Hope for South Africa’s only nuclear power station

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Despite severe delays, Eskom says its Long-Term Operation to refurbish South Africa’s only nuclear plant is on track.

Eskom said that unit 1 of the Koeberg Power station finished the mechanical work of the replacement of the steam generators on Friday, 28 July 2023

Koeberg provides nearly 2,000 MW of power, with each unit able to mitigate one stage of load shedding.

Eskom said that this is the most significant part of the refurbishment, and it will allow Eskom to now continue with outage activities that could not be performed in parallel with the replacement of the steam generators.

“Immediately after the completion of the outage activities, the reactor will be reloaded with fuel, enabling the return to service of the unit. The commissioning, including the necessary tests of the new steam generators, will occur while the unit is synchronised to the grid,” Eskom said.

Eskom said it expects Unit 1 to be commercially available on 3 November 2023 – long after the initial June deadline in 2023.

However, Eskom said that the outage at Unit 2 has been postponed to 7 November 2023 to ensure that both Koeberg units are not switched off simultaneously.

“The replacement of the steam generators was a first-of-its-kind complex nuclear project to be performed at Koeberg and is the last major plant component out of the three to be replaced on the unit as part of the Long-Term Operation (LTO) project,” Eskom said.

“The other two components, namely the replacement of the Refuelling Water Storage Tanks and the Reactor Vessel Closure Heads, have been replaced in previous years on both Units 1 and 2. The replacement of the steam generators is the last of the large components that Eskom deemed necessary to be replaced in support of its application to operate the Koeberg units for another 20 years.”

Eskom said the new steam generators would be more efficient and produce an additional 27 MW.

The embattled power utility said that the refurbishment had given merit to its decision to apply for a license to operate for an additional 20 years.

It added that postponing the Unit 1 outage would not impact its license application with the National Nuclear Regulator (NNR) to extend Koeberg’s operating licence.

It added that it is looking into the delays with Unit 1 to ensure that the same issues are not repeated with Unit 2.

A pain for Eskom

The refurbishment at Koeberg has been hit with severe delays due to failures by both Eskom and French contractor Framatome.

For instance, Framatome had to fly 320-ton generators to China to be fixed; however, they were deemed unsavable, and production had to restart – this pushed the arrival of the generators back from 2018 to 2020.

Domestically, Eskom failed to build a house for the old generators, which emit radiation, creating even more delays.

Due to their parts’ failures, Eskom and Framatome have both been hit with severe penalties.

“There are now over 100 active contractual disputes between Eskom and Framatome, with a single one of them with a value of approximately R1 billion,” former board member of the National Nuclear Regulator Peter Becker previously said.


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