Matthew le Cordeur
Cape Town - Nuclear power generation has turned into an expensive operation, even when the machines are amortised, said nuclear expert Mycle Schneider.
Schneider, author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, told Fin24 on Monday that he questioned whether nuclear power can be seen as an alternative to a whole range of other energy options.
Schneider’s 2015 report, which was released in South Africa this month, concluded that “the promise that Generation III+ designs would be simpler and therefore easier to build appears not to have been fulfilled”.
“Real costs have increased significantly compared to their predecessors suggesting the attempt to reduce complexity was not a success.
“The ‘nuclear renaissance’ appears, in retrospect, to have been a last chance for light water reactor technology,” the report says. “Given the failure to reduce costs - and there are few who would forecast costs are going to go down at all, much less decline to the levels originally claimed - and the apparent failure to reduce the incidence of construction overruns, the future looks bleak for light water technology."
South Africa is forging ahead to build 9.6 GW of nuclear energy, which critics believe will drain the country’s fiscus due to the large upfront infrastructure costs they say will experience time and budget overruns.
Request for proposals – which would focus on the Generation III+ designs - will be released before the end of the month, the Department of Energy said.
Nuclear for SA would only be ready by 2025
“Nuclear power has the longest lead time of any option to generate electricity,” Schneider told Fin24. “The average construction time of the 40 nuclear reactors that have been brought on line in the world in the past 10 years was about 9.5 years, to which one has to add several years of site preparation and licensing procedures.