The power utility will oppose the Koeberg Alert Alliance’s bid to have one of the entity’s nuclear power stations decommissioned despite its attempt to keep it running for another 20 years.
POWER utility Eskom will oppose the Koeberg Alert Alliance’s bid to have one of the entity’s nuclear power stations decommissioned despite its attempt to keep it running for another 20 years.
Eskom chief executive Andre de Ruyter on Thursday said: “When it comes to action by civil society, clearly we take it seriously. We need to respond to those concerns where possible; we would like to avoid litigation.”
He cautioned: “However, it’s also important to stress that based on the merits of continued operation at Koeberg, we believe that we have a strong case. We believe that there is no risk involved to the general public and that in fact there are many benefits to the Cape Town region, economically, from an energy security perspective as well as to the country at large to proceed with the life extension of Koeberg (power station)”.
According to De Ruyter, Eskom would take legal advice on the challenge but said that they are also quite confident of the merits of the project and how it should be implemented.
On Wednesday, De Ruyter revealed that Eskom had applied to the SA National Nuclear Regulator for a 20-year extension of the life of the Koeberg nuclear power plant.
The Eskom boss also provided an update on the current spate of load shedding.
“The units that tripped at Arnot and Tutuka should be returning to service within an hour. It’s just a few minor things that need to be sorted out but those units should be back, should be synchronised fairly soon,” De Ruyter said.
He said the Kusile Power Station battled with its unit 1 as it tripped.
”Medupi (is) running four of the available five units. We took opportunity maintenance on the fifth unit,” said Eskom group executive for generation Phillip Dukashe.
He added that at the Kusile Power Station, none of the commercial units were running.
”We are running the non-commercial unit, which is unit 4. We are continuing with the recovery, a number of units are expected back towards the end of this week and also early next week,” he said.
Eskom chief operations officer Jan Oberholzer said: “We trust that by Monday morning when we start the week, that the dams will be full and that will assist us to deal with the challenges we may have in the week to come”.
Oberholzer added that Eskom also aimed to have diesel levels at Ankerlig Power Station in Cape Town specifically full by Monday morning, when stage 2 load shedding is expected to end.
He said suppliers delivered 92 loads on Wednesday but that the challenge remained the Kusile power stations.
”We have managed to return to service the non-commercial units 500 megawatts (MW); it’s running as we speak. However, we have challenges with Kusile unit number one. We really have some challenges, we have some vibration challenges that we are dealing with,” said Oberholzer.
He gave assurances they were getting ready to bring unit two back to service.
”However, what one needs to understand is that it was on a long outage, the same outage where we implemented some of the design challenge modifications. We do expect we may have some difficulty bringing this unit back and that it will contribute sustainably to the capacity that we need,” Oberholzer added.
Political Bureau
