More nukes on the way

What lingered in my mind after his speech on the nuclear future for South Africa was not Dr Rob Adams’ confident prediction that we would have another 10 Koebergs in the next 20 years.

It was his assertion, in replying to a question from the audience in the Rhodes University lecture theatre on Tuesday, that anti-nuclear activists had the wrong target in aiming at the nuclear industry’s safety record.

Adams, head of the Nuclear Energy Corporation of SA, had been quite persuasive in arguing the nuclear industry’s case, but I was surprised that he had not encountered more aggressive questioning. Neither did Alec Erwin, the Public Enterprises Minster, who spoke on Monday.

Both were speaking at a teach-in arranged by the politics and physics departments at Rhodes.

Erwin had also presented the nuclear route as the only one to follow, saying that South Africa’s dearth of water, quite aside from pressure to cut carbon emissions, would force us to use more nuclear power.

Many people, confronted with the reality of more conventional nuclear power stations — and we are talking about conventional power stations, not the pebble-bed modular reactor that is still being tested — become angry. “What about alternative energy?” they ask, indignantly.

Well, Adam pointed out that alternative energy sources don’t crack it when it comes to “base load” power generation, because base load power has to be continuous, not intermittent like the power supplied by windmills.

He also pointed out South Africa is number 15 on the world’s list of the biggest carbon dioxide emitters. Taking into account our small population shoots us up the rankings quite a bit, he said. And if Eskom was a country it would be the 25th largest emitter of CO2.

Adams also explained why we should worry about this. In future, coal-fired power stations that don’t pump their CO2 underground are likely to cause exported products made using this unclean power to have heavy taxes slapped on them by importing countries.

In other words, we’ll be punished for being heavy CO2 emitters.

But just to keep pace with projected economic growth our electricity generation capacity has to double by 2030.

At the same time South Africa has to diversify from coal, and in any case in the Eastern and Western Cape there are no convenient coal reserves.

Nuclear is it, then, — 20 000MW of it, equal to 10 Koebergs.

Now let me confess that I am not alarmed by nuclear energy per se. I know the very idea drives some environmentalists to the edge of sanity. I guess this is because of the link with the use of atomic technology for bombs.

I grew up in a nuclear age, when memories of Hiroshima were recent and the prospect of nuclear holocaust seemed imminent. I remember well that the black humour of Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove resided in the real potential for global nuclear destruction at the hands of idiot politicians. Or so it seemed at the time.

Perhaps that was why I think Adam is pointing to a real concern — security. What is the potential for nuclear material to fall into the wrong hands?

Still, it does occur to me that many people in New York spent decades worrying about nuclear guided missiles falling from the sky, yet when an attack did come it was much more low-tech, in the form of misguided terrorists flying planes into buildings.

For that matter, Americans worrying about a terrorist attack from Islamic fanatics were taken aback by the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, committed by two very white, very non-Islamic men with a truck full of fertiliser and explosives. The attack, the largest terrorist attack on US soil until the September 11 2001 attacks, killed 168 people.