South African taxpayers will have to fork out R400-billion to pay for Eskom's planned nuclear programme, an independent study has revealed.
The cost of decommissioning the proposed nuclear power stations at the end of their lives will add several hundred billion rand to the bill.
The study found that this massive expenditure would not solve South Africa's energy crisis, as the proposed nuclear power plants were unlikely to make a significant contribution to the national grid before 2020.
Eskom is forging ahead with the proposed nuclear programme in an energy policy "vacuum" as South Africa has no integrated energy plan, while the public, who will foot the massive nuclear bill, has had no chance to have its say.
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| There was an 'aura of panic' |
Steve Thomas, professor of energy policy at the UK's University of Greenwich, was commissioned by the Cape Town office of the Legal Resources Centre to assess the nuclear power programme.
His report has been submitted to the environment affairs and tourism portfolio committee, which will hear public submissions on nuclear energy on Wednesday.
Thomas said there was an "aura of panic" around South Africa's decision-making on the power sector because of the energy crisis.
"The risk of such a large programme is that for the next 10 to 15 years, South Africa will be locked into an expensive nuclear programme that will have absorbed many of the available resources, but which will have come to nothing, or will have produced only one or two 'white elephants'," Thomas said in the report.
This would leave few resources to develop options that could help South Africa meet its energy needs in a more sustainable way, such as energy efficiency and renewables.
"The nuclear programme envisaged by the South African government and Eskom would require the expenditure of about R400-billion of public money to build the plants.
"Waste disposal and decommissioning would cost an addition sum of a similar order of magnitude. A new nuclear programme should be launched only with the full and informed consent of the South African public. Such a huge commitment of public money should not be rushed or short-circuited," Thomas wrote.
Because the nuclear power plants could not contribute to electricity supplies before 2020, the programme was irrelevant to the issues facing the South African electricity industry now, and a dangerous distraction from dealing with them.
The Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) programme, where costs had escalated out of control, and markets and partners had failed to emerge, needed an independent review, open to full public scrutiny.
The most recent estimate of R15-billion for the next phase was probably an underestimate.
Thomas said it was essential that the project was independently scrutinised to find a design to satisfy the National Nuclear Regulator, whether the construction cost was competitive, the PBMR plants were reliable and economic, and whether there was a market for them outside SA.
Thomas said the government's proposal to build "conventional" nuclear power plants seemed no better thought out.
"These 'conventional' designs have been under development for about 15 years, and were known when the PBMR programme was launched. So it is hard to understand, why, if they were so unattractive a decade ago, they are now a good option.
"They remain unproven in operation and the only construction experience to date, in Finland, has been appalling."
Sputnik Ratau, spokesperson for the department of minerals and energy, said Eskom's nuclear plan had "been in the pipeline for a long time. Not everything stops because the integrated energy plan has not gone through".
Lance Greyling, ID spokesperson on energy, said on Tuesday that it appeared Eskom and Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin were "taking the gap" presented by the lack of national policy.
"Serious decisions are being made in the absence of an energy plan for the country. We are at a critical juncture and need to think very carefully about what decisions are made, because they can lock us in financially for 30 or 40 years."
- This article was originally published on page 1 of Cape Times on June 20, 2007
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