Clean energy is the future
ON DECEMBER 13, 2016, the Western Cape High Court postponed the challenge by environmental justice groups Earthlife Africa Johannesburg and the Southern African Faith Communities Environment Institute to the legality of the government’s nuclear procurement deal.
The importance of the challenge is clear.
It relates to the largest procurement deal the country has seen since the advent of democracy, a deal which is feared to have been engineered for Russia to be the preferred bidder.
In what the court described as a “disquieting” twist of events, court proceedings began with the senior counsel for the State, Marius Oosthuizen SC, announcing that yet another secretive Section 34 Determination for nuclear power had been signed by the current Minister of Energy, Tina Joemat-Pettersson.
Despite it being signed on December 5, 2016, the court was not informed thereof and neither were the applicants until literally minutes before the hearing was to begin.
The court stressed in its judgment that there was no evidence presented to the court explaining how this determination came about when it was decided upon and the processes leading thereto, despite the determination apparently having been made more than a week before the hearing.
The State’s legal team also argued that the Department of Energy was no longer the procurer of nuclear power but that this responsibility had now been handed over to Eskom, which the State argued was a company with its own board and therefore required no mandate and no consultation from the State or the public to carry out its business and the spending of public funds.
At the time that the parties were arguing in court, the media reported that the request for proposals for the procurement of nuclear energy was to be released this week.
Earthlife Africa Johannesburg noted “this was in fact, nothing short of an insidious delay and divide tactic on behalf of the Department of Energy, Eskom and NERSA. Instead of arguing the legalities and constitutionality of the determination made in 2013 and then kept secret for two years, the courts were forced to deal with this latest development”.
The court expressed its displeasure with the State’s conduct by ordering that the State should pay the costs of the applicants’ four counsel and on a punitive scale.
The judges made it clear that the case needed to be heard on an expedited basis and the case has been adjourned for hearing between February 22 to 24, 2017.
Why is there mounting pressure to the nuclear deal?
In short, it is too expensive, it is too dangerous and it will deliver too late.
The government-funded Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has shown that we could be saving more than R90 billion a year.
This was so, even though they consciously treated the costs of solar and wind more strictly and were more lenient on nuclear costs.
For example, they did not include the huge costs of disposal of nuclear waste.
The cost of nuclear energy is R1.17 per kilowatt and for solar and wind it is 62 cents per kilowatt.
As for their costing on solar and wind, they used current costs for solar and wind at the same level as today even though the costs of solar and wind have been coming down drastically over the last decade and all predictions are they will drop further as there is greater uptake globally.
The argument that is made is “but what about when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow?”.
This would have been a reasonable argument a decade ago. But we have seen a huge development in terms of storage capacity. Again, we can predict that the cost of storage capacity will drop over the coming decade.
It is also important to remind ourselves that in the post-apartheid period, Eskom had a massively expensive nuclear project, known as the Pebble Bed Molecular Reactor (PBMR), which in today’s money costus at least R30 billion, delivering not a single unit of electricity but making a bunch of people wealthy.
In terms of safety, nuclear has several problems compared with renewable energy.
There is no guarantee that there will not be technical failures or human error.
Nuclear facilities will be located near South Africa’s coastline because of water needed for the cooling process.
With guaranteed sea level rise because of massive melting in the Arctic and Antarctic, there is no guarantee that we will not potentially face a tsunamilike disaster that could leave us with the kind of problem Japan has with a facility that is dysfunctional and costs billions of dollars to keep safe.
While some will say this is unrealistic, the Asia tsunami in 2004 took lives in East Africa, a little-reported fact.
It is now more than 30 years since the Russian-built Chernobyl disaster.
On the 25th anniversary of that accident, I was allowed into the Chernobyl plant as part of a Greenpeace delegation and again, while the facility is dysfunctional, it costs billions of dollars annually just to keep that plant safe.
The Russian and Japanese economies might be able to absorb such costs but our economy and people will suffer should this occur in the future.
But the main problem, from a safety point of view, is that at the end of the nuclear cycle the waste has to be stored somewhere safe.
This waste takes between 200 and 1 000 years before it stops being a danger to humanity.
Where do you think these sites will be?
Surely it will be where poor South Africans live.
The next key question is, how long does it take to build a nuclear reactor?
In the best case scenario, where everything runs like clockwork, it will take about 10 years on average.
The Russian nuclear company Rosatom, for example, when it builds nuclear plants outside of Russia, has in some instances taken more than 20 years.
Given that Eskom has been asked to manage this, a look at Eskom’s track record in terms of staying on schedule and on budget should not give us any comfort.
The two coal plants being built, Medupi and Kusile, are running way behind schedule and they have cost overruns that exceed original predictions.
Those resources should have been spent on building our renewable energy capability, which is clearly the energy system of the future, especially given that coal is a fossil fuel driving dangerous climate change that threatens the future.
True, we cannot get off coal immediately; but we should not be investing a cent more in new coal projects.
Unfortunately, we will need coal in our mix for much longer than if Eskom had not tried to block the expansion of renewable energy. But what about jobs? The international trade union confederation correctly calls for a “just transition to a clean, safe, renewable energy future”.
This is a demand that a broad spectrum of civil society organisations support globally.
We need to ensure that workers are trained for decent jobs that do not endanger their health.
There are probably very few coal miners who want their children to have the hard lives they have had to lead.
But what about nuclear energy and job creation?
You will hear nuclear apologists saying that nuclear energy will create jobs; just as we heard the same about how the arms deal was to create jobs that never materialised – but where many wellconnected individuals got rich at the expense of the poor.
When Germany, one of the largest economies in the world, made the decision to discontinue a massive nuclear programme after tons of taxpayer money was invested in nuclear energy over several decades, we saw the industry employing 30 000 people.
With a minuscule amount of government subsidy to wind and solar energy – in comparison with nuclear – and over a much shorter period, the renewable energy sector in Germany now employs 400 000 people.
I believe that given that many, perhaps most of our cabinet as well as parliamentarians, as well as members of the ANC do not support nuclear energy with any enthusiasm, and because it is unlikely that lenders will be found to finance this deal, it is unlikely that it will go ahead.
But the fact that we are dragging our feet to embrace the inevitability of an economy that is driven by clean, green, renewable energy, we are not investing in training our youth to be ahead of the game, nor investing in making storage capacity cheaper and investing in other research innovations that could place South Africa at a competitive advantage in the future.
True, companies like Shiva Uranium – owned by the Guptas and President Zuma’s son – would benefit but not the poor or our people as a whole.
Kumi Naidoo, former head of Greenpeace, is now Launch Director, Africans Rising for Justice, Peace
and Dignity