Power cuts also switch off salaries and wages

Eskom CEO Tshediso Matona should try running a business during a power outage.

He and most of the ANC ineptocracy seem to think of power outages as inconveniences.

In the real world, processes such as baking have to be shut down an hour before the outage, and then take an hour to restart. An unscheduled outage results in spoiled product of an hour's worth of production.

Presses and injection moulders jam, extruders seize up, sometimes needing days to unjam.

Machine tools stall, cutting tools break.

Power surges damage circuit boards in numerically controlled machines.

Smelters have to empty their crucibles, which can crack on cooling.

Why should foreign capital invest in a country that can't even keep the lights on?

The list of harm done to industry is far too lengthy to go into here.

Employers have to pay labour to sit there and do nothing. Should employers be allowed to not pay labour during power failures? (I refuse to use the euphemism load-shedding.)

If workers went unpaid there would be a political backlash that would force the ANC to fix the problem - and quickly.

KH Irwin, Tokai

If Eskom cannot even supply diesel and water to emergency generators, or maintain a stable coal silo at Majuba, can we trust them with eight Russian nuclear reactors that have not been installed anywhere else internationally?

I am not a qualified nuclear physicist but I know reactors need heavy water, and the consequences of not enough heavy water at a reactor far exceed a water shortage at a non-nuclear turbine.

The Russian reactor at Chernobyl had 180 tons of enriched U-235 uranium onsite, and the area is still uninhabitable because of radioactivity. U-235 has a half-life of 704million years, meaning there will still be 90 tons of radioactive nuclear waste infinitely far into the future because it wasn't cleaned up properly.

Matona told us that "India succeeded to grow even with worse power problems". But India built a coal-fired station on time and for less than half the cost of our six-years-overdue power stations. So why does Eskom not want to privatise power stations?

Perhaps the bosses don't wish to lose the combined R55-million annual executive bonuses they got for not providing monopolised power to us?

Robert Nicolai, Howick