South Africa’s Koeberg nuclear power plant at Melkbosstrand, near Cape Town, uses seawater, unavailable inland, as a coolant.
South African nuclear scientists want to build a new generation of mini nuclear reactors, both to plug holes in their own country’s blackout-plagued power grid and to build an export industry for the future.
A company has designed a small, modular gas-cooled reactor that it says can be installed within three years on a site smaller than a football field and safely produce enough electricity for a city.
Similar projects are underway in other countries, as the world faces the challenge of powering a future economy of electrified transportation, heating and data centers while reducing carbon emissions.
Europe is divided on the path forward. Some countries, France in the lead, are banking on nuclear power. Others, like Germany, hope that renewable energy like wind and solar power will replace fossil fuels and make up for lost access to Russian natural gas exports.
South Africa will depend on coal for some time to come but, with an electricity shortage already, it is betting on the development of its nuclear program.
And some experts like Kelvin Kemm, a nuclear physicist and chief executive of Pretoria-based private company Stratek Global, believe South Africa is uniquely positioned to take the lead in developing fourth-generation reactors.
Continuous power outages
“I believe that the future is not only near, I believe that the future has arrived,” Kemm told AFP in an interview in his garden on the outskirts of Pretoria.
Dr Kelvin Kemm, a nuclear physicist and chief executive officer of Stratek Global, believes South Africa can become an exporter of mini nuclear power plants.
“I see that in the next six years there will be a massive global proliferation of nuclear power of all sizes, and that there will be a huge change of heart over the next 24 months. I believe that the South Africa is already a leader.”
South Africa’s civilian nuclear adventure began in 1976, with the start of construction of the Koeberg nuclear power station on the southern Atlantic coast, just north of Cape Town.
It was commissioned 40 years ago and has a capacity of just under 2,000 megawatts, a small fraction of the 27,000 MW that South Africa’s much-derided state power company, Eskom, can supply, largely through carbon-intensive coal-fired power plants.
But domestic demand for electricity often peaks at more than 32,000 MW per day, and South Africans face repeated power outages or “load shedding” of up to 12 hours per day, a heavy burden on the economy of what should be the powerhouse of the continent.
In December, the government announced plans to commission the first in a series of new nuclear power plants by 2033, adding another 2,500 megawatts of capacity, while planning to renew Koeberg and extend its life life of an additional 20 years.
But even with the appearance of solar panels on homes and housing estates across the country, the country still remains short of electricity in the medium term. This is where, in the plans of nuclear evangelists like Kemm, small modular plants come into play.
Large power plants like Koeberg, with its two French-designed pressurized water reactors (PWRs), must be located on the edge of the ocean to allow 80 tonnes of cold water to be pumped per second to cool its reactors.
However, most of South Africa is dry and its commercial center, Johannesburg, as well as its mines and energy-intensive industry, are far from the sea. The capital Pretoria is also far from the cool coast Atlantic from the Cape as Rome is from London.
Despite large coal mines and a four-decade history of civilian nuclear power, South Africa’s economy has been hampered by repeated power outages.
This is where Stratek hopes to step in with its High Temperature Modular Reactor (HTMR-100).
According to Kemm, who is already in talks with international operators as far away as France and South Africa, these helium gas-cooled reactors can be installed in groups of 10 or usually six to power steam turbines ready for employment.
These plants would each produce less than 300 megawatts, enough for a major industrial mining complex or for domestic use in a city the size of Pretoria.
Weak Rand
But most importantly, they would be easier to supply – consuming less than a truckload of uranium fuel pellets in portable, cricket-ball-sized spheres per year – and easy to cool without seawater.
By nuclear industry standards, with notoriously long and expensive development schedules, they would be relatively cheap and quick to install, and prices would drop once the first prototype was operational.
Kemm said the weak rand meant his company could estimate the cost of the first reactor at $470 million and aim to bring subsequent builds down to $300 million each.
“We are extremely cheap by global standards,” he said.
© 2024 AFP
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