Energy and electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa is finalising the appointment of a panel of independent international experts to advise him on the country’s procurement of new nuclear generation capacity.
“They won’t have links with any vendor,” he told Business Day on the sidelines of the 60th anniversary of commissioning of the Safari 1 research reactor at Pelindaba near Pretoria.
“The question that we must answer is the pace and scale [of nuclear procurement],” Ramokgopa said. This would then inform the design of the finance package.
The inclusion of new nuclear generation capacity in SA’s Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) has for years been qualified by the necessity of doing it “at the pace and scale” the country could afford without pronouncing on that.
It is not clear if the much-anticipated latest IRP will give clarity. Ramokgopa said the document had been with Nedlac for four months and that he had stressed the urgency of finalising it.
He said decisions about nuclear energy must be based on the country’s sovereign interests. “Geopolitics are being fought on the energy front. SA must be clever in positioning itself,” he said. If the country re-established itself as a supplier in the nuclear fuel cycle, “the superpowers will hate each other, but they will love us”, he said.
SA had rich endowments of uranium, which was key to the production of nuclear fuel, he said, but needed investment.
Key to this positioning was the proposed life extension of the Safari reactor when its license expired at the end of 2030 as well as the development of a new multi-purpose reactor (MPR) at Pelindaba, he said.
The government has already approved R1.2bn for the preparation work for the MPR, but Ramokgopa emphasised much more was needed. He said the SA Nuclear Energy Corporation (Necsa) that owned and operated Safari 1 must find a partner that would bring money and innovation, while the government would retain ownership.
Ramokgopa said the future of nuclear was much brighter than any other technology for power generation. “Nuclear is the mainstay of energy generation, he said, pointing to the low cost of generation at the Koeberg nuclear power station near Cape Town.
He referred to the rapid development of small modular reactors (SMRs), with Russia and China having operational models. “Data centres are the biggest investors in SMRs. They are the future,” he said.
He described the development of SMRs as the “cutting edge of human development” and said that ignoring it would be ignorant.
Ramokgopa said of the 1.4-billion people on the African continent, 600,000 did not have access to electricity and 500,000 women died annually because of conditions linked to this energy poverty.
Nuclear was the answer to electrify and industrialise the continent, he said. SA had rich uranium resources but was currently doing little with it. “We are sitting on riches, but we are poor,” he said.
“In the next few days we will have our own fight as MPs over the budget,” he said with reference to finance minister Enoch Godongwana’s battle to get support for his budget proposals, especially the increases in VAT.
According to Ramokgopa, the reason for the controversy is the lack of economic growth in SA. If the economy was growing, there would not have been a problem, he said, hailing nuclear as the key to economic growth.
He referred to his visit to Washington last year, when he did a site visit to X-energy, one of the companies at the forefront of SMR development in which C5 Capital, a venture capital group founded by South African Andre Pienaar, is invested. “There were 13 people in the meeting, and we could just as well have held the meeting in Afrikaans.”
He said the X-energy team all held PhDs from SA universities and developed their expertise at Necsa or working on the pebble-bed modular reactor (PMBR) that the SA government had abandoned. “They left [SA] because they were looking for opportunities, not because they are unpatriotic.”
He said SA built these skills during the apartheid era and must once again invest in training people, especially black youngsters from rural areas and girls, to have careers in nuclear.
Zizamele Mbambo, deputy director-general for nuclear at the department of energy, said the proposed MPR would help SA to retain its position among the four largest producers of radioisotopes for medical use.
He said the process to register the project as a strategic integrated project (SIP) aimed at improving the quality of life for all citizens through infrastructure investments in key sectors was under way.
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