Guess who’s woken up to the glory of nuclear energy?

Guess who’s woken up to the glory of nuclear energy? It wouldn’t be fair to be that mean to electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa. He’s toyed with the idea, as have many ministers before, but now it seems serious.

He’s even bemoaned the abandonment of our pebble bed modular reactor research. Good news for him: it seems his buddies’ buddies in China picked up the research, coincidentally, after we let it go and, coincidentally, after there was this break in at the Pelindaba research facility where there was, coincidentally, a laptop with information just chilling on a desk.

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I’m no conspiracy theorist and don’t want to believe leaked cables, so I won’t. I’m just saying that if China really were our friends, they’d share some info with us without us having to send the special task force in.

And our Russian buddies, à la Jacob Zuma, who were graciously going to build us a nuclear reactor for a trillion bucks? One wonders how much fat they’d trim if Ramokgopa gave them a call. I have my doubts that the Yanks will be doing us any favours soon.

So, where is this tech going to come from? One does not just restart a nuclear programme and South Africa’s track record of building and running power plants is a great place to start. But the dude is making all the right noises.

Yes, we were ahead of so many advanced nations in modular nuclear reactors and they’ve overtaken us. It’s great that he’s acknowledged that. It’s great that he wants to do something about that. What we can do about it seems quite limited.

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You’re talking about a country that seemingly can’t explain why, at its only nuclear station, one unit would trip while the other is being serviced. And that’s just considering getting the technology and building it. What would we do once we start using it?

We don’t have a good track record of dealing with our human waste and now we’re expected to deal with more nuclear waste? One wonders whether the tender will go out to the same people who took R400 million to build the nonexistent Daggafountain Mega City….

The minister is saying exciting things and nuclear is an exciting prospect; it is sustainable and potentially incredibly clean. However, it requires a lot of foundation around it – infrastructure, expertise, development, internal research and security.

Yet here we are struggling to get the basics right. Jumping into nuclear seems about as great an idea as going into PhD with a Grade 9 certificate. Yeah, it would be great if you somehow managed to graduate, but the gaps in your knowledge will only start to show when you’re on the job.

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Cracks in a nuclear programme aren’t ideal in the best of cases, let alone when the reactor is running and they’re unexpected. If we’re going to be making an exciting noise about nuclear, we need both partners and support around it.

Ramokgopa seems to grasp this from what he’s saying, but doesn’t exactly seem to know where to turn to from here. The idea is out there now and we’ll see which countries want to take a bite and help us out.

We couldn’t do it in an efficient and marketable manner on our own years ago. It’s pretty clear, given that we’ve abandoned our overpriced research, it will be even more difficult to do it ourselves. We’ll need allies.

Two things are certain: it’s not going to be cheap and certainly not without difficulty. Let’s just try to make this worth our while and not just another delayed megaproject à la Medupi.

But hey, if Vegas can be powered by a big wall in a river… anything is possible.

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