The bulk of our power comes from coal fired plants but due to the low quality coal for cost reasons and thus high sulphur and lack of preventative maintenance it results in boiler tube leaks nearly every week.
Some of our plants are at the end of their lives and their replacements are no better off due to corruption and a malady of technically incompetent builders (looking at you Hitachi South Africa).
7000MW out of commission so we get daily power cuts for half the day.
Those like myself who have the ability just install home solar systems for some measure of sanity while most companies are using diesel standby generators for their infrastructure.
Walking into the office park and you can hear the chugg chugg and smell the fumes.
South Africa almost got something similar, the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR). Well ahead of its time and excellent technology, with Westinghouse involved as a partner at one point and having bought some of the IP. [0]
Pebble bed reactors have problems. The fuel is more expensive to fabricate, activated dust comes off the pebbles as they abrade each other, the pebbles can crack and jam, and the volume of the spent fuel is high, increasing the cost of dealing with it.
We'd need 23 of them. Depending on the cost, it would be better than nothing. Currently, I think it costs R10 mil to generate 1MW through solar; so R70 billion with solar.
The bulk of our power comes from coal fired plants but due to the low quality coal for cost reasons and thus high sulphur and lack of preventative maintenance it results in boiler tube leaks nearly every week.
Some of our plants are at the end of their lives and their replacements are no better off due to corruption and a malady of technically incompetent builders (looking at you Hitachi South Africa).
7000MW out of commission so we get daily power cuts for half the day.
Those like myself who have the ability just install home solar systems for some measure of sanity while most companies are using diesel standby generators for their infrastructure.
Walking into the office park and you can hear the chugg chugg and smell the fumes.