Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa. (GCIS)
South Africa will follow the science to develop nuclear power capacity as part of the country’s just transition to cleaner renewable energy, including wind, solar and hydropower, Electricity and Energy Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said on Thursday.
This is despite challenges by what he called “emotionally charged lobbyists” — environmentalists — who cite the dangers of nuclear power and radioactive waste disposal. He said they did so without paying attention to the science.
Ramokgopa told a nuclear summit in Pretoria that developing 2500 megawatts of new nuclear energy generation, as highlighted in the Integrated Resource Plan 2019 (IRP 2019), is firmly on the table as part of the country’s future energy mix.
He said the government’s recent withdrawal of the January 2024 gazette of a ministerial determination to procure nuclear power under the Electricity Regulation Act was to ensure the public participation process is transparent, “clean” and “democratic”.
Environmentalists including the Southern African Faith Communities Environment Institute, Earth Life Africa and the Democratic Alliance had challenged the procedural fairness and legality of the determination in the high court.
Ramokgopa said that although renewable energy is ascending in use and popularity there remains “little conversation” about nuclear power from scientists.
“Where are the nuclear people? Because we’ve got the sterling record of 76 years of contribution to the science and technology, at least to the extent that nuclear
is responsible for power … for purposes of electrification,” he said.
“We have entered an arena and a period in this evolving energy complex, of lobbyists, of those who ‘appropriate to themselves, the know-how’ of a technology, and they’ve got the capacity and the potential to … undermine and discredit a technology not supported by science and evidence.”
Ramokgopa said the scientific community had a duty to dispel “these myths” regarding dangers of nuclear power.
The minister said politicians and policymakers had also “soiled” the reputation of the technology “because of allegations of malfeasance, leakage, corruption, manipulation” and the wasting of money.
“This is what nonscientists that don’t have a scientific basis use to push back and invalidate the argument,” he said.
Ramokgopa said the government would announce its next steps regarding its nuclear energy plans “in the next week or so”, because some of the underlying assumptions, such as Eskom’s generation performance, highlighted in the IRP 2019 plan have changed.
“If there are complexities, or the process of the 2500MW build programme is compromised, and on our own version, having studied the process objectively, we find that it is compromised, we have a duty to pull it back, to clean it so that you don’t conflate the science and the process. Because when you misstep on the process, you are inviting legal practitioners to enter the domain of science,” he said.
“We are cleaning the process, making it as democratic as possible. Those who’ve got objections can raise those objections based on the science … It’s important that the process is credible.”
Ramokgopa said the summit had gathered some of the country’s top scientists to tackle the nuclear issue and to make it “fashionable, funky, youthful and female”.
“The point I want to make is that nuclear energy is part of the energy mix. Nuclear is part of the future. It’s indispensable to the attainment of energy sovereignty in this country. Science must trump emotions and politics.”
He said nuclear is also competitive from a capital cost point of view, because the use of small modular reactors, which could be placed close to sources of consumption, would mean Eskom would not have to expand its distribution lines and the country could also export its nuclear energy skills to the rest of the continent.
South African Nuclear Energy Corporation (Necsa) chief executive Loyiso Tyabshe said the R2.6 billion revenue business was “running very profitably” and 60% of its revenue comes from foreign sales in the US, Europe and Asia.
The state-owned company is responsible for processing source material, including uranium enrichment and research and development in nuclear energy and radiation sciences, co-operating with institutions locally and internationally.
“Necsa is at the leading edge in that we are the first in the world to move our reactor from using highly enriched uranium to low enriched uranium. The rest of the world is following us,” he said. “Our isotopes occupy 20% of the global market. We need to sustain that and improve wherever possible.”
He said the company employs 1600 people and this could be tripled if plans to expand nuclear energy generation go ahead.
National Radioactive Waste Disposal Institute chief executive Alan Carolissen said there was a need to demystify the myths associated with radioactive waste and nuclear energy.
“Currently, the debate is about nuclear energy, the power side. I’m not hearing anybody telling Africans and the world, what are we doing in terms of our radio isotope manufacturing. If we don’t exploit our nuclear energy, we cannot go for a CT scan. We cannot get radiation therapy.
“Nuclear technology is not corrupt. People are corrupt,” he said.