The National Nuclear Regulator (NNR), which has to decide whether to grant Eskom’s application to extend the operating life of Koeberg nuclear power station in Cape Town, will hold a new round of public hearing on the issue in February.
The hearings will take place only five months before the decision process on whether to extend the operating life of Koeberg by 20 years, which needs to be concluded if the power station is to keep running after its licence expires on July 24.
The notice, published by the regulator on Wednesday, said that after the closure of the public comment process on March 16 an NNR project team reviewed comments received and advised the board to conduct further public consultation on the application.
“The NNR board as the decision-making authority determined that further public debate on health, safety and environment issues connected with the long-term operation (LTO) application is necessary. [To this end, the board] will hold public hearings to provide members of the public an opportunity to make oral presentations to the NNR on health, safety and environmental issues connected with LTO application,” said the regulator.
Public hearings will take place in Table View on February 3, in Atlantis on February 10 and finally in Athlone on February 17.
Koeberg’s operating licence will expire in July. According to the regulator, while a final decision on whether to grant the licence that would extend the operating life of the plant by 20 years could not be confirmed now, “the regulatory process is on track to submit a recommendation to the NNR board on the LTO application within the time frames indicated in the nuclear licence”.
In response to questions from Business Day, the regulator said outstanding matters to be determined and concluded before it can announce its decision include finalising the review of the safety case for the life extension.
“This also entails the NNR processing additional information requested from Eskom. The outcome of these reviews, as well as of the public hearings, will serve as input for the regulatory decision and associated recommendation to the NNR board on the LTO application.”
The regulatory process, they said, was on track to submit a recommendation to the NNR board on the LTO application within the time frames indicated in the nuclear licence.
Regardless of the regulator’s decision on the life extension, at least one of Koeberg’s two generation units will be offline at least for the whole of next year. This will deprive SA of the roughly 920MW (equal to one stage of load-shedding) of power generated by each of the two Koeberg units.
There have been several delays to critical maintenance work on Koeberg that has to be completed for the regulator to extend the life of the plant.
The steam generator replacements on unit 1 was originally supposed to take place between February and June 2021 and between January and May 2022 on unit 2, but both projects have faced delays and are yet to be completed.
Eskom told Business Day that after concluding the steam generator replacements on unit 1, this unit was now being started up. This process can take up to two weeks. The outage on unit 2 will then commence soon after unit 1 has been fully returned to service, which could mean the unit 2 outage will start only in December and last at least six months.
The regulator said these delays had no effect on the process it is following to decide on the life extension application.
Eskom previously said while it waits for the NNR’s decision it will continue with the implementation of another 200-day long-duration maintenance outage on unit 1 on July 24 — the day when the operating licence expires.
Unit 2 will have to be taken offline for a similar outage.
Eskom has also applied to the regulator to separate the operating licences for unit 1 and unit 2, a move that will enable it to run unit 2, which originally came online about one year after unit 1, until July 2025.
The regulator said it would announce its decision on this application once it has finished reviewing the request.
Update: November 15 2023
This story has been updated with new information.
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