unusual for the leftist media to report on the benefits of the cheapest and greenest form of energy
re posted from THE DAILY MAVERICK
Ramokgopa makes the case for small modular reactors and the resuscitation of SA’s nuclear industry
Nuclear energy is back on the table in South Africa, but it is not likely to look like the sort of large-scale, conventional plant-build programme that was mooted under the tainted nuclear procurement programme of the Jacob Zuma presidency.
In a media briefing last week, Minister of Energy and Electricity Kgosientsho Ramokgopa stressed that nuclear energy would be a crucial part of South Africa’s energy mix and that activity was under way to re-energise the country’s nuclear capacities.
He was specifically referring to small modular reactors (SMRs), not conventional large reactors like the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station.
Despite concerns about environmental impacts, high initial costs, regulatory hurdles and public scepticism, “what we have accepted is that SMRs are the future”, said Ramokgopa on 20 November.
“There’s about 50 to 60 different SMR technologies that are at different stages of concept. I think it’s only the Chinese that are advanced. We know that we’ve got the capability and in fact, the genesis of the current generation of small modular reactors is the PBMR [pebble bed modular reactor]. We have sunk over 10 billion, 12 billion rands into that programme [and then] abandoned it for reasons that were explained at the time.”
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