South Africa expects to phase in nuclear power because of expected carbon taxes.

[NNadir]

State power utility Eskom has identified the world’s biggest nuclear power firm, Areva, and US-based Westinghouse as the vendors to build South Africa’s first new nuclear power station in more than 20 years, and construction could start as early as 2010, a top official said on Wednesday.

The plant, to be built at one of five possible sites along South Africa’s coastline, would “definitely” cost more than the R80-billion Eskom was paying for the coal-fired Medupi plant that it is building at Lephalale, nuclear stakeholder management senior manager Tony Stott said.

The State-owned power utility was hoping to have a letter of intent signed with the preferred bidder sometime in 2008, he told Engineering News Online, on the sidelines of the Institute for International Research South Africa Nuclear Energy conference in Sandton...

...sked at what intervals Eskom hoped to introduce new nuclear reactor units after 2016, Stott said that the firm would be looking to bring on a new unit every one to two years.

“They are all going to happen fairly swiftly after each other”, if the parastatal was to meet its target of generating 20 000 MW of nuclear power by 2025.

Eskom was hoping to generate 30% of its power from nuclear sources by this time.
"If Eskom hypothetically counted as a country, it would rank as the 25th worst carbon emitting State in the world"

Currently, it depends on coal for about 86% of its power generation capacity.

Carbon taxes
Stott reiterated statements made earlier this month by Eskom CEO Jacob Maroga that Eskom had to assume that it would, at some point in the future, have to pay carbon ‘taxes’ for its emissions.

“Beyond the Kyoto agreement in 2012, South Africa is almost certainly going to have to pay carbon taxes,” Stott said, referring to the Kyoto Protocol that most developed countries signed about a decade ago.

“From Eskom’s side, we have to work as though that is going to happen,” he stressed.

This made nuclear energy a more viable option than coal, which was pollution intensive, and it was expensive to capture the carbon emissions...

Eskom is currently facing huge power shortages, putting the coal mines that are supposed to fuel Germany's "nuclear phase out" in question.

Apparently the South Africans are less gung ho on coal than the Germans.

http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article.php?a_id=117621