South Africa: nuclear power can be the solution to energy problems, but how?
The South African government and scientists want to build a new generation of mini nuclear reactors ( SMRs ), both to plug gaps in their country's blackout-plagued electricity grid and to build an export industry for the future. An ambitious program, but is the southern country suitable for using this solution?
In South Africa Stratek believes it can provide a solution to this problem with a gas-cooled reactor solution capable of providing energy for the country's industrial development, bringing energy where it is needed.
South Africa: an energy nightmare developed over time
South Africa's problems and energy problems, resulting from years without serious investments both in the construction of new power plants and in the maintenance of lines, are there for all to see. Eskom, the country's energy company, relies on coal, which is abundant, if dirty, and theoretically reliable, but power plants can no longer meet energy demand and even by 2024, as Bloomberg points out, they are Rolling blackouts have been predicted, endangering economic development but also infuriating families.
Some experts such as Kelvin Kemm, a nuclear physicist and CEO of Pretoria-based private company Stratek Global, believe that South Africa is ideally placed to take the lead in developing fourth-generation reactors.
“I believe the future is not just around the corner, I believe the future has arrived,” Kemm told AFP in an interview in his garden on the outskirts of Pretoria.
“I see that in the next half dozen years there will be a massive worldwide proliferation of nuclear energy of all sizes and that in the next 24 months there will be a huge change of heart. I believe South Africa is already a leader."
A long, but dated, nuclear experience
South Africa's journey into civil nuclear power began in 1976 with the construction of the Koeberg nuclear power station on the southern Atlantic coast north of Cape Town.
It was put into operation 40 years ago, in 1984, and has a capacity of just under 2,000 megawatts, a small fraction of the 27,000 MW that the much weakened state power company Eskom is able to supply, thanks largely to power plants carbon-intensive coal-fired. However, the power plant, with French reactors, is now old and has had a certain number of accidents in its history.
But domestic electricity demand often peaks at more than 32,000 MW per day, and South Africans are faced with rolling blackouts, or “load-shedding,” that can last up to 12 hours a day, a serious burden on the economy of what should be the continent's powerhouse.
This has led to the spread of solar panels in homes, precisely to address these shortcomings, but these are palliatives that do not solve the structural problem of energy scarcity.
In December, the government announced it wanted to bring the first of a new series of nuclear power plants online by 2033, adding another 2,500 megawatts of capacity, and that it wanted to refurbish Koeberg and extend its life for another 20 years.
Because South Africa is poorly suited to traditional nuclear power
Large plants like Koeberg, with its two French-designed pressurized water reactors (PWRs), need to be located close to the ocean to allow 80 tons of cold water per second to be pumped to cool the reactors.
Most of South Africa, however, is arid, and its commercial hub Johannesburg and its energy-intensive mines and industries are far from the sea. The capital Pretoria is as far from the cool Atlantic coasts of Cape Town as Rome is from London. Getting water inland is a big problem.
This is where Stratek hopes to come into play with its High Temperature Modular Reactor (HTMR-100). It is a helium-cooled nuclear plant that uses the new TRISO atomic fuel, in which the fissile material is enclosed in ceramic capsules to avoid uncontrolled fission. The power is 100 MW and, as a by-product, produces large amounts of heat that can be used for industrial purposes, for example in chemistry.
The system is conceptually similar to the one designed, for example, by X-energy which has a similar energy production.
According to Kemm, which is already in talks with international operators from France and South Africa, these helium gas-cooled reactors can be installed in groups of up to 10 or typically six to power ready-made steam turbines. A dozen plants could be built, each capable of generating 300 MW and therefore meeting the needs of large mining or chemical plants.
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The article South Africa: nuclear power can be the solution to energy problems, but how? comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/sud-africa-il-nucleare-puo-essere-la-soluzione-ai-problemi-energetici-ma-come/ on Sun, 18 Feb 2024 10:12:02 +0000.