nuclear-news

South Africa urged to not be a sucker for the nuclear salesmen

Nuclear is so Third World; an expensive, hazardous, problematic technology for suckers. The French are the nuclear industry leaders and they are facing declining demand in the developed world. Francois Hollande’s victory yesterday is more bad news for the industry. They are now desperate to sell their technology to corruptible developing countries especially the aspirational Brics.

Why SA should say no to nuclear energy, Politics Web, Brent Meersman 08 May 2012 Brent Meersman says the cost is simply prohibitive and the time frame impossible
Our government, it seems, may be dangerously close to repeating the e-toll fiasco with nuclear energy. As with e-tolls, by the time the pubic wakes up to its implications and how it effects them, the contracts are signed and the citizenry is on the hook for billions.

Bad planning in energy needs is not unique to us. It’s something
governments struggle to get right. Italy was having rolling blackouts
at the same time we were. Now we’re switching off energy looters such
as smelters to keep the lights on elsewhere in the country. What is
not talked about is that every time we do this, we handsomely
compensate the smelters for their loss.

Let’s not make the same mistake again.

Government has signed off on an energy plan and it includes nuclear.
This will be the biggest procurement deal in the history of the
country (at least R300-billion, conceivably R1.4-trillion) and yet
there is far less transparency than there was around the e-toll
system.

This is why MP Lance Greyling (who says he is not ideologically
opposed to nuclear) called for an urgent debate on the matter in
Parliament, but this was shot down by the speaker in February.

“Foreign nuclear companies seem to know more about South Africa’s
Nuclear Fleet Build Programme (NFBP) than the South African public,”
says Greyling, who is now resorting to the Protection of Information
Act (PAIA) to request a copy of Treasury’s pre-feasibility study.

This despite the fact that the National Development Plan states: South
Africa needs a thorough investigation on the implications of nuclear
energy, including its costs, safety, environmental benefits,
localisation and employment opportunities, uranium enrichment, fuel
fabrication, and the dangers of weapons proliferation . . . All
possible alternatives need to be explored . . . A maximum of one year
remains to agree on a decision-making process for nuclear investments.
[November 2011]

Such a thorough investigation, I think, is unwarranted. Nuclear can be
thrown out at face value. The cost is simply prohibitive and the time
frame impossible……

the industry is notorious for cost overruns and delays. For example,
the Olkiluoto reactor in Finland which was to have come online in 2009
is still at least a year off, and its cost has ballooned from
€3-billion to €5.3-billion. It is being built by the company most
likely to get the contract in South Africa.

Greyling points out that committing to nuclear “will lock us into an
energy future for the next 40 years and will take away any flexibility
to shift our energy policy and investment resources into other
technologies which are rapidly coming down in price”.

This is perhaps Greyling’s clincher.

Nuclear is so Third World; an expensive, hazardous, problematic technology for suckers. The French are the nuclear industry leaders and they are facing declining demand in the developed world. Francois Hollande’s victory yesterday is more bad news for the industry. They are now desperate to sell their technology to corruptible developing countries especially the aspirational Brics.

This past weekend, as a result of the Fukushima disaster, the last of
Japan’s 54 nuclear power stations were switched off. Already under
Schröder, Germany announced it will abandon nuclear energy (currently
20% of their supply) by 2020, and Merkel has confirmed this. Other
European countries have also gone cold on nuclear.

It is the intention of the Germans to invest €300-billion to crack
renewable energy, energy efficiency and new energy technologies.

As economist Mark Blyth has pointed out, while everyone else is in
denial or hostage to vested interests, the Germans are responding to
the obvious: fossil fuels are running out; the world has an insatiable
desire for more energy; and the planet is warming up. “Whoever figures
out how to make sustainable green tech in the next 30 years gets to
sell it to everybody else for the next thousand. That’s what they’ve
[the German’s] figured out.”…

The nuclear industry is almost as shady as the armaments industry. The
story of how nuclear reactors spread around the world is a fascinating
read; General Electric and others played Europe off against North
America and vice versa by basically lying to governments.

Interesting, too, is how the engineers were ignored by the
accountants; nuclear engineers had always maintained that the power
stations were simply too big to be safe. These big reactors are all
accidents waiting to happen, and so far (in the 50-year history of
nuclear power) the world has been lucky. Instead of listening to the
people who design the things, we’ve been patting ourselves on the
back.

My concern is not so much the record on nuclear safety, but the fact
that when things go wrong they go horribly wrong. Koeberg has already
got a tatty track record (readers may recall Alec Erwin’s lost bolt).
Do we want another six of these highly complex installations? We have
Africa’s only nuclear reactor; we don’t need another one.

Nuclear is not an insurable risk. If a serious nuclear accident
happened in South Africa, the clean-up and containment costs can
easily run to billions of dollars, and we would be dependent on
foreign expertise to rescue us. According to a Japanese government
panel the Fukushima disaster is going to cost Japan anything from $71-
to $250-billion!

Meanwhile the department of energy says the NFBP is in the “final
stages of consideration”; apparently there is now a nuclear Plan B in
the works.

May 10, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general