High nuclear clean-up bill

Peter Bruce should not be surprised that about the only persons enthusiastic about new nuclear power stations are the engineers who will build them and their buddies who will get vicarious pleasure watching this (Thick End of the Wedge, March 3).

Japanese taxpayers have so far spent $1-trillion cleaning up the Fukushima mess. The memorandum of understanding between our Department of Energy and Rosatom includes a clause that Rosatom only sells its reactors voetstoots — so we taxpayers fork out the R1-trillion rand clean-up bill.

Bruce forgets the pebble-bed modular reactor (PBMR) was promised to us for R2bn-R3bn — and cost us more than R12bn by the time a courageous Cabinet minister stopped pouring good money after bad.

Siemens abandoned this project as its design has intrinsic flaws. It would take 20 PBMRs to generate as much electricity as one Koeberg reactor. The containment materials in each “pebble” weaken until their structural integrity is breached. There is no real-time method to detect this or to detect hot spots in the reactor.

Keith Gottschalk Claremont