We haven’t seen demand for nuclear energy like this since Bob Marley wrote Redemption Song,and it’s bad news for a country looking to add 5,000MW of atomic energy to the grid over the next dozen years. The era was the 1970s, and the country is South Africa. Nuclear business is booming, but in a good way.
“The new record electricity generation from nuclear energy in 2024 is a testament to the industry. To meet our global energy and climate goals, it is a record that needs to be bettered again and again, every year, by increasingly larger margins.” Those are the words of Dr Sama Bilbao y León, director-general of the World Nuclear Association, in the opening paragraphs of the 2025 sector performance report. Egypt, Pakistan and China are all at the atomic feeding trough.
And where China dares to go – the country has three power plants currently under construction – the United States, under Donald Trump, will hastily follow to try to overtake it. “They’re starting to look at nuclear a little bit and they’re doing just fine,” the US president said of his assumed global adversary during his rambling WEF address in Davos on Wednesday. After, of course, announcing his country’s grander ambitions: “I’ve signed an order directing an approval of many new nuclear reactors.
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We’re going heavy into nuclear.” Dr Yves Guenon, chairman of the French South African Chamber of Commerce and Industry (and seasoned nuclear engineer), told Daily Maverick that South Africa lost 17 years in the nuclear energy race because of failed 2008 plans. “You don’t have IP… Koeberg was built by the French, and now we [the French] are busy building in France, Europe and in America.” In 2008, Eskom was on the verge of awarding a contract for two massive light-water reactors (the “Nuclear-1” project) to either France’s Areva or the US’s Westinghouse. But the deal collapsed when the price tag – a then staggering R120-billion – was deemed “unaffordable and uncompetitive” by a Treasury already nervous about the global financial crisis.
Fast forward nearly two decades, and that R120-billion looks like a bargain. In the US alone, load growth forecasts have increased fivefold in two years. Tech giants such as Google and Amazon aren’t waiting for the grid; they are buying up nuclear capacity directly. This crowding-out effect means the very people South Africa needs to build its reactors, companies like France’s EDF, are currently drowning in their own domestic 1970s revival, which involves building up to 14 new reactors at home.
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