Minister of Energy and Electricity, Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, says Cabinet’s decision to lift the state of care maintenance of the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor will place South Africa back to its “rightful place” at the forefront of nuclear technology.

The Minister was speaking during a media briefing on Sunday.

“South Africa is going back to its rightful place as a major player on the nuclear fuel cycle and we are confident that over a period of time, we’ll be a dominant and indispensable player on the nuclear side,” he said.

The decision allows South Africa to participate in the nuclear fuel cycle which will have both domestic and commercial opportunities.

“It means we can reopen the fuel development laboratories to undertake research and development. There are also commercial opportunities. There’s over 80% of [Small Modular Reactors] that are at differing stages of development.

“We know that it’s only one country that is a supplier of this fuel. Globally, with the exponential rise of SMRs [Small Modular Reactors]. With the introduction of the work that we are doing, we are going to be another player in that space,” Ramokgopa added.

Last month, the Minister released the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) 2025 which included plans to install some 5200 megawatts of new nuclear capacity in South Africa.

“Nuclear is going to play a very crucial role in ensuring that we address the 600 million people on the continent that do not have access to electricity, the industrialisation of the continent, the need for us to beneficiate the critical minerals that are going to underpin the decarbonisation agenda…it’s going to rely on clean baseload and nuclear is going to feature significantly.

“As a country we are not going to be left behind. We have built a body of knowledge over time…and once we’ve lifted this care and maintenance, we are confident that the engineers that we invested in will come back and working with universities, we are going to build a pipeline of nuclear scientists who are going to participate in this build programme,” he explained.

The Minister also reflected on the selection of Duynefontein to be one of the locations for South Africa’s new nuclear build.

“On the IRP we said that we want to additional 5.2GW of nuclear generation capacity. A major decision was taken by the Department of Forestry and Environment…we were granted the EIA [Environmental Impact Assessment] for the site that we had identified for the new nuclear build and that is Duynefontein just adjacent to Koeberg.

“We can deploy, when we initiate this new build, at least 2400MW of nuclear energy. We are also able to demonstrate that now there’s a site that is fully permitted for us to able to roll out the nuclear build programme,” he said.

Other sites are also being explored in the Eastern Cape.

Originally posted on SAnews.gov.za