nuclear-news

 Already, the Rosatom view has been qualified with a senior government source telling Reuters “[t]hey jumped the gun” and Xolisa Mabhongo, an executive at South African state agency Nuclear Energy Corporation confirming that there would be a bidding process before any final contracts were signed.

The whole drive for nuclear power is very hard to understand, especially since it goes against the government’s own policy document, the Integrated Development Plan, which advises that commitments to long range, large-scale investment decisions “should be avoided” in order to ensure “decisions of least regret”. Nuclear builds take a long (a decade) to be completed and therefore do nothing to ease our current pressing energy problems. If nuclear were to get the green light, other shorter-term solutions would still be needed and then, when nuclear eventually comes online, we will find ourselves sitting with thousands of megawatts of excess and extremely expensive baseload capacity. ……….

…..Perhaps “jumping the gun” has something to do with the pressure Rosatom is facing from its various foreign nuclear power station builds, which it says amounts to $100 billion due to tighter economic sanctions imposed against Russia for its role in Ukraine’s civil war. This includes a $8.4-billion nuclear power project in northern Finland (where Rosatom has a 34% ownership stake) and a $10 billion nuclear plant expansion deal brokered between Rosatom and a Hungarian utility company. The Hungarian one is especially  interesting. It is reported that Benedek Javor, a Hungarian member of parliament, requested that the EU investigate Rosatom deal because he says that it secured its deal without a public procurement process in violation of EU regulations……….

Despite everything, nuclear energy is just uneconomic and will not solve our immediate energy problems either. Countries that select power supplies through democratic, transparent and market-based methods aren’t building new nuclear reactors. The cost differentials between nuclear energy and anything else can’t be fixed by sharpening pencils – the gulf is just too big. None of this means that we should not be vigilant. Rosatom’s footprints in Hungary and Turkey should be closely tracked.

Perhaps the biggest problem with our government’s apparent fixation with nuclear power is that it diverts attention away from the very many things in our energy sector that desperately require our attention. We can but hope that our decision makers will consult the IRP and put these nuclear dreams aside.DM http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2014-09-25-analysis-why-we-wont-be-getting-any-nuclear-power-plants-from-russia-anytime-soon/#.VCXSO2ddUnl