The Association of Ghana Industries says Government ought to focus on nuclear energy to significantly reduce the cost of electricity in the country.

Presently power in the country is being sold at about 17 cents per kilowatt-hour as compared to about 8 cents per kilowatt hour with Nuclear energy.

Nuclear power plants are however expensive to build but relatively cheap to run.

But speaking to Citi Business News, Director of Business Development Service at AGI, Johnson Opoku-Boateng says nuclear energy is the way to go and his outfit would support any efforts by the government towards it.

“Nuclear power has been one of the issues that we’ve been talking about over and over again. In 2017, at the industrial summit, we spoke about that. We had Rosatom from Russia who is a giant when it comes to nuclear power and then in 2018 we still had them coming back. We also had the Chinese getting interested. As at today, I understand that we still have so many other countries interested in nuclear power. The base of it is that, aside from the fact that it will create more jobs and other related industries, we believe that the stories that we’ve heard, the fact that we will be able to get electricity tariff at a single digit is something that we need to applaud and we need to support the NPG to get this thing sorted out. If we are going to be getting at 8 cents kWh as against 17kWh, that is twice, we’ve gone down full cycle that is 50 per cent reduction. That is going to go a long way to support industries so AGI is in full support of the nuclear power project, and we’ll do everything in our ambit to help them and support them to ensure that this thing comes to pass in the very near future.”

Presently, there are no nuclear power plants in Ghana even though the first President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, created the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission in 1963 and initiated the plans for the Ghana Nuclear Reactor Project (GNRP) on November 25, 1964.

Despite electricity generation being one of the key factors that contribute to the development of the Ghanaian national economy, plans for a nuclear power plant have fallen through repeatedly.

The Ghana Atomic Energy Commission plans to begin building a power plant in Ghana in 2018 with estimated completion in eight years.

About AGI

The Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) is a voluntary business association of over 1,200 members, made up of small, medium and large-scale manufacturing and services industries in agro-processing (food and beverages), agri-business, pharmaceuticals, electronics and electrical, telecommunications, information technology, utilities, service industries, transport, construction, textiles, garments and leather, banking and advertising.