South Africans seem to specialise in doing difficult jobs well, often with unique and apparently dangerous technologies. The country’s expertise in gold and diamond mining is well known, but its success with fuel technologies, polymer research, boat building, wine growing (especially at the innovative Tokara Winery) and even Aids treatment, among many others, is now gaining respect and recognition.
Mining at 3 614m below the surface is not a simple task, as I witnessed on my current trip to South Africa supported by the International Marketing Council. The council had brought a group of science writers to see South Africa’s expanding science base and we started down a mine. It’s a hell of a place to work, with rock temperatures of about 50°C and about one metre of vertical space in which to drill holes for explosives. When these are detonated and the rock processed, each ton yields less than an ounce of a very valuable substance.
My fellow writers and I were guests of Mponeng’s gold mine, owned by AngloGold Ashanti, and it was an eye-opening, sweat-inducing experience. Temperature and seismicity are key obstacles the miners have to overcome and they do it with remarkable skill and dedication.
This mine has one of the best snow-making machines in the world, which keeps working temperatures at the face down to a more bearable 30°C.
Mining is profitable at the moment with a relatively strong gold demand, and if the price goes higher the engineers tell me they can operate at depths of below about five kilometres.
But it’s not just in the mining sector where the resourcefulness of South Africans comes out; one sees it in at least one other field — fuel production. As a pariah state during the apartheid years, South Africa produced its own liquid fuels from coal. In a process largely shunned by the West, South African entities have spent 50 years turning coal into synthetic fuels, providing 28% of domestic liquid fuel requirements. Now the technology has come into its own owing to the high price of oil, attracting interest from Abuja to Shanghai. And Sasol, the privatised former apartheid state organisation, is now the largest producer of liquid fuel in the world.
But it’s in another area of energy delivery, power production through nuclear energy, that may generate the greatest interest globally.
South Africa is not attempting nuclear energy in the normal way. It is drawing on another abandoned German technology to ameliorate traditional problems. The pebble-bed modular reactor (PBMR) replaces traditional uranium rods with fist-sized balls containing roughly 15 000 tiny particles of uranium surrounded by graphite and silicon carbide. The uranium therefore has its own protective casing that can withstand high temperatures; the “physics prevents meltdown”, says one expert.
South Africa has the best malaria control programme in the world and it is even improving its Aids treatment. And with scientific breakthroughs in cheap HIV (CD4 count) testing such as that by Dr Debbie Glencross of Chris Hani Baragwanath hospital, South Africa is even exporting good news on the Aids front. Whether the global media will pay attention is another matter.
South Africa has its problems, high unemployment and HIV rates and significant corruption. But, all in all, South Africa is “alive with possibility”, as the International Marketing Council likes to say; its science should be a source of pride for all South Africans.
Dr Roger Bate is a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, and US director of Africa Fighting Malaria (a South African health advocacy group)