Source: Greenpeace Statement –
While politicians at ICoNE 2026 speak of first-world ambitions, the fishing families of Lake Victoria (who were not adequately & meaningfully consulted) are being asked to stake their livelihoods, their health, and their children’s futures on one of the world’s most dangerous and expensive energy technologies.
This week, President Ruto opened the International Conference on Nuclear Energy (ICoNE 2026) by declaring that fears about nuclear power are not supported by evidence. Siaya Governor James Orengo went further: nuclear energy, he said, is non-negotiable if Kenya wants to be a first-world economy. Greenpeace Africa has a question for both leaders. First-world for whom? Not for the 200,000-plus fishing families on Lake Victoria’s shores who have no idea their lake has been earmarked as a coolant source for a nuclear reactor.
Make no mistake: what is being proposed is the construction of a 2,000 MW nuclear power plant on the banks of Africa’s largest freshwater lake. A lake that feeds millions of people, connects to the Nile, and anchors over 100 globally significant ecosystems stretching across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Nuclear plants require vast quantities of water for cooling (15 to 25 percent more than a coal facility, and even more in Kenya’s tropical heat). That warmed water goes back into the lake. It disrupts fish breeding. It degrades aquatic ecosystems. It crosses borders. And if there is ever a leak, as there has been at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, the contamination of one of Africa’s most vital freshwater systems would be irreversible.
The government calls this progress. We call it a gamble with assets that don’t belong to the state to gamble with.
What makes this worse is how it has been done. Residents in Uyombo, the original coastal site, reported being arrested for asking questions, phones confiscated, movements monitored. In Siaya, communities learned they were the preferred site not through consultation, but through a government conference announcement. The Strategic Environmental and Social Assessment is still a draft. No rights-compliant community process has taken place. And yet Governor Orengo boasts that Siaya has “moved with impressive speed.” Speed, it turns out, is easiest when you don’t stop to ask the people most affected.
“Nuclear power near Lake Victoria is not development – it is displacement dressed up as progress. Communities stand to lose their land, their fisheries, and their livelihoods, while carrying the long-term burden of radioactive waste that will outlast every promise being made at ICoNE this week. Africa and her Africans deserve better than this.”
Shumirai Zizhou, Responsive Campaigner, Greenpeace Africa
The economics are no more reassuring. Kenya already generates close to 90% of its electricity from clean sources: geothermal, wind, solar, and hydro. It is a continental leader. Nuclear adds nothing to the grid for at least eight years, will cost between $2 and $4 billion by optimistic estimates, and will almost certainly run late and over budget if global precedent holds. The cleanup costs of nuclear accidents and centuries of radioactive waste management are routinely excluded from headline cost figures. Kenya has no waste disposal framework. The liability, when it materialises, falls on the public. Meanwhile, ICoNE itself was co-funded by the US government’s FIRST programme and South Korea’s KHNP, entities with direct commercial interests in selling nuclear technology to new markets. Independent scrutiny of this programme is overdue.
Greenpeace Africa demands:
• An immediate suspension of Kenya’s nuclear programme pending a fully independent review, free from commercially interested parties.
• A halt to all site activity near Lake Victoria until free, prior, and informed consent is obtained from communities across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.
• A complete, independent ESIA that is publicly accessible, translated into local languages, with genuine participation before any further decisions are taken.
• A redirect of nuclear budgets toward Kenya’s proven clean energy strength: decentralised renewables that deliver energy justice now, not in 2034.
Kenya does not need nuclear power. It needs the political courage to invest in what is already working. The fishing families of Luanda Kotieno did not ask to be part of this experiment. They deserve a government that treats their lake, their livelihoods, and their consent as non-negotiable, not as obstacles to be managed on the way to a first-world photo opportunity.
ENDS
For media inquiries:
Sherie Gakii, Communications and Storytelling Manager, Greenpeace Africa, [email protected] | +254702776749