For those of us who have been following issues around nuclear power over the last few years South Africa’s recent history has left many of us scratching our heads. When the R13 billion that government invested in the Pebble-Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) was clearly not yielding the kinds of results that the PBMR company was hoping for, we were hardly surprised when eventually government decided to pull the plug. Why the project had to go on for so long when previous research by the Germans (and elsewhere) had shown it was not viable years before we even started is another matter altogether, but at least there seemed to be a certain level of logic in the closure of the company.

That was at the end of last year. For a short while thereafter it seemed that this trend of following logical courses of action on nuclear issues was set to continue into the future. This was born out by the Department of Energy’s (DoE) response to the high level of criticism for South Africa’s proposed new energy policy, the Integrated Resource Plan 2 (IRP2). Logic was appearing to prevail when at the end of January 2011 the DoE finally agreed to draft a new IRP2 that would exclude nuclear power as a future option in this country.

Very soon after this announcement something happened that took nuclear power issues out of the relatively small sphere of people interested in energy issues, and thrust it into the minds of millions of people around the world. I am of course referring to the still unfolding nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors in Japan. In time this disaster will dwarf Chernobyl in its consequences, but one good thing that has come out of it has been a long hard look at what nuclear power actually means to the various countries that have been investing in this technology.

According to the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010-2011 there were only 64 plants under construction prior to Fukushima. China had 27 plants in the pipeline, Russia 11 and India five. As a result of the disaster China enforced a suspension of approval of nuclear power projects, including those under development. India’s Nuclear Power Corporation’s (NPCIL) chairman Shreyans Kumar Jain stated that: “We and the Department of Atomic Energy will definitely revisit the entire thing, including our new reactor plans, after we receive more information from Japan.” In Russia Vladimir Putin commissioned a review of the future of Russia’s nuclear power sector. That’s 67% of global nuclear reactor construction put on ice by just three countries.

In the same period of time since the demise of the PBMR Company, Germany has gone from facing massive protests over Angela Merkels plans to extend the life of some of their nuclear plants by eight years, to announcing that their entire nuclear fleet will be taken offline by 2022.

All seems logical right? Well that’s where it ends I’m afraid. In contrast to what the rest of the world is doing, in the week after the start of the reactor meltdowns in Japan our cabinet signed approval for a plan that includes the construction of six new nuclear reactors in the Western Cape. Even though the kind of reactors for the proposed plants have still not yet been determined, the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has been rushed through with the public only being given 45 days to comment, (it was subsequently extended).

Now when Nuclear Industry Association of South Africa (NIASA) president Dr Rob Adam says that investment in nuclear power would not only ease South Africa’s energy shortage, but would also allow for significant job creation, you can’t help but think, maybe this highly suspicious behaviour is simply a mis-guided attempt at responding to real needs. But when we investigate these two claims it becomes pretty clear that this is really a load of nonsense.

There are a whole host of reasons why nuclear power is a bad idea; it is expensive (and getting more and more so), it creates waste that is lethal for hundreds of thousands of years that no country on earth has been able to develop a safe and guaranteed long term plan for. It is an ineffective response to climate change, as the mining, refinement, enrichment, processing and transport are all highly carbon intensive. It is harmful to the very few workers that do manage to get jobs from the process (remember the 90 workers that were irradiated at Koeberg last year? No? – Well apparently the government doesn’t either). The list goes on.

Simply put, at a time when the whole world is reviewing their nuclear policies, why are we not doing the same?