16 August 2007
editorial
Johannesburg — HOW times have changed! Not only are we planning to generate a lot more of our electricity from nuclear, because it's "greener" than coal, but we also have aspirations to build a (peaceful) nuclear industry that draws on some of the skills built up for the apartheid government's nuclear weapons programme.
It's all quite ironic. But it does make some sense. Nearly 90% of SA's power comes from coal and we have coal reserves that will last us for centuries to come. But coal is not as cheap as it once was and, more to the point, it's very dirty, in environmental terms. Nuclear fuel is much cleaner when it comes to emissions and given mounting concerns about global warming, it's started to look a lot more attractive than it used to. Safer too. And though it's desirable to look at other renewable energy sources such as wind and water, nuclear is the only source capable of generating power at scale. So for SA any new "base-load" power stations that aren't coal-fired will have to be nuclear.
And that's the plan: half of the generating capacity Eskom plans to build in the next 20 years will be nuclear, as it cuts dependence on coal to less than 70%. The minerals and energy department wants nuclear's contribution to SA's energy mix to rise from 6% to more than 15% over the next few of decades.
But nuclear has another potential plus for SA, because we have the fuel right here underground. SA has the world's fifth-largest uranium resources. But it's only the world's 11th largest producer. The new nuclear energy policy that the department released this week for public comment aims to change that, setting out a strategy aimed at boosting uranium mining and beneficiation. Government aspires to build a new industry around nuclear, the department says . That includes enriching uranium and producing fuel -- an industry that is not new to SA since the former Atomic Energy Corporation, now the Nuclear Energy Corporation, was doing just that under apartheid.
The emphasis now is on peaceful purposes only, as the policy document emphasises. And though the global politics of producing nuclear fuel are delicate, SA did voluntarily dismantle its nuclear weapons capacity before 1994 and that should help its standing in the international nuclear community.
But all this could cost taxpayers a great deal. We need a lot more transparency on what the beneficiation strategy might involve, and how it will be funded. We need detail too on just what the new nuclear policy will mean for the mining industry.
Because uranium is seen as strategic, it's treated differently to other minerals. The minerals and energy department wants to ensure adequate local supplies of uranium for Eskom's new nuclear plants, as well as more for export, and it's talking about "regulatory" incentives for uranium mining. It could, for example, grant mining licences on condition miners supply a certain percentage of their output to the state for local nuclear power generation. But that has to be spelled out soon: with the uranium price soaring, there's plenty of interest in expansion in the industry. The department must not stifle the momentum with regulatory uncertainty.
But government must take care too not to have delusions of grandeur. In theory it makes sense to develop an industry around nuclear because we have uranium, are building power stations and have certain of the skills. But this is an extremely high-tech industry. Skills of that kind are in short supply and SA needs them elsewhere in its energy industry too. What's more, though it may sound good for SA to aspire to "global leadership" in the nuclear industry, as the policy document says, it's fairly unlikely we will be taken that seriously as a global player in so sensitive and high-tech a field. So let's aim for a realistic strategy rather than one that's too ambitious -- or too costly.
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