SA to award nuclear build contract by year-end, with Russia’s Rosatom ‘an important’ contender
Moscow — Russian state-controlled energy group Rosatom is a contender for SA’s nuclear expansion project and the country will award the contract by the end of the year, the chairman of the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation (Necsa) said on Monday. SA is planning to build 9,600MW of nuclear capacity to wean itself off coal, a project that could be one of the world’s biggest nuclear contracts in decades. Besides Russia’s Rosatom, major nuclear firms from South Korea, France, the US and China are interested in bidding for all or part of the contract. "We are aiming for this to be done before the end of the year, and we very imminently want to start," Kelvin Kemm, Necsa chairman, said on the sidelines of a nuclear conference in Moscow, when asked when SA would make a decision on which company would build the new nuclear reactors. "Rosatom is definitely in there, but a decision has not been finally made. That will be a decision made by the senior politicians in collaboration with t...
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