LAST week, I expressed the view that the nuclear build programme must be driven by a targeted levelised cost of lower than R1 per kilowatt hour.As I have said, Eskom aims to replicate Koeberg’s success and aims for a standardised design with no leading-edge technology. There have been suggestions Eskom is looking to buy less-safe nuclear reactors to reduce the cost of the nuclear build programme, the so-called Generation2, rather than the modern Generation 3 reactors. This is not the case.The issue of what makes a Generation 2 design versus a Generation 3 design is interesting and has never been well defined. All vendors of the current nuclear power plants claim that their nuclear reactors are Generation 3 or Generation 3 plus and that their competitors’ designs are Generation 2 plus.Probably the best definition of the difference between Generation 2 and 3 is that the early designs (dating from the 1960s and 1970s) considered that the prospect of a core melt accident was impossible ...
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