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ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) - Nigeria's president has pledged his oil-rich but infrastructure-poor West African nation will build a nuclear power plant within 12 years.
Despite being Africa's leading oil producer and the fifth biggest supplier of crude to the United States, most of Nigeria's 130 million people remain deeply impoverished. Blackouts are common in major cities and few rural areas have steady access to electricity.
"Today ... marks day one in the timeline of our national nuclear electricity program," President Olusegun Obasanjo said Monday in the capital Abuja at the inauguration of the Board of the Nigeria Atomic Energy Commission, a state nuclear advisory body.
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