Members Statement on the PBMR by Lance Greyling
2006-01-05. The Independent Democrats have been outspoken in their criticism in the way in which the whole issue of the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor has been dealt with. This potentially dangerous and enormously expensive project has not been subjected to thorough public or parliamentary scrutiny. Attempts to receive documentation relating to the financial viability of this project have been fruitless and civil society activists have had to resort to legal means to obtain the documentation. Just last week we saw the spectacle of another gagging of the media, this time by the PBMR company who mistakenly gave the wrong documents to Earthlife Africa. This is a company that we are trusting with nuclear energy and billions of rands yet they are not able to ascertain whether they are giving it the right documents or not.
It is clear why the PBMR company did
not want the information in these documents to be circulated to the
general public. In Eskom board meetings of 2002 it clearly states that
the PBMR is not a commercially viable option for South Africa and that
the uncertainty regarding the international market still remains one of
the major risks. To my mind this explains why Eskom finally decided to
rid itself of it shares in this project and for the taxpayers of this
country to become the new shareholders. Without the government’s
lifeline of R600 million this project would have been halted, and this
is in addition to the more than R1 billion that has been poured into it
by various government entities over the past few years. Now that we are
all the shareholders the public has a right to know the true picture of
this project’s financial viability before we are forced to pour
billions of rands into a project that could well prove to be a
dangerous white elephant. The Independent Democrats calls on the
government to be transparent in its dealings with the public and
parliament on this issue so that we can all determine whether this
project is truly in South Africa’s best interests or simply in the
interests of a small nuclear cabal.
