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NECSA head office entrance
The South African Nuclear Energy Corporation (NECSA) has refuted claims that the country is assisting Iran to develop “nuclear arrangements.”
NECSA Group CEO Loyiso Tyabashe hosted a roundtable on the work of the entity and to share the organisation’s contribution to the South African economy.
One of President Donald Trump’s executive orders claim that South Africa is reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military and nuclear arrangements.
South Africa voluntarily dismantled its nuclear weapons in 1993 and all its facilities are closely monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Nuclear is under scrutiny globally. South Africa has maintained that its nuclear programme is for peace purposes, mainly energy and for the treatment of cancer.
But the US president moved to impose executive orders on South Africa claiming that the country has “re-established its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military and nuclear arrangements.”
Tyabashe says, “For NECSA, there is no memorandum of understanding with Iran and there are no other working relationships that I’m aware of as an organisation. And I believe that the work that we are doing is to collaborate with many, many other nations, including USA going forward because nuclear has a very collaborative space. But to your question clearly there is no work that we are doing with Iran.”
Nuclear energy Research and Development:
The Minister of Minerals and Petroleum Gwede Mantashe earlier told Reuters that South Africa could turn to Russia or Iran to expand its civilian nuclear power capacity.
According to Mantashe, South Africa can’t have a contract that says Iran or Russia must not bid.
Meanwhile, efforts are under way to ensure a solid nuclear energy future for South Africa with the NECSA CEO saying the turnaround strategy implemented in 2021 has yielded positive results,
“We have a strategy that was approved by both the board of directors of NECSA, the South African nuclear energy corporation as well as the Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy at the time wherein the intent was to stabilise the organisation.”
We’ve seen the stabilisation and now what we are starting to move forward to a point where we are starting to grow the organisation. And as you’ve rightfully said we’ve got six high impact programmes, as we term them, to make sure that we grow the organisation to greater heights going forward which is in the view of ensuring that nuclear occupies that centre stage.”
NECSA is a state-owned company responsible for undertaking and promoting research and development in the field of nuclear energy and radiation sciences.
The CEO says the projects come at the tune of about R50 billion that will include re-establishing front end fuel supply and the rollout of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) for flexible energy solutions.
Tyabashe says, “The first programme I can talk about is the one on the research reactors wherein we are looking at extending the life of the reactor we are currently operating, as well as implementing a new reactor called a multipurpose research reactor and we’ve had cabinet approval to start initial stages of the project.
And it is really exciting times that we are going back to that dominance in the nuclear research reactor space. That’s the first programme. The second programme is, we want to explore the small modular reactors. We have the pebble bed modular reactor (PBMR) company that is being transferred from Eskom. It is still under care maintenance, but we want to see when it is lifted, what is it that we can do with that intellectual property but also looking at the international space of SMR, we want to say who can we collaborate with to make sure that we have SMR that can fit the needs of our country of our nation.”
The organisation says they are also looking at carbon free projects in line with the Just Energy Transition and future energy security.
South Africa is aiming to add 2 500 MW of nuclear capacity to the grid and to increase nuclear infrastructure as per the Integrated Resource Plan with NECSA.
NECSA says it’s looking to the electricity ministry on a new section 34 determination that will feed into their future plans with the organisation’s team also embarking on a nuclear power generation funding drive to help raise the about R50 billion needed to support projects under the six high impact nuclear programmes.
