Anti-nuclear activist evicted from Energy Minister’s nuclear stakeholder fiasco

Meant to be an open and constructive get together of “nuclear stakeholders”- including those against nuclear power – it turned into a fiasco. In just over an hour, Kantey the lone anti-nuclear activist in a predominantly pro-nuclear government and industry gathering, was summarily ejected for daring to challenge Kelvin Kemm’s claim that nuclear power is a form of “clean energy”. Discussion of the ruling party’s nuclear policy was also ruled “out of order”.

A former member of Armscor from 1981-1986, Kemm stands to benefit from the PBMR boondoggle as a director of BEE company Silver Protea. Kantey is the self-funded Chairperson of the national Coalition Against Nuclear Energy (CANE) and was one of only four civil society invitees to the meeting.

At the same meeting, Deputy General-Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers Oupa Komane introduced himself as a “representative of the working class” and confirmed that the biggest trade union in COSATU and an active member of the Tripartite Alliance is “opposed to the PBMR but in favour of nuclear power.”

All those affiliated to CANE — as well as those sister organisations opposed only to the siting of a nuclear power station in their region — will be having their own consultation to determine what response will be appropriate in the forthcoming months leading up to the 2010 World Cup.

Given the credence given to climate change denialist Kelvin Kemm in the meeting, and the Minister’s own attempts to convince civil society that “nuclear power is a clean energy option”, we will continue to broaden and strengthen the Coalition across all sectors of society — including our own trusted allies within the Tripartite Alliance.

The new-look Government should understand once and for all that the anti nuclear lobby cannot be co-opted, isolated or marginalised, since it remains united in opposition to nuclear energy, whether at the local level, or as a “one-size-fits-all” national energy policy. The blatant attempt to over-represent nuclear lobbyists with minimal civil society representation as ‘stakeholders”, must be addressed and rectified.

The anti nuclear lobby believes that the R1.3-trillion nuclear policy will hold back scarce public funds from solving the real issues of grinding poverty and economic injustice and will also substantially delay delivery of reliable energy to the economy due to massive delays in bringing nuclear power plants on line.

If China can build a massive two gigawatt solar plant, enough to power about 3 million Chinese households for less than $6 billion resulting in a tariff of 15 to 25 cents per kilowatt hour, why does South Africa with the best solar potential in the world want to go nuclear? *

Nuclear stakeholder groups from Namaqualand, Bantamsklip, Thyspunt, Koeberg and Pelindaba expressed solidarity with Kantey and questioned why their representatives had not been invited to the meeting which was billed as all-inclusive, as announced by the Minister.

As evidenced by the attached correspondence and (Revised) Socio-Economic Impact Report, the mandatory process of the Environment Impact Report for the Pebble-Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) Demonstration Unit at Koeberg in Cape Town is reaching its closing stages, with the Final Environmental Impact Report due in September 2009. Given her stated commitment to a nuclear energy future, it seems a foregone conclusion that the recently appointed Minister of Water & the Environment, the Honourable Bujelwa Sonjica MP, will rubber-stamp the deeply flawed process with her signed Record of Decision (RoD) — in favour of the beast.

Given the possibility of fresh challenges in the High Court, as well as the renewed and envigorated popular mobilisation in Greater Cape Town area against this travesty of public spending, we believe it is of vital importance to register and engage — however succinctly — in this pathetic excuse for public participation only to ensure that we have collectively “exhausted all remedies” before approaching the Bench.

May I then remind you as to what issues remain for objection to the PBMR:

1. Its hopelessly flawed issues relating to technical safety:

1.1. the high temperatures greater than anticipated in the the case of the AVR in Germany, leading to greater instability
1.2. the lack of integrity with regard to the continued sphericality of the silicon carbide “pebbles” under high temperature, pressure and constant jostling, leading to the jamming of the outlet flue, as occurred at the THTR-3000 in Germany in May 1986.
1.3. the possibility of a leak in the piping whereby oxygen can enter into the system and cause the graphite to spontaneously ignite, as occurred at Sellafield in the United Kingdom in 1957.
1.4. the possibility of the graphite tiles on the inside of the reactor housing falling off the walls under high pressure, temearature and jostling — not to mention constant neutron bombardment.

2. The logical and scientifically well-known threats to human health, both in terms of workers and the surrounding community, from the long-lived and carcinogenic radio-isotopes Cesium-137 and Strontium-90, which are equally well-known and well-documented daughter products of nuclear fission.

3. The reasonably unlikely but scientifically plausible threat of an accident on the major scale of INES-7 )akin to Chernobyl of April 1986), whereby massive releases of the radioactive core through a combination of high temperature, pressure and the ingress of oxygen to ignite the graphite, causing a major runaway nuclear firestorm, depositing Cesium-137 over an 80-km radius.

4. The necessity, therefore of instituting a workable emergency plan for the whole of the City of Cape Town — NOT “3 km” !!! – a plan which has been categorically stated by members of the Cape Town Disaster Management as being “impossible to implement successfully”.

