THE THICK END OF THE WEDGE
PETER BRUCE: In the nucleus of an electrifying dream
The Russians would get Thyspunt and the French and Chinese could get Cape Town. So, everyone’s happy.
David Nicholls is by any measure a nice guy. Tall and loping, talking away at high speed, he’s an Englishman who’s spent most of his life at Eskom, where he is now chief nuclear officer. At 62, his dreams are finally coming true. He’s the guy who’ll decide what reactors get bought, and where they’ll go, once the politics around the nuclear deal gets sorted. A true believer, he can’t see the political problem. He doesn’t think nuclear is dangerous. Or even that expensive in the long term. I suspect that if he had his way, all 48,000MW of our base-load power would be nuclear one day. And if you remind him that studies show a faultline close to the Thyspunt site, near Cape St Francis outside Port Elizabeth, and that researchers think it’s crazy to put a reactor there, he’ll tell you he’s got it covered. Eskom asked the Americans to model the biggest earthquake they could on the nearest part of the faultline to Thyspunt. The result? Nothing, he says. Nada. Besides, he’ll tell you, nucle...
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