• Minister of Electricity, Dr. Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, says South Africa will build a nuclear power plant at a, “scale and speed that we can afford”.
• The minister made the comments during a Cabinet Lekgotla at the weekend.
• No mention was made on when such a project would get underway.

At the weekend President Cyril Ramaphosa held the first Cabinet Lekgotla for the Government of National Unity (GNU) in Tshwane at the weekend.

While it focused on number of elements, of immediate interest to us were the comments made by Minister of Electricity, Dr. Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, regarding government’s plans to build a new power plant.

Speaking to media in one of the sideline sessions, Ramokgopa noted his concerns around the cost of a nuclear power plant for the country, especially given the ever-rising costs of electricity in the country.

“In the long term, we need to ensure that we anchor the baseload and nuclear is an important part of that intervention. We are working on the framework for procurement because we don’t want to discredit the process through a procurement process that is not transparent,” he said per SA News.

“We will do it at the scale and speed that we can afford as a country,” he added.

Precisely how much a new nuclear power plant will cost the country remains unknown for now. The divisive, and ultimately blocked, plan to build a nuclear power plant with the help of Russia was reported to be around $76 billion back in 2018.

According to the World Nuclear Association, the current costs depend heavily on how much capacity the plant would add to the grid, with some European regions estimating it at €5 700 (~R112 408) per kW that the plant would be designed to deliver.

As such, we would see any new plant built in SA cost more than the aforementioned Zuma-Russia deal did.

It will therefore prove interesting to see whether this financial burden will come back to everyday South Africans, particularly as Ramokgopa has highlighted how expensive electricity is in the country’s low-income communities.

“The poor and those that are located in the townships are finding it exceptionally difficult to afford the increases in electricity. The pricing and the tariff is prohibitive and a lot of our people across the length and breadth of the country are not in a position to afford electricity,” he highlighted.

“Those are challenges on the distribution side…and we know that over a period of time municipalities have underinvested in the maintenance, replenishment and protection of the distribution grid and of course we are paying the price now,” he added.

With no timeline hinted at for now regarding the new nuclear power plant, if the minister is indeed cognisant of cost, it will be interesting to see what direction his department takes. Either way, despite having more than 100 days of no load shedding, the country’s energy crisis is till far from solved.

[Image – Photo by Mick Truyts on Unsplash]