costs reach parity with large reactors by 2040, cost-effective uptake could increase by 60%, with deployment reaching 190 GW by 2050 globally. That trajectory is faster than conservative scenarios but slower than what SMR developers are currently promising. Somewhere in between is probably where reality lands.
What would a credible path actually look like? A few things seem clear:
Regional cooperation matters more than individual country deals. Robert Lisinge of the UN Economic Commission for Africa has called for regional nuclear projects spanning multiple countries, sharing costs, regulatory capacity, and trained personnel
The World Bank’s policy shift on nuclear financing needs to translate into actual loans, quickly, with concessional terms that reflect the development premium these projects carry
Training pipelines need to start now, even where the first reactor is a decade away. Kenya’s IAEA SMR School model is exactly right — you build the human capital before you need it, not after
Western democracies need to compete on vendor terms, not just on safety rhetoric. If Russia and China are offering financing packages that developing countries can actually access, the U.S. and Europe need equivalent instruments — or they’ll lose this market and the geopolitical relationships that come with it
Hybrid approaches work. SMRs don’t replace solar and wind in developing countries — they complement them, providing the firm baseload capacity that makes an intermittent-heavy grid stable and reliable
The World Nuclear Association’s SMR Global Project Tracker shows at least 40 countries now taking concrete steps toward SMR deployment. That’s not hype — that’s a genuine shift in how the world thinks about nuclear energy’s role in the energy transition.
Here’s the question I’d invite you to sit with: If an SMR in Ghana in 2034 lights up hospitals, powers factories, and enables a generation of Ghanaian engineers to build and operate nuclear infrastructure — was the decade of preparation worth it? Most people, thinking carefully, would say yes. The real failure would be not to start that preparation now, because the alternative is another thirty years of diesel generators, unreliable grids, and economic ceilings that don’t need to exist.
What’s your read — are SMRs a genuine lifeline for the energy-poor world, or are we getting ahead of the technology again? The answer probably depends on what happens in Ghana over the next ten years. Watch that space.