CANE - Coalition Against Nuclear Energy South Africa

By: Irma Venter
Published: Engineering News, 6 Apr 07 - 0:00

Earlier this year the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa (Necsa) announced that it expected electricity generated from nuclear energy to increase by 25 000 MW by 2030.

This means government will have to build 24 pebble-bed modular nuclear reactors, and 12 conventional nuclear power stations as it works towards reducing its dependence on coal-fired power stations.

However, 36 new nuclear power stations – adding to Koeberg, in the Western Cape, and Necsa’s reactor, at Pelindaba, near Pretoria – will pose a nuclear waste challenge that existing facilities will not be able to cope with. In fact, a new spent nuclear fuel facility will have to be constructed.

In other countries that make use of nuclear energy, the cost of building such a waste facility has reached around R5-billion, says Necsa nuclear liability management divisional manager Dr Piet Bredell.

Low- and medium-level radioactive nuclear waste from Koeberg is currently trucked to the Vaalputs near-surface repository, in the Northern Cape, where it is buried in seven- to eight-metre- deep trenches.

Higher-level waste, such as spent nuclear fuel, is kept in storage pools on site at Koeberg.

Necsa’s own waste is stored on site at Pelindaba.

Low-level waste typically consists of gloves, clothes, paper and cleaning material, and medium-level waste of resins, filters and smaller components.

It is planned that high-level waste from Koeberg and Pelindaba, and possibly other nuclear plants, will go to a “future high-level waste repository site”, says Bredell.

Such a deep geological repository is typically 500 m to a kilometre deep, and costs around R5-billion to develop.

Bredell says South Africa is in the process of preparing legislation to establish a radioactive waste-management agency, as well as a waste fund, all before 2010.

It is expected that the Bill regarding the agency will be before Parliament in March next year, while that on the fund will follow later.

“It will be a challenge to put this into operation; we need to get going on it,” notes Bredell.

It will be the task of the radioactive wastemanagement agency to initiate the project to establish a deep-level disposal site for South Africa.

The establishment of such a site is normally an extremely sensitive social issue, with Bredell noting that several similar initiatives failed abroad, as they were “wrongly initiated”.

“It can take up to 20 years to get a site adopted.”

One example of where this happened is the proposed Yucca mountain site, in the US.

“We need to ensure the timely selection of a site for Eskom’s nuclear power station needs,” emphasises Bredell.

Eskom Generation nuclear fuel procurement manager Hans Lensink says the power utility has a reference plan for its spent nuclear fuel, which includes not only disposal, but also reprocessing.

Reprocessing nuclear fuel reduces the volume of waste, through the removal of plutonium and uranium.