The introduction begins with Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah (1957-1966) laying the foundation stone of the first reactor building at the new Ghana Atomic Energy Commission in Kwabenya. He promoted “scientific equity” and access to science for all citizens. The nuclear energy project, headed by the engineering professor R.P. Baffour, topped Nkrumah’s plans for scientific development. Nkrumah sent Baffour to the Soviet Union to negotiate with Prime Minister Khrushchev to see what resources Ghana might provide in exchange for technical assistance and a reactor. Nkrumah and his closest advisors asserted a new African vision for nuclear power, predicated on the idea that all countries had citizens with equal intellectual capabilities. Nkrumah expressed, “no country has monopoly of ability.” Ghana was among several independent African nations interested in nuclear energy and the peaceful uses of the atom including Tanzania, Libya, and Nigeria. Julius Nyere and Kenya’s Ali Mazuri stressed that Africans would be more capable of managing nuclear energy than Europeans. The introduction interrogates this assertion through a discussion of scientific equity, manpower and human capacity, and urban dynamics at Atomic Junction. It locates Ghana’s story within scholarship on the rise of nuclear power elsewhere, especially in India and South Africa.

This chapter considers how Ghanaian citizens experience nuclear power in the Kwabenya environs. It establishes the setting of Atomic Junction, through archival evidence of territorial disputes in a borderland area home to Guan, Akan, and Ga families. From the 1960s, Ghanaian scientists, inspired by Nkrumah’s grand plan settled in the area to manage the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission. While they did not obtain the GHARR-1 until 1994, they led local families to believe that a reactor was installed around 1966. Given this widespread misunderstanding, the chapter asks how have people living near the reactor interpreted life on a nuclear frontier, or what Joe Masco has termed the “nuclear borderlands”? The chapter interprets how Ghanaians in Haatso, Kwabenya and other villages near the nuclear exclusion zone relate their experience with Atomic Lands (i.e. GAEC property) to the advent of nuclear spaces around the world where the potential for radioactivity excludes populations. It stresses the greater risk posed by petrol stations on the Haatso-Atomic Road, culminating in the 2017 explosion of a petrol tanker and a mushroom cloud at Atomic Junction.

This chapter considers how Ghanaian scientists gleaned information on nuclear physics from different sources, most notably Soviet universities, and shared information with subsequent generations of Ghanaian students. To acquire nuclear power, Ghanaian scientists needed to become experts in nuclear physics. For many of them, that quest began in the Soviet Union. This chapter relies heavily on reminiscences of Ghana’s first generation of nuclear physicists, detailing their trials learning physics in Russian, the rejection of their Soviet training in Ghana after the overthrow of Nkrumah, and their ongoing efforts to secure further training abroad and employment abroad, whether in Gaddafi’s Libya, or for the IAEA in Vienna. These scientists sustained their knowledge and interest in nuclear physics by offering extensive training courses, first at GAEC and later at the Ghana School of Nuclear and Allied Sciences. Scientists from Ghana and visitors from other African countries who enrolled in these courses in turn shared their knowledge within a growing community of African nuclear physicists. Central to my analysis is the question of language, or what Michael Gordin has termed the “scientific Babel” of the early Cold War period, and the challenges of integrating different training experiences into a unified Ghanaian approach.