ANDREW KENNY | Nuclear power is SA’s cheapest electricity option

In April 2011 nuclear power provided Germany with her cheapest, safest, cleanest electricity and was central to Germany’s successful industrial economy. In May of the same year then-chancellor Angela Merkel, who had previously praised nuclear, decided for political reasons after the Fukushima accident, whose radiation hurt no-one, to phase out nuclear power and replace it with “renewables” (wind and solar). The result: disaster.

Germany has spent about $500bn on tens of thousands of gigantic wind turbines and solar arrays, using colossal amounts of raw materials (wind turbines use more than 10 times as much concrete and steel as nuclear per kilowatt-hour (kWh) produced) with huge associated costs. The outcome has been soaring electricity prices, unreliable power, environmental blight, de-industrialisation and economic stagnation.

In January this year Chancellor Friedrich Merz described Germany’s decision to shut down its commercial nuclear power plants as a “huge mistake”. Even so, Britain, with its lunatic push for “net zero” and expansion of wind and solar, is following Germany into economic suicide.

South Africa continues to be desperately short of electricity. We failed to build new stations in the 1990s, when it was obvious we needed them, and ran out of electricity in 2007. This crippled our economy and our industries, retarded growth and escalated unemployment. For a healthy economy, we must build more power stations and we must use the most affordable, safe source of energy, which is nuclear.

Around the world, nuclear has shown it can be very affordable and often the cheapest source of grid electricity. Around the world, without exception, solar and wind have shown themselves to be by far the most expensive option for grid electricity.

This is because they are not despatchable: they are not available on demand, they are intermittent and unreliable. They are good off-grid, for domestic water heating or solar panels to provide small amounts of domestic electricity, but are useless for the grid. To make them useful — despatchable — incurs staggeringly expensive system costs, including back-up generation, spinning reserve, extra controls, extra transmission lines and compensation for loss of inertia and storage.

If the cost of wind and solar electricity at source were 10c/kWh, the system costs would still make it horribly expensive. This explains why we hear renewable energy is becoming cheaper (meaning Chinese solar panels, made from coal-fired electricity, are becoming cheaper), but renewable grid electricity keeps growing more expensive.

Eskom once provided South Africa with the world’s cheapest electricity. This was the basis of our industrialisation, when we used smelters and factories to add value to our abundance of minerals. This has ended, mainly because Eskom has been disabled. The ANC bears much responsibility, but the rot set in a decade before it came to power, when the Eskom managers of the era began to cripple Eskom with crazy ideas, such as our not needing to build more stations.

There are signs of sanity returning to Eskom’s leadership under electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa. But he must shed his ruinous plans for more renewables. He must plan for nuclear and gas. The Northern Cape has the world’s best solar conditions, but reliable solar power there is still extremely expensive. Ramokgopa must scrap his disastrous plan to spend R440bn on unneeded transmission lines to bring expensive solar electricity from the Northern Cape to centres of demand. This is part of the unjust “Just Energy Transition”, which promises ruin.

Nuclear has by far the best safety record of any energy source. The only nuclear power accident to cause serious harm was at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union. The primary cause was bad reactor design. On April 26 1986 its managers took down unit 4 to low power for a commissioning trial. Things went wrong: red lights flashed, the instruments showed the plant was in danger and it was illegal to continue. The engineer ordered them to continue anyway.

There was a tremendous surge in power. The reactor blew up the building, with a huge release of radiation that eventually killed about 60 people. Chernobyl used a bizarre and dangerous reactor design, the RBMK. Meanwhile, in the same ramshackle Soviet Union, with the very engineers and operators, another reactor design, the VVER (a pressurised water reactor similar to Koeberg’s) was running with a perfect safety record. It is vital to choose a proven reactor design, and there are a number to choose from.

It is also vital to choose a vendor with a proven, continuous record of building nuclear plants on schedule and on time. Fortunately, there are several, including South Korea, China and Russia. The few plants that were over budget and schedule, the ones the greens keep harping on about, were all built by vendors with no continuous record of nuclear construction. France once had an excellent nuclear programme that provided the country with cheap electricity, building stations on budget and on time. But then, through green pressure and its own arrogance, France let its building programme lapse, with famous failures.

All power stations, including coal, wind and solar, leave toxic waste that lasts for millions of years. It can’t be otherwise. Most atoms, including the 60 or so varieties in our bodies, last forever. The only atoms that don’t last forever are radioactive ones, which disintegrate, releasing radiation. The longer their half-life, the more slowly they disintegrate, and therefore the less radioactive they are.

A radioactive material with a half-life of five minutes is extremely dangerous; one with a half-life of 5-billion years is harmless. We are all bathed in radiation all our lives, doing no harm at all, but still much greater than the radiation we would ever get from nuclear power. Nuclear waste is tiny in mass, chemically stable and easy to store, so it presents no danger. Some solar waste includes cadmium, a deadly heavy metal, which lasts forever.

Koeberg, which began operating in 1984, has proven a huge success, providing us with cheap, safe and reliable electricity. There have been embarrassing blunders, but none affecting safety. We need more Koebergs. The best sites are Koeberg itself and Thyspunt, near St Francis Bay. I think Bantamsklip is unsuitable for logistical reasons.

Unfortunately, new nuclear plants will take time. From the decision to build, it takes a nuclear plant about 10 years to begin operating. We must start now.

• Kenny is a retired engineer with degrees in physics and engineering and hands-on experience in coal and nuclear power and in energy research.