5. The further hindrance of development north of Cape Town because of the extended presence of a nuclear complex at Duynefonteyn.

6. The unacceptability of the production of high-level (spent fuel) nuclear waste without a reasonable location for its proper long-term storage (NOT “disposal”) and management (over 24 000 years, in the case of Plutonium-239), thereby rendering the technology unclean, unsustainable and at odds with the principle of inter-generational equity.

7. The unacceptability of the high costs of the PBMR — as well as the added costs of uranium enrichment, fuel fabrication, transport, and security when so many better, cheaper and more relatively benign technologies exist for the produciton not only of electricity but also of pure energy for lighting, cooking, space heating, water heating and the running of electrical appliances.

8. An increase in the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, demonstrated not only by the capture and successful prosecution of nuclear weapons dealers in South Africa, but also the yet unsolved and highly sophisticated raid on the nuclear complex at Pelindaba, a national key point, thus demonstrating the incompetency of NECSA and the NNR in protecting or prohibiting anything remotely resembling public safety.

I trust that you will make your voices heard in resisting this unilateral imposition of an obsolete and technically unworkable “solution” to global warming and will encourage all who you know that work and play in Cape Town to oppose this rubbish in the name of democracy, environmental justice and economic common sense.

Join CANE now and help us change nuclear policy in this country once and for all.

Go to www.cane.org.za and add your voice to those who say “Nukes? No thanks!”

The demise of the pebble bed modular reactor
BY STEVE THOMAS | 22 JUNE 2009

In February 2009, Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) Ltd., an eponymously named South African company announced a major change of strategy. After 10 years of development it said it was abandoning plans to build a full-size 165-megawatt-electric demonstration plant. Furthermore, PBMR Ltd. said it will try to redirect its future plans for the reactor from electricity generation toward thermal applications, such as coal gasification and water desalination. With government funding set to run out next year, the company will have to close if new funding is not found.

Although the company claimed the global recession had driven it to make such changes, it is hard to fathom that PBMR Ltd.’s problems are simply the result of the ongoing financial crisis since the project has been troubled for years. The company’s actions instead point to potentially deeper problems with the reactor design itself. If this is the case, there are bound to be implications for the only other major pebble bed reactor research program left, which is in China and based on the same technology.

Where the pebble bed came from

Pebble bed reactors are helium-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors in which the fuel is in the form of tennis ball-sized spherical “pebbles” encased in a graphite moderator. New fuel pebbles are continuously added at the top of a cylindrical reactor vessel and travel slowly down the column by gravity, until they reach the bottom and are removed.

The technological root of both the South African and the Chinese PBMRs is the German high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) developed at the government’s Jülich research center outside Cologne. A German company promoted the pebble bed design for a couple of years with high expectations that Russia would buy the technology. These hopes never materialized, however, and in 1991, it abandoned the reactor design citing a lack of realistic business prospects. It did, however, continue selling technology licenses, most notably to companies in South Africa and China.

In 1993, the South African utility Eskom took up a PBMR design that, unlike its predecessors, was expected to generate electricity using a gas turbine driven directly by its helium coolant. In 1999, Eskom set up PBMR Ltd. to develop and market the PBMR and to complete a feasibility study. The subsidiary raised money, but several investors eventually pulled out of the project. The end of the feasibility phase of the project was never announced publicly, although it appears to have been completed in March 2004.

A successor company to PBMR Ltd., which would have built the larger demonstration reactor if the feasibility study had been successful, was never created. And since none of the project partners ever agreed to fund a larger demonstration reactor, the project has, in some respects, been languishing since 2004. The development of the demonstration plant, which was originally expected to cost $223 million and be in service by 2002, was expected to cost at least $1.8 billion by the time it was abandoned. If funding had continued, it was projected to be in service no earlier than 2014. Commercial plants were not expected to be operational before 2025.

Critical faults in the PBMR design

For some, helium-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors such as the PBMR have always been the ultimate evolution of fission reactor design. The use of helium and graphite allows the reactor to burn the fuel efficiently and to operate at much higher temperatures than conventional light water reactors. It is hoped the temperatures would be high enough to allow for the reactor’s heat to be used directly for industrial processes such as hydrogen production and tar sands processing. High temperature reactors can also be designed to use thorium-based fuel as well as uranium and can be developed as fast neutron reactors that don’t need moderators.

In Germany, a 15-megawatt-electric prototype PBMR was designed, built, and operated from 1967 to 1988, followed by a 300-megawatt-electric demonstration Thorium High Temperature Reactor, which only operated from 1985 to 1988. A report explaining the delays and problems in the German pebble bed design became public in 2008 when the Jülich Center released a review of its previous pebble bed reactor work.1 It was Jülich’s design, specifically the prototype pebble bed reactor, which South Africa had taken as the basis for its PBMR.

