Balancing energy needs with environmental priorities

Many will remember the World Summit on Sustainable Development hosted by Johannesburg back in 2002, the follow-up event, the 2009 World Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen certainly put a much sharper spotlight on the negative impact of carbon emissions. There were great expectations that the summit would produce a binding agreement among world nations to reduce their carbon emissions, but we now know that the summit failed to deliver this agreement. At best, the summit has made countries such as South Africa aware of the need to re-evaluate their emission problems and propose their own plans to reduce carbon emissions in the long term. By most calculations, South Africa releases in excess of 400 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per year. The biggest emissions culprits are the coal-driven electricity stations, which account for 70% of all the carbon dioxide South Africa emits into the atmosphere every year. South Africa’s carbon dioxide emissions make up less than 2% of global emissions but alarmingly, the country’s per capita carbon emissions are more than those of China and India combined. South Africa therefore is under great pressure to come up with a clear action plan to reduce its carbon emissions. In Copenhagen, the government of President Zuma pledged to reduce South Africa’s carbon emissions by at least 34% by the year 2025, a fairly ambitious target indeed.

What is government to do?

As stated above the coal-driven electricity power stations are the biggest carbon emissions culprits, it therefore makes sense that any plan to reduce emissions must seek to reduce South Arica’s reliance on these power stations and look for alternative energy-generation sources. In march of 2009 the national centre for carbon capture storage (CCS)was launched under the auspices of the Central Energy Fund (CEF). The basic intent of the CCS is to somehow capture the carbon dioxide produced by many industrial processes before it escapes into the atmosphere and then compress this gas into a liquid. This liquefied carbon dioxide would then be injected into and “stored” deep underground. In my view, the CCS should not be used as justification for building more coal-driven power stations as national electricity supplier, Eskom, is proposing. Indeed what is really required are alternative cleaner energy sources, such as solar, wind, sea-wave and nuclear. However, the most realistic solution for South Africa is by far nuclear powered electricity generating stations, given the great amount of research and development investment that has gone into the use of this technology to generate cleaner energy, read into this the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) programme which has been running since 1999. Make no mistake, nuclear energy power generation does produce highly toxic waste material and the enriched uranium used in the production of nuclear energy is a highly volatile material with potentially catastrophic results if not managed carefully. Remember the Chernobyl disaster of 1986? I’m no expert on nuclear energy and by my limited understanding, what the PBMR project seeks to achieve is making nuclear power generation safer and the disposal of the resulting toxic waste much easier.

The government of President Zuma ought to pursue nuclear energy and increase investment in the development of this technology, if not to reduce South Africa's carbon emissions at least to guarantee electricity supply to the population.