By Mike Kantey
In a recent article in Business Report (July, 19, 2023), Hlathi Zak Madela claims that anti-nuclear sentiments are “misplaced” and “devoid of facts”.
He cites the US, Canada, Western Europe, the UK, India, China and the Middle East as leading a nuclear resurgence. What he fails to mention, however, is that most of the states (including France) are nuclear-weapons states, despite the use of such weapons of mass destruction being outlawed by the UN.
As Pakistan, India, Israel, and South Africa (mercifully in the past) have shown, no nuclear weapons programme would be possible without a civilian nuclear-power programme.
Far more extravagant, however, is the language of his opening paragraph, which is worth quoting in full:
“The negative sentiments and biased arguments devoid of real facts on the ground if not unwarranted, and attacks on the South African nuclear industry by the Greenies and those against nuclear power are baseless.”
While slating the anti-nuclear movement for “negative sentiments” and “biased arguments devoid of real facts”, the author himself, with his vigorous rhetorical flourishes, debases and demeans any attempt at a rational argument. Even his choice of the now-pejorative “Greenies” epithet displays his singular and overly emotional contempt for honest debate.
As the Ancient Romans might have put it, argumentum ad hominem: playing the man instead of the ball, as was demonstrated recently by the Argentinian full-back against the young Grant Williams.
Madela also suggests a revival of the dubious Pebble-Bed Modular Reactor programme, which wasted R10 billion of taxpayers’ money before grinding to a halt in the absence of investor support.
As shown by Dr David Fig in a report for the Institute of Security Studies in 2017, the project was born out of a failed experiment in Hamm-Uentropp in Germany and should never have made our shores at all. Like Reuel Khoza and nuclear industry beneficiaries before them, the current posse of South African pro-nuclear advocates all stand to gain from the procurement spend.
To then insinuate from a lone sentence among Earthlife Africa’s prodigious output of well-researched technical, scientific and economic anti-nuclear arguments that they are simply “pro-renewable” is absurd.
The worst horrors to be produced from inside the author’s rhetorical kitbag, however, are the oft-repeated phrases “clean, affordable and reliable”. If I had 10 zlotys for every repetition of the callous and cavalier phrase, I would be richer than JK Rowling. Were Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three-Mile Island “clean”?
Were the SL-1 Idaho reactor, Sellafield and the waste dump at Khystym clean? Even routine operations of nuclear power stations are responsible for deadly emissions and effluents.
As for “affordable”, Clyde Mallinson, in his “Briefing Note: Koeberg life extension; a techno-economic assessment” of January 2022, points out that we cannot afford it.
Koeberg can play a far more important role of generating at maximum capacity until planned decommissioning in mid-2024, in order to buy additional time to mount a large, sustained PV, wind and storage-build programme, at multiples of the IRP 2019.
The impact of the Koeberg extension, as well as the downtime required to prepare for the extension, could cost close to R50 billion in maintenance and related expenses, increased need for open-cycle gas turbines usage, increased key customer supply curtailment and increased load-shedding.
Within the next decade, non-flexible generation from Koeberg, or any new nuclear plants, will b out of place, and not fit for purpose in a new PV, wind and storage, flexible generation supply system. In fact, when either of the two units at Koeberg require refuelling in this new-generation architecture, they will need to be backed up by renewable resources and storage. This implies that they will be technically redundant.
If one were to search for the word “nuclear”, moreover, in the Draft Discussion Document issued by the South African Presidential Climate Commission Report. “Framework for a Just Transition in South Africa”, published in February 2022, you would search in vain. We just don’t have enough time to muck about with the high cost and long R&D and build time of Small Modular Reactors, when cheaper, off-the-shelf technology is available immediately.
Finally, the very idea of “reliability” has been destroyed by Koeberg itself. One of the problems of a nuclear power plant is the continuous, internal bombardment by stray neutrons. This has emerged as a major problem in France, one of the discreetly absent countries in Madela’s praise poem,
As reported in the Daily Maverick, “In March 2022, a technician accidentally cut a valve on the reactor known as Unit 1 instead of cutting it on the reactor known as Unit 2 (which was down for scheduled maintenance) in an incident that “could have had devastating consequences”.
Shortly afterwards and unrelated to the incident, the IAEA team visited Koeberg (March 22–31, 2022) to conduct a SALTO review. A subsequent IAEA statement noted that the country’s state utility and nuclear operator should “comprehensively review and implement all plant programmes relevant for long-term operation of the Koeberg nuclear power station” and “complete the revalidation of qualification of cables in the containment building for the long-term operation period and ensure full functionality of the containment-structure monitoring system.”
In a nutshell, then, nuclear power stations are not “clean, affordable and reliable” but dirty, hellishly expensive and unreliable.
Mike Kantey is the former chairperson of the national Coalition Against Nuclear Energy.
BUSINESS REPORT