Environmental NGO Earthlife Africa has threatened a legal challenge to what it says is South Africa’s ”hasty and ill-informed” draft nuclear policy.
The threat was made in a submission on Earthlife’s behalf by the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) on the policy document, released by the Department of Minerals and Energy in August.
The LRC said the draft failed to make public a number of issues that should have been taken into account in drafting it.
Nor were reasons given for deviating from a process outlined in the 1998 White Paper on energy — which called for a national energy expansion plan, with projections on demand and cost for various options — before going into the detail of a nuclear policy.
The LRC said it was not clear whether the nuclear option had been properly compared with other alternatives.
”The draft nuclear policy is a hasty and ill-informed document replete with sweeping unsupported statements as to the appropriateness of nuclear power as an energy option,” the LRC said.
It noted that in February this year, the United Kingdom’s High Court declared that the British government’s decision to back the construction of new nuclear power plants was unlawful.
The judge overseeing the case, brought by Greenpeace, had declared that the consultation process was seriously flawed and the process ”manifestly inadequate and unfair”.
This was because the government had not made enough information available for people to make an intelligent response.
”It is submitted that the [South African] draft nuclear policy suffers from the same deficiencies and should not form the basis of government policy,” the LRC said.
”Should these deficiencies not be cured, the[n] Earthlife Africa reserves its rights to challenge the lawfulness of the policy.”
The draft policy says nuclear energy will form part of South Africa’s strategy to mitigate climate change, and says nuclear is the only economically viable alternative to coal for base-load electricity generation.
Eskom has said it is looking at an extra 20 000MW of nuclear capacity by 2025. — Sapa