A balance of power

Back in the Fifties, nuclear power was hyped as ushering in an age where electricity would be too cheap to meter. Those power utilities that accepted the sales talk have been given plenty of reasons to regret it ever since.

While they knew the initial cost of nuclear would be higher than fossil- fuel power stations, they did not foresee that falling gas and coal prices would wipe out the promised operating-cost advantages.

Maintenance costs also turned out to be far higher than anticipated. Not only have the nuclear power stations in operation today turned out to be more expensive to build and run than their fossil-fuel counterparts, they have the added disadvantage of costing a fortune to close down.

Given the clearer picture of the economics of nuclear power that emerged with experience, no private sector power company has been willing to order a new nuclear plant in more than a quarter of a century. But state-owned power utilities kept buying them, for motives that look very suspicious.

These plants provided governments with plausible reasons to buy or manufacture atomic fuel, some of which could be refabricated on the sly into warheads.

So today’s nuclear power plants have come to be seen as disappointing investments, culprits in the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and (arguably unfairly) as safety and environmental hazards. But what about tomorrow’s?

Various “new” technology nuclear generators have been developed that claim to overcome these problems. The word “new” is in quotation marks because these designs have been around since the Sixties.

A comparison of the potential candidates in a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) six years ago concluded the best is “a small, modular pebble-bed gas reactor cooled by helium using a gas turbine to generate electricity” — the very technology Eskom has been punting since 1993 as the high-tech manufacturing niche in which South Africa should stake its claim.

MIT’s study said a small, 20MW thermal pebble-bed reactor had been running in Germany for more than 20 years, and a 300MW plant also ran in Germany for many years before it was shut down.

The MIT study heralded these as potentially “a new generation of nuclear plants that could be deployed worldwide without fear of proliferation or safety, which could make a substantial contribution to the efforts to avoid global climate change”.

MIT’s researchers argued that because the plant is smaller than traditional power stations, it is both safer and more economically viable. Because it is a 10th of the size of a traditional power station, it lends itself to factory production. The first module can be brought online rapidly and start generating cash flow to support the financing of the next incremental units.

Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR), a subsidiary created by Eskom and sister state-owned enterprise Industrial Development Corporation (IDC), projects that if it can sell at least 20 modules a year, the result will be 114 000 jobs and R20-billion a year in exports.

About R1,3-billion has been spent since the inception of the company to the end of last year. The company now wants to spend R10-billion constructing a demonstration plant and a fuel plant at Pelindaba.

The vision of South Africa becoming the factory of the world for a new generation of high-tech power stations is very appealing.

But a cause for concern is that, at the moment, the project is entirely a “government job” — a gamble that currently rests entirely on South African tax-payers and electricity consumers. One group of concerned citizens challenging the financial viability of the project is Earthlife Africa.

In a document entitled Why are we against the PBMR? the organisation states that, originally, “a condition sine qua non for the PBMR to go ahead is that there must be credible international investors. Where are they? At what point does someone shout ‘stop?'”

Earthlife Africa and others have argued that several richer, more technologically advanced countries have tried and failed in this market. So what chance does South Africa have?

“We feel it is the wrong assumption that other nations have failed,” PBMR said in response to that question. “It is perhaps more accurate to say that the research projects in the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States have provided a solid foundation on which the South African technology was built.

“Over the past couple of years the PBMR project has been reviewed by a host of independent bodies: the International Atomic Energy Agency, Eskom and its partners, and an independent team of experts commissioned by the South African government. Suffice to say that the project has survived this scrutiny.”

With “war on terror” a current catch-phrase, will larger economies allow South Africa to sell nuclear reactors to developing countries? According to both the MIT study and PBMR, one of the advantages of the pebble-bed design is that it would take too many “pebbles” and so the production process would be too complex for this type of reactor to be an attractive cover for a government wanting to create nuclear arms.

Although nuclear plants are popularly perceived to be environmental and safety hazards, they actually compare favourably to their fossil-fuel cousins.

“The single such nuclear accident was Chernobyl, caused primarily by a crazy reactor design that would never be allowed in the West. Nuclear is by far the safest large-scale source of energy.”

The accident at Chernobyl killed 31 people. The total death toll is estimated at about 15 000, and another 50 000 people are estimated to have been handicapped by the disaster. So that single accident puts a large blot on the safety record of the nuclear-power industry.

And the way the rest of the nuclear industry continues to maintain that it has a good safety track-record is brought into question by horror stories — such as a recent article in noseweek, which alleged that instead of revealing a radiation-related medical problem to a Koeberg employee, Eskom persuaded him to accept a retrenchment package with no medical aid.

But these problems don’t necessarily relate to pebble-bed reactors because, in theory, they will be even safer than those currently in operation. This is partly because they are smaller than conventional power stations, and partly because they run with little human intervention.

What to do with spent fuel is a problem no one has yet found a solution for. A plan in the US to create a disposal facility at Yucca Mountain “is becoming a multibillion-dollar monument to why nuclear is in decline” the MIT study said.

But again, when viewed next to the global warming and acid-rain contributions pinned on fossil-fuel generators, nuclear waste looks like the lesser of two evils.

But there are other ways to generate electricity that create neither nuclear nor fossil-fuel waste.

The hydroelectric potential of Africa’s great rivers has barely been harnessed. Importing this power instead of exporting coal-fired power could lead to both a stronger regional economy and to a cleaner environment.

Eskom says it is exploring a whole host of technologies. These include natural gas, clean coal, imported hydro-power, renewable energy, nuclear and advanced technologies such as fuel cells.

The past 50 years have seen the pendulum of sentiment on nuclear power generation swing from wild over-optimism to extreme pessimism.

Now this pendulum appears to be swinging back — especially as the concern over the greenhouse contribution of fossil-fuel generators grows. Eskom may have placed itself shrewdly to profit if utilities start to view nuclear generators in a better light.

But since this is a huge gamble with public money, it is a good thing that Earthlife Africa is paying attention and demanding answers.

Death by power

The number of energy accidents between 1969 and 1996 that killed at least five people are as follows: