Just a month after temporarily withdrawing plans to procure new nuclear power, electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa is convening a seminar to help demystify misconceptions about nuclear power.
Ramokgopa's spokesperson Tsakane Khambane told TimesLIVE Premium that the one-day seminar to be held this week will gather academics, nuclear engineers, government, Eskom and other industry experts under one roof to share information and “demystify” nuclear.
“We seek to unpack issues around nuclear in a scientific and objective manner. In essence the seminar seeks to demystify nuclear because nuclear in South Africa is often misunderstood and characterised by misinformed assumptions and opinions,” Khambane said.
Khambane said the panel discussion topics will include the various aspects of nuclear energy and technology.
“The discussion on nuclear is significant in the context of pursuing cleaner and sustainable forms of energy,” Khambane said.
One of the panel discussions will be on the current status of nuclear energy and technology in the country, while another focus on the nuclear non-power application.
Expanding on the statement issued earlier, Khambane said they also hope that the gathering would help refine policy on nuclear.
The National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) issued a concurrence for the government to procure 2,500MW in September last year. However, Ramokgopa decided to withdraw the determination published in the Government Gazette in January for South Africa to procure the nuclear power.
“The determination on the nuclear bill programme was withdrawn on the basis that there had been no sufficient public consultation, so this [seminar] will, to an extent, stimulate public discourse on nuclear,” Khambane said.
Khambane did not mention names of participants, but she indicated they includes players in the industry, government, researchers, civil society, the National Nuclear Regulator (NNR), Eskom and the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa (Necsa).
“This nuclear seminar seeks to surface facts, and to a great extent, it may assist in the processes of policy implementation,” Khambane said.
Kelvin Kemm, nuclear physicist and former chairperson of Necsa who runs Stratek Global, a Pretoria-based company which has developed a first-of-its-kind nuclear reactor, said the seminar was “essential”.
“There is no doubt that the public demystification of nuclear power is essential. One reason is that the concept of nuclear electricity coming out of uranium metal is puzzling to people in general, so it is not intuitively obvious where it comes from, or how it works,” Kemm said.
He said another reason was that the extremist anti-nuclear lobby groups have gone out of their way to deliberately confuse the public in an attempt to block nuclear.
Kemm said he believed those opposed to South Africa securing energy security through nuclear had “own agendas” of seeing the country experience low electricity production “so that, in their opinion, they put brakes on GDP growth”.
“The objective in this is to block the building of more industry and commerce so as to apparently save the planet from increased waste and pollution. This is extremely silly, but they make a lot of noise to advance their case,” said Kemm.
Kemm said those actively discrediting nuclear often used an incident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Ōkuma, Japan, where cooling systems failed in three reactors after power supply cuts in the aftermath of an earthquake.
“Not one single person was killed or injured by nuclear radiation, yet people generally continue to refer to it as a 'nuclear disaster'. It was not,” Kemm said.
Kemm said South Africa needs to be proud of its nuclear heritage and “world-leading status” as the country that started the worldwide move towards Small Modular Reactors (SMR) in the energy mix.
“We need South Africans to find the courage and self-confidence to become world exporters of Small Modular Reactors,” Kemm said.
Francesca de Gasparis, the executive director at Southern African Faith Communities' Environment Institute, which is opposed to the country's nuclear move raising safety and affordability concerns, told TimesLIVE Premium they were not invited to the seminar.
“It's a great pity, we have not been invited and time is very short now as it [seminar] is only two days away. Currently, views of civil society and the research we have done and our concerns around safety and affordability ... mean we won't be in the room to be able to be part of the seminar,” De Gasparis said.
She said as a result of their absence, the participants will not get all the views on the nuclear issue.
“We wonder if therefore it is a PR exercise rather than a real opportunity to host, consult and do what government said it was planning on doing in its decision-making on nuclear,” De Gasparis said.
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