South Africa: New reactor falls short of US standards
Posted by africanpress on September 8, 2008
Johannesburg (South Africa) – Eskom’s proposed R14,5-billion pebble bed nuclear reactor, touted as “meltdown proof”, cannot get certification in the United States in its current form because it does not meet safety requirements there.
The PBMR demonstration reactor planned for Koeberg does not have a safety barrier – called a “secondary containment” – which is built into the design of all modern nuclear reactors to contain radiation in the event of an accident.
This raises questions regarding both public safety and the economic viability of the PBMR export project. Eskom plans to build 24 to 30 pebble beds for export, but specialists say it is highly improbable that any country would buy nuclear technology which the US has not certified.
A German nuclear scientist, who has recently reinvestigated safety problems of the nuclear plant that was the prototype of the South African pebble bed, said he considered it “irresponsible” to construct a nuclear plant without a secondary containment.
In simple terms, without this structure, there would be nothing to prevent a massive release of radioactivity into the environment if there were an accident.
The PBMR company, 100 percent owned by Eskom, is steaming ahead with the project, and said in its annual report that it hoped to “pour the concrete” of the first PBMR at Koeberg in 2010. Alistair Ruiters, chairperson of the PBMR board, said they were already looking beyond the demonstration plant to the commercial development of “a fleet of modular reactors”.
The South African taxpayers are bankrolling the bulk of the pebble bed project, as the international partners which Eskom hoped to attract have not materialised. The PBMR company says the total cost of the PBMR’s demonstration phase, including a number of other “essential programmes” to demonstrate the fuel and reactor technology, will be R31,9-billion.
Rainer Moormann, a nuclear scientist working for FZJ, a German research centre where the prototype pebble bed reactor was first developed, has published a paper about the “indisputable” facts relating to this reactor, called the AVR. It states that the old AVR plant was “heavily contaminated” with Strontium-90 and Caesium-137, which was the result of “inadmissible high core temperatures”. He said the problems with the AVR were not sufficiently understood, 20 years after its final shutdown.
This has implications for future pebble bed reactors, including the PBMR being developed by South Africa. But the PBMR company claims the PBMR is “inherently safe” and so needs no secondary containment.
————–
API/Source.Cape Times (South Africa), by Melanie Gosling