The prototype, known as the AVR (Arbeitsgemeinschaft VersuchsReaktor or Research Group Experimental Reactor) had been portrayed to the South African public as an unqualified success. The new Jülich report, however, presented a starkly different picture. In particular, it found that the AVR’s fuel had reached dangerously high temperatures during operation. Although the exact temperature reached inside the reactor is unknown, melt strips placed within dummy fuel pebbles, which are designed to withstand heat of up to 1,400 degrees Celsius, melted, meaning the reactor was being operated beyond the design limits for the fuel. The report disagreed with a 1990 Association of German Engineers report on the AVR that stated that high temperatures within the reactor were solely the result of poor-quality fuel. Other factors, as yet unknown, were probably involved, the Jülich report concluded.

According to the South African PBMR joint venture, the maximum fuel operating temperature within the reactor should not exceed 1,130 degrees Celsius.2 If the large temperature variations observed in the AVR are a guide, however, this assumption is far too optimistic, and the PBMR’s fuel would fail. The Jülich report found that such fuel failure would contaminate reactor components on an order of magnitude higher than similar contamination in traditional light water reactors, and would thus increase decommissioning costs. The report concludes that irradiated graphite dust created by the rubbing of fuel pebbles within the AVR as they worked themselves through the reactor could become a major safety issue in the case of an accident.

The Jülich report further recommends that gas-tight containment structures be built for any commercial pebble bed plant deployed and that further research and development is necessary to evaluate the safety of the design and to understand why such high temperatures were experienced at the AVR. The need for such containments for PBMR-based plants has been the subject of disagreement for some time. PBMR Ltd. has claimed the pebble bed is “intrinsically safe” and “melt-down proof” and has argued that no pressure containment is needed and that the emergency evacuation zone needs to be no larger than the plant site itself. If a containment structure is required, the additional cost would make the reactor prohibitively expensive to build commercially. Although the Jülich report is bitterly contested by PBMR advocates, the high credibility of Jülich, which submitted the report to an extensive peer review process, means it cannot simply be dismissed.

Impact on next generation reactor designs

All the major countries involved in designing reactors, including the United States, Germany, France, Japan, and Britain, have put major time and effort into developing high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors such as the PBMR. Despite more than 50 years of trying, however, no commercial-scale design has yet been produced. Yet China and South Africa have found the allure of pebble bed technology irresistible , as if it were an “unpolished gem” waiting to be developed, regardless of the consistent engineering problems it has had since the beginning.

South Africa took a particularly aggressive approach, believing that it could develop a commercial-size PBMR design without even operating a prototype. If the PBMR is proved to be fundamentally flawed, as indicated in the Jülich report, South Africa’s $980 million investment in the project will be seen in hindsight as wasteful, one that the country, plagued with many more pressing and basic problems, could ill afford.

PBMR Ltd. is now exploring all possibilities to develop new markets for its reactor, and to collaborate on technology development, to replace the government’s funding for the project that it will lose next year. For example, following its February 2009 announcement, PBMR Ltd. negotiated a technology cooperation agreement with China’s PBMR developers including Tsinghua University’s Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology and Chinergy Co. Ltd. The South African project’s appalling budget and time over-runs and the company’s inability to complete a finished design may scare away other potential new customers and investors, leaving China the world’s largest investor in PBMR-based reactor designs.
China, which has much greater financial resources than South Africa, appears to be taking a conservative approach, building and studying how its prototype reactor performs before committing itself to any commercial-sized plants. In 1992, the Chinese decided to build a 10-megawatt-electric pebble bed prototype based on the AVR design. This prototype was completed in 2000 but was not connected to the grid until 2003.3 In 2001, the Chinese announced their intention to build a 100-megwatt-electric commercial version; the reactor’s output was subsequently increased to 195 megawatts. In 2004, the Chinese expected a demonstration plant using this design would come online in 2011. Yet in 2008, the Chinese tweaked the design to have two smaller reactors connected to one steam turbine, which together would produce about 200 megawatts of electricity.

Compared to the original South African PBMR design, China expects to use a steam cycle rather than helium gas for at least its first pebble bed units and plans to operate its reactor at 750 degrees Celsius. How much this decision may have been based on concerns about excessively high fuel temperatures is unclear. The Shandong site, where the demonstration plant is being built, could eventually host up to 18 pebble bed reactor modules. Unlike South Africa, which attempted to go straight to a fixed, final design, China has been actively tweaking its design. In April 2008, an engineer close to the project told Nucleonics Week, “The design continues to evolve and it is likely that the last unit built on this site won’t look exactly like the first one.”

Chinese nuclear decision-making is rather opaque to the West and if the problems identified in the Jülich report do cause the Chinese to think again about their plans for the pebble bed modular reactor, it is unlikely that there will be a public announcement comparable to that by PBMR Ltd. The project will just quietly slip out of Chinese plans. Even if this happens and the South African program is effectively ended as well, it is unlikely to be the last that is heard of the pebble bed design, since support in Germany is still strong in some quarters. But it seems unlikely those supporters will ever be able to convince anyone else to spend the large amounts of money necessary to try to bring the design to commercial fruition.