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NUM blasts abandoned PBMR project
As far as the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) is concerned, South Africa's abandoned Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) project still casts a shadow over the country's future nuclear energy plans, Mining Weekly reports.
During the 1990s South Africa obtained a licence to develop the PBMR from Germany, where the technology was originally developed. The government stopped funding PBMR early in 2010 and the project was abandoned.
"We hated the PBMR because of its failure in Germany," said the NUM national coordinator for energy Job Matsepe at the NUM Nuclear Workshop in Midrand. Matsepe added that PBMR technology's R10-billion bill was unjustifiable, that the project "delivered nothing", and that the PBMR Company's plans to build a 400 MW commercial-scale reactor first, instead of a smaller test reactor, were "sheer madness." Matsepe said that the PBMR project was "a means to divert money away from the real needs of the people to a powerful foreign-owned nuclear industry".
However, according to Mining Weekly, Matsepe stressed that neither he nor the NUM were necessarily against the country's plans to build new nuclear power stations. "We are not criticising [the new] nuclear build. We are not fighting nuclear." He pointed out that the broader debate on whether or not South Africa should build new nuclear power stations would take place at the Congress of South African Trade Unions' (Cosatu's) congress later this year.
Read the full article on www.miningweekly.com.
