Johannesburg | Tuesday
A US-based company, Shaw Group Inc., has signed an agreement with two South African firms to help build this country’s second nuclear plant, using a pioneering technology dubbed “safe and economical”.
The deal among Shaw, South African nuclear technology firm PBMR Pty Ltd and engineering company Murray and Roberts was announced late on Monday and will enable South Africa to build a test plant with pebble bed modular reactor (PBMR) technology.
This generates power with tennis-sized balls of uranium instead of the rods used in conventional nuclear plants.
PBMR Pty Ltd says the technology is inexpensive, clean and cost-efficient. The trial plant would emit no environmentally damaging greenhouse gases and be radiologically safe.
A PBMR representative on Tuesday said the aim was to develop the test plant in 2003, but could not be more specific. The “preferred site” was Koeberg outside Cape Town, but “we’re still doing feasibility studies and environmental impact assessment”.
Koeberg is currently the location of South Africa’s only nuclear power plant, operating two conventional PWR reactors in a country which remains largely dependent on fossil fuels coal and oil.
In a statement, Shaw said its subsidiary Stone and Webster will provide consulting services for PBMR Pty Ltd and its investors — electricity utility Eskom, British Nuclear Fuels Plc, the Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa and the giant US utility Exelon.
PBMR’s Communications Manager Tom Ferreira on Tuesday rejected charges by anti-nuclear activists that the United States sought to develop the new technology in South Africa, rather than in its “own back yard”.
“Eskom started working on this in 1993 — and it was really only Eskom,” Ferreira said. Then we got Exelon and British Nuclear Fuels as partners.”
“The initial goal was to prove the technical and commercial viability” of PBMR’s. Eskom has announced plans to acquire some 10 such plants to provide power to coastal regions remote from the Gauteng coalfields in the north of South Africa, Ferreira added.
Nuclear power accounts for less than seven percent of South African electricity production. Almost 93% of the 187 billion kilowatts of energy supplies in 1999 came from fossil fuels, according to government figures. – AFP