On May 21, residents of Sakwa, in southeastern Kenya, gathered to protest the government’s plan to install a nuclear power plant near their homes, along Lake Victoria.
Sakwa, in Siaya County, is home to the Luo tribe and lies along the shores of Africa’s largest freshwater lake, which Kenya shares with Uganda and Tanzania.
In late March 2026 during the International Conference on Nuclear Energy, Kenyan President William Ruto announced the construction of a 2,000-megawatt nuclear power plant in the area. There is currently no information about the plan available on the national Nuclear Power and Energy Agency (NuPEA) website. However, Ruto said construction would begin next year, and the plant is expected to start producing electricity by 2034.
“No country in the world has ever achieved its development ambitions without adequate and reliable energy,” Ruto said. He also stressed nuclear energy is considered by the United Nations to be a low-carbon source of energy and integral to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. “The integration of nuclear energy into our national grid therefore represents a strategic transition towards securing a stable long-term solution for Kenya’s rising electricity demand,” he said.
In his speech, Ruto said he had already consulted residents of Siaya County and suggested that local communities supported the project. However, the recent protest indicates the reality on the ground is quite different.
Additionally, a petition against the project launched in April gathered more than 400 signatures before being submitted to NuPEA and the county governor. Mongabay reviewed the document and found locals expressed concerns over radioactive waste management, fears of losing ancestral land and being displaced.
“Such displacement would not occur in isolation; it would fragment extended family landholdings, disrupt inheritance systems, and likely trigger disputes over compensation and resettlement – challenges that Kenya has historically struggled to manage equitably,” the petition noted.
The presence of a nuclear power plant near the ecologically sensitive Lake Victoria is also raising alarm among fishing communities that depend on the lake for sustenance and their livelihoods. “Potential radioactive leakage, thermal discharge, or accidental releases from nuclear operations could alter aquatic ecosystems, disrupt fish breeding cycles, and introduce long-term radioactive contamination into the food chain,” the petition stated.
The lake and its extraordinary biodiversity are already compromised by climate change and invasive species. According to a recent report by World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Africa’s Great Lakes harbor the highest diversity of freshwater fish species in the world. But invasive species have caused Lake Victoria to suffer one of the most significant vertebrate extinction events in modern history.
Still, the lake is crucial for local food systems and the economy, yielding more than 800,000 metric tons of fish annually and locals worry these fish could become contaminated if waste from a nuclear plant were mismanaged or in the event of an accident.
Banner image: Lake Victoria in Kenya. Image by Jozef020 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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