(552.5304) Earthlife Africa - The latest on this is that the first proposed site, located near scenic Cape Town, at the current (and only) nuclear power station in South Africa at Koeberg, is on hold. This seems mainly due to local government and other key players in the area, who are on record as having rejected the proposal. The proposed site for the fuel manufacturing, at Pelindaba in Northwest Province, a much poorer province, is now also the proposed site for the test reactor, and a recently proposed radioactive waste smelter as well! This is situated just 2 kilometers from the World Heritage Site, The Cradle of Humankind; and about 5 kilometers from the nearest township, although people live as close as two kilometers from the site. A nuclear nightmare indeed, as this site already hosts toxic chemical processes, and plans are also underway to make blasting cartridges for the mining industry too! Toxic chemicals, explosives and nukes, all in the one site, which in itself is a legacy of Apartheid South Africa's Nuclear Weapons program!
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US PEBBLE BED DEVELOPMENTS For example, the Price Anderson Act is up for reauthorization to provide industry with continued limited liability coverage from a nuclear accident. The Act's payment scheme is figured on a per reactor unit basis. In order to dodge the per unit liability equation for its multi-unit modular sites, Exelon wants an exemption from paying into the Act on the per unit base by redefining "facility." Otherwise, even keeping up with the limited liability coverage of Price Anderson would prove "cost prohibitive" for Exelon. More revealing, its Chief Executive Officers are suffering from double vision on the PBMR project depending on which one of its CEO's you talk with according to the Washington trade journal, Energy Daily. Corbin McNeill, CEO from the PECO side continues to extol the virtues of going nuclear with the PBMR. However, John Rowe, Commonwealth Edison's counterpart, is quoted, "I've said that I feel very strongly about the long-term need for nuclear. But until you can build one and until you can dispose of the waste without that kind of (adverse) public reaction, you're not going to see me investing large amounts of shareholders dollars in that." Disposing of the nuclear waste by dumping on Yucca Mountain will not be easier with the recent
shift in Senate leadership and the Environment and Public Works Committee now chaired by Nevada's
Senator Harry Reid. Projections that the PBMR's spherical fuel volumetrically increases its nuclear
waste stream an order of magnitude per megawatt will not win Exelon favors there. |
The proposed waste smelter (currently undergoing an EIA) is apparently to smelt weapons waste, but much of the waste on site is not weapons waste; weapons waste need not be smelted; and worst of all, the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa (NECSA) is on record as wanting to "commercialize" the smelter once they have "treated" local waste! We are already aware of a conduit for radwaste via Italy to African countries, and our neighbor, Mozambique, is one of them. Frightening stuff indeed, as the current waste will generate (according to the proponents, and unsubstantiated) at least 360 grams of uranium and 5 kilograms of uranium-contaminated "dust" per annum! Of course, cutting / crushing and encapsulating the waste has been rejected, as the dust hazards will require a sophisticated off-gas system (which is being proposed for the smelter), but the cutting of the waste to 150 mm pieces, with no off-gas system, and the venting of the dust to atmosphere, unfiltered, is completely acceptable, according to the proponents!
Process problems abound - from a lack of references, to a clearly stated, on record, refusal to speak with people living in nearby Black townships. Information is sketchy, with, for example, no economics or safety documentation available. Even without the relevant documentation at hand, it is not difficult to see that none of these processes can be viable in any sense of the word, and are part of the "last gasp" of the nuclear industry, as can be witnessed by two of the players, Exelon and (locally) Eskom, a parastatal electricity utility, both coming out with statements designed to place pressure on their respective governments, by saying that each "needs" to be the first to build the PBMR's.
As this article was being written, a new nuclear scandal has just erupted - Depleted Uranium (DU) shells were found at a scrapyard not half an hour away. It seems that South Africa, under Apartheid, produced DU ammunition - we are informed that only 2100 were ever produced, and are stored at NECSA (previously Atomic Energy Corporation), the very people who wish to build a fuel plant for the PBMR and a "commercialized" radwaste smelter! The same people who have yet to rehabilitate a spill from a year ago, and who took casual labor from the streets to do dangerous radioactive work!
Earthlife Africa (a Southern African voluntary environmental activist organization), who is
running with the "Nuclear Energy Costs the Earth!" campaign, could do with your help. The easiest
way to show support is to e-mail the campaign co-ordinator, Muna Lakhani on muna@iafrica.com, giving your details as follows:
Organization
Contact person
Contact details (E-mail, Phone, Fax, Mail)
and state your support for their campaign to move South Africa away from a nuclear development
path, towards one that is sustainable and people centered. You can also e-mail the Government of
South Africa, directly to President Thabo Mbeki, at
president@anc.org.za. Campaign contributions are also welcome.
Tel: +27 11 837 0343
Email: muna@iafrica.com
Web: www.earthlife.org.za
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