Recently Johannesburg and Cape Town branches have focused on the squandering of public money on development of a 'new' generation of reactors. The solar and wind energy resources available in South Africa are sufficient to provide for all our energy needs many times over. The development of new nuclear power plants is unjustifiable on any terms, but particularly when judged as an energy strategy for South Africa, rather than solely as a speculative investment opportunity. The PBMR programme is designed to capitalise on previous subsidisation and an energy industry that continues to ignore full social and environmental costs of energy generation, such as impacts on human health and the environment.
Proponents also misrepresent the possible role of nuclear power in climate change mitigation.
In an earlier article programme manager David Nicholls in Nuclear Engineering International suggested a third of all units would be for local construction. This limits the size of the plant but avoids the need for highly reliable, diverse and redundant safety systems that are used to ensure adequate safety on current reactor designs. It is anticipated that power stations will consist of clusters of 5 to 10 reactors - hence the term 'modular'. Eskom hope that the relative simplicity of the design and the modularity of the system will allow for the realisation of the economies of mass production. For units following the reference module, under mass production conditions, Eskom's own estimations of costs per kilowatt hour vary from 1.7 to 2.43 US cents.