South Africa planning to start nuclear procurement

[NNadir]

South Africa planning to start nuclear procurement

An excerpt:

South Africa plans to issue a Request for Proposal for 2500 MWe of new nuclear capacity at the end of March 2022 and complete the procurement process in 2024, Deputy Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy Nobuhle Pamela Nkabane told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 65th General Conference. The country is also finalising its ratification of the amended Convention on Physical Protection of Nuclear Material.

"As we embark on the Just Energy Transition in South Africa, we recognise that nuclear plays a pivotal role as one of the clean energy sources that are needed to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050," Nkabane told the conference, which is being held in Vienna.

"In June 2020, South Africa issued a Request for Information to test the market appetite for the 2500 MW of nuclear energy and received positive responses from 25 companies that showed an interest in this programme. The National Energy Regulator of South Africa has recently concurred with a ministerial … determination for the procurement of 2500 MW new generation capacity from nuclear energy. We plan to issue the Request for Proposal for 2500 MW nuclear programme at end of March 2022 and complete the procurement in 2024 to support the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan and ensure security of energy supply."

She thanked the IAEA for its continued support through peer-review Safety Aspects of Long-Term Operation missions at the Koeberg nuclear power plant, which is currently undergoing "technical and regulatory work" to extend its lifetime by 20 years.

[DetroitLegalBeagle]

1. The first country to willing give up their nuclear weapons after developing them

I wonder if they still have any scientists or technicians around from their program. Its been 30 years now since they disarmed so probably not.

[GregariousGroundhog]

3. South Africa currently operators two commercial nuclear reactors built by Framatome

I don't doubt their ability to safely run new nuclear reactors. The more interesting question is who they will purchase the reactors from, and how much it will cost them to build.

[cstanleytech]

2. I know nuclear is the best way to produce energy at a reliable rate that has lower impact

on the environment (unless there is one of the rare accidents) but do you see any real potential alternatives to replace it like fusion happening any time within say the next decade or two?

[NNadir]

4. Fusion energy has been just twenty years off for my entire adult life. I'm not young.

Sarcasm aside, I really can't badmouth the effort, if only because I avail myself of the wonderful winter lecture series at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, the "Science on Saturday" series.

The ITER in France, an international cooperative effort, is supposed to fire up relatively soon. It is not designed as a power reactor, but it designed to produce more energy than the maintenance of the fusion plasmas require, a chimeric hope of the last twenty years.

Fusion systems involve fascinating science, and as I review the faculties of major US Nuclear Engineering Schools to help steer my son, I note that every major department has fusion people in them.

The Science on Saturday series usually has two or three lectures out of ten or so, involving plasma physics and the development of fusion energy systems. I've been attending these lectures for more than ten years. While stabilizing plasma with a net energy gain is the goal of the ITER, there's a long way between that and a power reactor. It does seem to me that they have serious materials science issues, although clearly advances have been made. My feeling is that the issue of heat exchange is not one that has even been approached. I could be wrong about that, but that's my general impression.

The fusion rhetoric always presents itself as being superior to fission, calling up the usual bugaboos, the so called "waste" issue, and the "safety issue" and the "non-proliferation" issue. I had a rather absurd conversation with one of their material scientists after a talk where he acted like they couldn't use zirconium based thermal barrier coatings "YSZ," because of zirconium-93, because, um, radioactivity.

One thing is very, very, very, very clear. Fusion energy will not be available on any scale worthy of addressing climate change within half a century, if then. It's too little too late. It's not even remotely clear what the economics of these reactors might be or what their lifetimes might be, given that the neutrons are more than an order of magnitude more energetic than fission neutrons.

By contrast, fission works, and has been saving human lives for more than half a century. There is no better form of energy now than fission. We can all speculate about fusion, and will speculate about it. Plasma physics has many valuable aspects that have technological applications, some of which are already in use and many others worthy of development. In fact, I often consider plasma related issues in considering certain types of fission reactor heat exchange systems.

Overall, I support fusion research, but I'm skeptical that it will be as readily available or as sustainable as fission energy or as affordable.

The consequences of climate change are here now. They are not ten years from now, twenty years from now, 50 years from now, they are now.

Fusion is cute, but fission is the last best hope of the human race, seriously.