Mike Kantey, the former chairperson of the “National” Coalition Against Nuclear Energy, recently attacked the energy expert Hlathi Madela in a right of reply in Business Report, “Words without end: A factual approach to the nuclear debate”, on August 3.
Kantey makes four claims about nuclear energy that are just plain wrong: The Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR), nuclear proliferation, the danger of radiation, and the cost.
Kantey is right that the PBMR did indeed cost South Africa around R10 billion, but why doesn’t he say that the project ran over a period of 14 years? India with a significantly poorer population than South Africa, invests heavily in science and engineering and the pay-off is that the Indians recently constructed their own domestic heavy water reactor. Why shouldn’t South Africans follow their lead?
Kantey is wrong that the technology hasn’t been demonstrated. Experimental gas cooled reactors have been in operation in various countries, notably in Germany, the UK, China, and the US. South Africa’s PBMR was unique, because it was an attempt at the first commercial reactor with the purpose of getting the technology to mass production. The PBMR was, and still is, a sensible investment that would provide affordable carbon-dioxide-free energy to the mining, cement, and steel industries, not just in South Africa, but throughout the African continent.
The reactor runs on both abundant uranium and thorium and the fuel’s by-product cannot be used for weapons proliferation. The PBMR is fail-safe as any loss of coolant accident such as Fukushima would immediately stop the nuclear reaction.
In fact, the PBMR project never shut down and local companies such as Stratec Global still dedicates a design team to the technology.
China commercialised its first Pebble Bed in 2022, and X-Energy in America recently signed deals with two clients, in the chemicals industry and South Korea respectively. The cost for the X-Energy reactor is around $2.4bn (R45bn), with half of the sum being used to get the regulator ready. But the subsequent costs would be $1.2bn for a 320MW reactor (4x80MW) that pays for itself during the lifetime of the project.
Kantey’s claims about the link between civilian nuclear power and nuclear proliferation is bizarre as South Africa is a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and there are 23 countries with civilian nuclear programmes that have never gone the route of weapons proliferation. Kantey mentions Israel, for example, but why does he neglect to say that Israel has no civilian reactor and only nuclear weapons?
Kantey’s statement about nuclear accidents is based on an outdated understanding of radiation called Linear No Threshold (LNT). LNT caused the moral panic at Three Mile Island, Fukushima, and Chernobyl.
In the first two events nobody died of radiation and in the latter 31 individuals died from high radiation exposure (the UN claims 50). Chernobyl occurred because the reactor had no containment building – a safety feature that is included in all modern reactors.
By comparison 27 individuals died in 2004 in a methane gas explosion in Algeria and in there were 37 fatalities in the wind industry in 2006 alone. In addition, prominent health physicists like Dr Wade Allison and toxicologists like Dr Edward Calabrese have shown that a bit of radiation is beneficial to humans. The phenomenon known as radiation hormesis is why plant and mammalian life are flourishing at Chernobyl and Fukushima and why airplane pilots, nuclear plant staff and the atomic bomb survivors have reduced rates of cancer.
In terms of costs, Eskom’s balance sheet shows that no independent power provider is cheaper than Koeberg Power Station.
Kantey’s “national” organisation (with no website) has links to the debunked 2011 report on Nuclear Power in South Africa that was written by Greenpeace, the Dutch campaigning business, with an annual income of almost $400 million.
How does the “non-profit” make more money in three years than the cost of the “unaffordable” PBMR?
Due to their “questionable activities”, such as their founder admitting to using propaganda, Greenpeace has had their bank accounts frozen in India and their charitable status twice rejected in New Zealand. Then in 2023 the French school of military economic warfare reported that the funds going into anti-nuclear NGOs come from foreign governments with the aim of in sabotaging nuclear technology at home and abroad – as was recently the case with the Niger coup d’état.
The South African government should please distance itself from these NGO Industrial Complex and rather refer to qualified experts.
Hügo Krüger is a YouTube podcaster, writer, and civil nuclear engineer who has worked on a variety of energy related infrastructure projects ranging from nuclear power, LNG and renewable technologies.
* The views expressed by the columnist are held independently of Business Report and Independent Media.
BUSINESS REPORT