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Joemat-Pettersson says nuclear build will be affordable

Joemat-Pettersson says nuclear build will be affordable
Photo by Reuters

1st September 2015

By: African News Agency

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South Africa was firmly committed to adding to its nuclear energy capacity but would only sign an agreement with another country as a supplier if it was affordable and in line with local procurement rules, Energy Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson told MPs on Tuesday.

“How are we going to reduce our carbon foot print and increase our baseload if we are not going to do nuclear energy?” she said in a briefing to Parliament’s portfolio committee on energy.

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“We are committed to a thorough cost-benefit analysis and the cost-benefit analysis is part of the procurement process. We are not going to compromise our country in any way,” the minister added.

She went on to not only deny persistent reports — fuelled by a leaked draft deal — that Russia’s state nuclear agency Rosatom was the preferred bidder to build South Africa’s second nuclear power plant, but to insist that the procurement process to add another 9 600 MW of nuclear energy to the grid by 2030 had not yet begun, though she wants it to be finalised by the end of the financial year.

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“There is no preferred bidder,” she said, before stressing that the deadline was the end of the current financial year in March 2016.

Joemat-Pettersson said she was showing the committee the outlines of the nuclear co-operation models the department had signed with Russia, China, the United States, France and South Korea — those with Canada and Japan were yet to be finalised — for the sake of transparency but that they should not be mistaken for contracts or commitments to funding models.

“Please do not treat these agreements as if it is the funding model,” she said.

“The funding model has not been completed… there is nothing about that in the agreements. So when we are ready we will bring it to you,” Joemat-Pettersson said, adding that she wanted any agreement to be open to “public scrutiny”.

However, she added, that certain aspects of the planned negotiations would initially be tabled to Parliament as classified information.

“We are not going to rush anywhere unless I am confident that this process could stand the scrutiny of any legal investigation… But then again, there is information on the commercial side and on the safety and security side which I am going to request the members to initially table as classified documents, which is also correctly so. ”

In response to questions from the opposition, she said reports that Treasury had only belatedly been given insight into the implications of what seems likely to be the country’s biggest infrastructure project ever were simply untrue.

Democratic Alliance finance spokesman David Maynier said last week that Treasury had “only just been invited into the process” and acting director general of energy, Wolsey Barnard, has suggested that the finance ministry was not yet involved as the process was still in a pre-procurement phase.

“Treasury has been involved, whoever answered three weeks ago, if it was the acting director general, I have to see what happened on that day, maybe it was one of his off days, but certainly the acting DG does know about the Treasury involvement.”

To a remark from the Democratic Alliance’s Gordon Mackay that reports that the nuclear deal carried a price tag of R1.3 billion were based on an interview with her predecessor, she replied that former energy minister Dipuo Peters had assured her she had never said that.

The chairman of the energy committee Fikile Majola on Tuesday pressed the department to respond to questions from MPs in full, and called for public hearings into the nuclear expansion programme to ensure maximum transparency.

But the meeting saw an extraordinary plea from ANC MP Tandi Mahambehlala not to allow to detractors to delay the process and to “let this child be born prematurely” if need be.

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