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Verashni Pillay

Cape Town - Former Greenpeace International leader turned nuclear proponent, Dr Patrick Moore, visited Cape Town recently to talk about his "intellectual conversion" to advocating nuclear energy, as Greenpeace activists accused him of being a "paid propagandist for a number of polluting industries".

Moore was invited for a week-long visit to South Africa by the Nuclear Industry Association of South Africa, to discuss global warming and the search for sustainable energy.

The controversial and internationally-renowned environmentalist spoke at the MTN Sciencentre, where he promoted the use of nuclear energy.

Eskom has announced plans to double its generation supply over the next 20 years, with nuclear reactors supplying half of the supply.

This comes as activists such as Earthlife Africa campaign for the abolition of nuclear energy in South Africa.

Only effective replacement

"Nuclear energy is your only choice of a non-greenhouse gas-emitting energy source that can effectively replace the fossil fuels and at the same time satisfy your growing need for electricity," Moore told the audience.

He started his career at Greenpeace, campaigning against the use of all nuclear energy during the nuclear proliferation crisis during the Cold War.

Moore later left the organisation in search of "solutions" and met Dr James Lovelock, father of the Gaia hypothesis, who convinced him that nuclear energy was the only viable replacement of carbon-intensive fossil fuel energy.

Nuclear energy was clean and relatively cheap to install compared to solar power, he explained.

Moore is the co-chair of an "industry-funded" initiative, the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which supports increased use of nuclear energy

"It is the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change," he said, linking carbon emissions from fossil fuels with steadily increasing global temperatures.

SA a 'top tier' carbon emitter

South Africa is in the "top tier" of carbon emitters globally, and is under pressure to reduce its heavy coal reliance. Coal plants supply 90% of the country's electricity.

While activists like ELA and Greenpeace advocate solar and wind energy as clean alternatives, Moore said these were "intermittent and unpredictable - they simply can't replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric".

Activists have also criticised the high levels of radiation allegedly emitted by nuclear waste.

ELA alleges that Eskom does not have adequate evacuation procedures in the case of an accident at either Koeberg nuclear power station or at the Pelindaba nuclear facility.

"In the event of radiation releases, all radiation releases from Pelindaba will reach Johannesburg or Pretoria within five hours, at an average windspeed of three metres per second," said ELA. "This is similar to what would happen at Koeberg with regard to reaching Cape Town."

But Moore downplayed the effects of radiation, saying that only 56 deaths could be directly attributed to the catastrophic Chernobyl disaster in 1986 in Ukraine.

However excess cancer deaths because of the accident have been put at 9 000 by the World Health Organisation and around 5 000 people who were children and adolescents at the time of the accident have so far been diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

Disagreements over facts are common between activists and nuclear proponents like Moore.

Greenpeace said that high level nuclear waste stays radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.

But Moore insisted that within 40 years used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor.

Disposing of nuclear waste

A concern in South Africa has been the disposal of nuclear waste, which has not been finalised.

"Eskom is investigating a number of options for the-long term final disposal of high level waste, including the well-documented and understood 'deep geological repository' for the spent fuel," it said.

One third of the fuel in the reactors is removed approximately every 16 months and stored in the fuel pools on site. Eskom said these pools have enough capacity to accommodate all the spent fuel for the 40-year lifetime of the station.

As the debate rages on, Eskom, which is among the first to use the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor, plans to up the use of nuclear energy from 5% to 15% in the power mix for South Africa.

But this is not enough for Moore, who has called for an "aggressive" roll-out of nuclear stations.

There are currently 441 operating nuclear power units in the world. The largest number, 104, are situated in the US and supply about 20% of America's electricity. Seventy-seven percent of France's electricity comes from nuclear power and more than 16 countries rely on nuclear power to supply at least a quarter of their electricity needs.