The environmental non-governmental organisation Earthlife Africa says it is to press ahead with a high court challenge to Eskom’s proposed pebble bed nuclear reactor.
Eskom has applied to the Department of Environmental Affairs for permission to construct a demonstration module at Koeberg near Cape Town.
The Pretoria High Court decided on Tuesday that an application by Earthlife for an order allowing it to make representations directly to government and giving it access to key documents, was not urgent, and should be struck from the roll.
However Earthlife spokesperson Liz McDaid said on Thursday the organisation would still pursue the matter, even though it was not considered urgent by the court.
”We are convinced that the process is deeply flawed,” she said. ”We really believe that the pebble bed is not an option for South Africa. We are going to court to put our case and pursue our constitutional rights.”
She said, however, that Earthlife’s legal team had indicated that it could take several months before the case came up on the court roll, and there was a danger the department’s director general Chippy Olver would make his decision before then.
Attorney with the Legal Resources Centre Adrian Pole, who is acting for Earthlife, said the NGO maintained it had the right to make representations directly to the ”decision maker” — Olver — and not just to make inputs into an environmental impact assessment process.
”We believe that flowing from the Constitution, common law, as well as the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act, we have a right to make representations to the decision-maker,” he said.
To make that right meaningful, Earthlife was also asking for all the documentary information on which that decision would be based.
”There is an indication that there is indeed information that we haven’t seen yet,” he said.
Consultants appointed by Eskom handed the final environmental impact report on the reactor to the department in October last year.
Asked whether Olver would delay a decision until the outcome of the court case, department spokesperson JP Louw said government had to consider economic, environmental and social implications.
”At the end the director general would consider a number of factors before saying to himself whether he would then make a decision,” he said.
Earthlife was only one of the parties with an interest in the matter, and there were others with opposing views.
”As government we are obliged to look at all of these factors,” he said. – Sapa