Shut down during the Zuma years, it’s back – with the first reactor to be built near Cape Town or Pretoria. From Moneyweb.
The Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR), a South African technological triumph that was muscled out of the energy discussion in 2010 under former president Jacob Zuma’s presidency, is getting a reboot.
The anti-nuclear lobby conflated it with spectacular nuclear power disasters such as Chernobyl in Russia, Three Mile Island in the US and Fukushima in Japan, to the point where any mention of the word ‘nuclear’ was shouted down on the grounds that it was potentially unsafe.
Things have moved on since then.
At a presentation on Tuesday hosted by the Southern African Agri Initiative (Saai), South Africans were brought up to speed on the latest advances in nuclear technology and the recent partnership between private equity firm C5 Capital and the farming sector to bring small, modular reactors capable of generating 300MW of clean power to the remotest of areas.
One of the biggest advantages is that there is no need to connect to the national grid.
South Africa’s latest evolution of the PBMR is the High Temperature Modular Reactor 100, or HTMR-100, which is capable of generating 100MW of heat or 35MW of electricity, whichever is required.
This allows for the creation of small, localised grids connecting farmers, mines or businesses in a relatively small area, down to a one or two kilometre diameter. This can be scaled up to extend hundreds of kilometres in diameter.
Safe, clean
On the safety issue, the fuel comes in cricket-ball-sized graphite balls containing grains of uranium with multiple coats of special material to keep them from causing harm.
These balls can be safely handled by humans, and once put to work in the reactors there is no danger of a meltdown, nor is the disposal of the waste as cumbersome as the current large-scale reactors used by the Koeberg nuclear power plant in the Western Cape.
Read:
Here comes the nuclear IPP [Nov 2023]
Eskom gauges interest in building pebble-bed nuclear plants [Jan 2020]
Eskom’s renewed interest in the PBMR [Mar 2017]
There’s zero carbon emission, which makes it a viable alternative to wind and solar, and it is capable of generating base load power 24/7, regardless of whether there’s wind or sunshine.
Interest
There’s strong interest in these modular reactors from farmers whose livelihoods have been assaulted by load shedding. Irrigation systems cannot function when there’s no power, poultry farmers have had to destroy millions of rands worth of stock, fridges don’t work, and the entire cold chain is critically disrupted.
Chris Opperman, operating partner for Africa and the Middle East at C5 Capital, says there’s been a surge of interest in these small reactors across Africa.
Washinton DC-based C5 is raising the R9 billion needed to build the first reactor, either near Cape Town or Pretoria, with a construction lead time of five years.
Costs and construction times will reduce as further modules are built.
“The cheapest, most reliable source of energy in SA is at Koeberg, which provides most of the Western Cape’s energy,” says Opperman. “It’s reaching the end of its current life cycle, and it’s important that it is now being extended.
“The private sector model [of modular nuclear power generation] is feasible, and will provide energy to off-takers under long term contract.”
The partnership between C5 and Saai aims to build on Koeberg’s success and the development of the PBMR, which was stopped under Zuma in 2010.
SA’s nuclear talent welcomed elsewhere
That fateful decision put hundreds of highly skilled nuclear technicians and engineers on the global job market, with many of them ending up at US-based X-energy, a nuclear reactor and fuel design engineering company.
As one industry observer explains it: “One of our nuclear experts went to a meeting with about 15 X-energy executives in Washington and the entire meeting was conducted in Afrikaans. That tells you what happened to our nuclear talent.”
X-energy has ended up with plenty of intellectual property developed in SA, though its modular reactors have taken a different course to that of the HTMR-100.
Read: SA-linked X-energy to list in New York
The C5-Saai partnership will focus initially on agriculture, mining and data centres.
Green energy belt
The preferred location for the first 320MW modular reactor is at Koeberg, which should make it easier to acquire the necessary regulatory approvals for a reactor of this type.
This could be scaled up to six similar reactors, providing 1 800MW of power, equivalent to Koeberg’s output.
The long-term view, says Opperman, is to create a green energy belt connecting Lobito in Angola to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Zambia and Angola, opening up a new western route to markets for agricultural producers.
“We see this as complementary to wind, hydro and solar.”
The typical life cycle of the modular reactor is 80 years, with a building cost coming in at 1% of older legacy generation plants. These costs are expected to drop further as demand increases.
Costs
“SA’s nuclear industry was one of the first and most established in the world. We have a very sophisticated regulatory framework in SA,” says Dr Kelvin Kemm, chair of Stratek Global, the company responsible for the development of the HTMR-100 modular plant. Kemm is also the former chair of the SA Nuclear Energy Corporation (Necsa).
Koeberg produces power at about 40c/kWh or $0.02/kWh, making it the cheapest source of energy in SA. The price of power generated by the HTMR-100 depends on the plant configuration, but it will be substantially cheaper than Eskom tariffs. The business model will allow for ownership of the modules or long-term power offtake agreements.
“The anti-nuclear energy lobby has created a false impression that nuclear is expensive, but that fails to take in the life cycle of the plant – which is 80 years,” says Kemm.
“The sandal brigade needs to pull its socks up and do their maths properly,” he adds.
“In SA, we are talking of building an additional 14 000km of transmission lines to bring solar power to parts of the country where it is needed. That’s a disguised cost which should be added to the actual cost of solar power.
“We have no objection to solar and wind, but these are intermittent sources and not useful for base load supply, unless you add expensive batteries or storage systems. Nuclear is available 24/7.”
The difference with solar is that it can be up and running in a year or less.
Kemm concedes that nuclear is not a quick fix, but it is sustainable and has zero carbon emissions.
