As a young principal director I won the Most Outstanding Achievement Shield for my divisional team’s pioneering renewables work at the Scientific Research Council (SRC), then led by Dr Arnoldo Ventura in 1980. Some of that early work still provides nearly a megawatt of steady power supply to the Jamaica Public Service (JPS) from a facility owned by the National Water Commission (NWC) below Red Gal Ring.

A similar facility at the entrance to Ram’s Horn Tunnel at the eastern base of Hermitage Dam operated equally well until JPS abandoned it to a massive landslide some years ago.

Thereafter, I worked for United Nations Industrial Development Organization on hydropower in Ethiopia, China, and the Philippines at First Philippine Electric Corporation. My firm Enerplan was engaged by Caricom and United Nations Development Programme as the designers/conceptualisers of the Regional Renewable Energy Development Station (RREDS) in the early 1980s.

SLOWPOKE

Consequent on a team visit to lobby for RREDS in several European capitals Ambassador Byron Blake of Caricom, Dr Jeff Dellimore of the Caribbean Development Bank, and myself, 40 million West German marks were successfully requested from the Government in Bonn to build both small hydroplants and to survey the back Rio Grande River system in Portland for hydropower potential.

At that time, as a private contractor, I deliberately took no further part in that kind of Jamaican Government construction work. But as one of several United Nations-sponsored Caribbean lead presenters I took part in the regional ministerial conference (in the 80s) that preceded the setting up of the SLOWPOKE reactor at The University of the West Indies (UWI).

Minister Patrick Manning of Trinidad and Tobago, Minister Horace Clarke of Jamaica, Ambassador Blake, Roddy Ashby from the energy ministry in Jamaica, and former Caricom Secretary General Ambassador Roderick Rainford were all very active at that meeting. So were the late Professor Gerald Lalor, a fast reactions chemist, and the late Professor Dennis Irvine, a chemical physicist and the then principal of the University of Guyana.

At no point during those preliminary deliberations was there any overt contemplation of nuclear power generation on any scale whatever.

Because he was a petroleum geologist/geochemist and deeply invested in another non-renewable, the late and normally unflappable Prime Minister Manning was exceedingly forceful in making certain that the SLOWPOKE project, as elaborated on by Dr Lalor, would stay on the “straight and narrow”.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was not represented at that meeting. IAEA subsequently took a focused interest. So did journalists of a major American scientific magazine campaigning against nuclear proliferation following an atomic fuel pile meltdown in Reactor TMI-2 at the civilian power generator at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, USA, in late March 1979.

Fukushima had not yet occurred in Japan, but the physicists, other scientists, and nuclear engineers present shared a common sense of pressing responsibility to keep Dr Lalor sanely on a leash.

I believe issues of anti-terrorist security and offending the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty arose and will still arise in this newly blended nuclear liqueur reportedly being sipped at the SRC, the Ministry of Energy, and at the somewhat pretentiously rebranded International Centre for Nuclear Sciences (ICENS), no less.

To me, this is high-sounding and deadly folly. It is a reckless binge lunge after clean energy 2022 Conference of the Parties (COP27) goodies.

Nothing published by The UWI’s ICENS so far has indicated that it has made or even attempted to make any technical advances in nuclear power generation at all.

Even at a stretch, SLOWPOKE and ICENS could not ethically engage in any conceivable two-to-three-megawatt, micro modular reactor (MMR) level of actual nuclear fission power hocus pocus and be safely housed in any locality that is within a radius of anything less than 700 metres (2,297 feet) away from its research facility.

SLOWPOKE-2 is now sitting amid the ordinary functioning offices, lecture rooms, store rooms, and sundry other laboratories within The UWI, Mona’s, bustling and compact little Chemistry Department. That The UWI department is in an area boxed in by Mona Road, St John’s Close, Queensway, the parking space of the Physics Department, and the outer bounds of the tiny Biotechnology Centre.

Amidst the chatter, could a peculiar Caribbean tragedy be on our political invitation list circa 2022, upon our delegation’s return from COP27 in Egypt?

As I recall, the ICENS nano-scale reactor has, for nearly 40 years, been essentially fuelled by less than 10kg of pelletised low-purity Uranium235 imported from Canada. It is an analytical chemist’s handy tool “primarily used for neutron activation analysis of trace elements in studies related to health, the environment, and agriculture as well as in education and training”. At the usually safe light-water facility, fairly qualified staff activate and analyse materials in our region and, of late, they assist in vector control in the fight against insect-borne diseases further afield. Those are noble and noteworthy achievements of ICENS that are well within the centre’s own permitted ambit and, dare I say, remit.

I write this as one of two physicist-engineers specifically trained by The UWI, St Augustine, in applied nuclear physics back in the 70s.

To dangle the initiatives being thought about by Ontario Power Generation in Canada or by its Australian counterpart in front of Jamaicans is simply a disingenuous immature political razzle-dazzle.

Consider this, one common 82-metre diameter wind turbine operating in Jamaica’s windy places can reliably produce, at a tiny fraction of the capital costs — and risks — the energy that even a biggish, as yet unlicensed, MMR in remote parts of Ontario or in the outback vastness of even Queensland could eventually manage to put out from non-renewable fissile material. For about 10 years such a plant could power about 2,500 modest Jamaican households before needing multi-billion US-dollar refuelling.

Where would the money and fuel come from? We have discovered no exploitable deposits of uranium ore (urania) from which to leach “yellow cake”. Furthermore, apart from Goat Island and within the pristine but occupied bowels of the Cockpit, where could such an operation involving power generation and radioactive waste disposal be rationally accommodated in this island’s parishes, using coolant water from the NWC and off-site auxiliary power from JPS?

There is still enough time for Prime Minister Andrew Holness to say, “Not on Jamaican territory.”

Dennis A Minott, PhD, is a scientist, energy consultant, and renowned educator.