GOVERNMENT planned to send highly-radioactive spent fuel rods stored at the Koeberg nuclear power station overseas for reprocessing, Parliament’s minerals and energy portfolio committee heard yesterday.

This was a short-term solution to disposing of it, in terms of policy approved by Cabinet “but not announced yet”, Minerals and Energy Department nuclear safety director Schalk de Waal told MPs.

“In the longer term, Necsa (the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa) will investigate the possibility of developing an indigenous reprocessing facility,” he said.

Senior officials from the department were briefing the committee on the National Radioactive Waste Management Agency Bill, which seeks to establish such an agency to take responsibility for the safe storage of nuclear waste.

Minerals and Energy chief director for nuclear energy, Tseliso Maqubela, informed MPs that the cost of decommissioning Koeberg’s reactors when they reached the end of their working lives would run into “tens of billions” of rand.

Responding to a member’s question, he said: “The estimate for decommissioning…certainly, I think, for a nuclear power plant, the costs are in the tens of billions. Whether it’s R20 billion or R30 billion in the SA context is another matter.”

According to the department, in June this year, there was a total of 1150 tons of highly radioactive waste – mainly in the form of spent fuel rods – in South Africa.

About 95 percent of this total is spent fuel stored at Koeberg, with the balance at the Necsa-operated Safari-1 reactor at Pelindaba, near Pretoria.

De Waal said that in terms of the country’s nuclear energy policy, spent fuel was not considered waste because it could be reprocessed.

“This is a practice that has been perfected by the French…whereby they take out about 96 percent of the raw materials from the spent fuel, and only about four percent then becomes high-level waste.

“This is then vitrified, stored in glass, and disposed of in a safe manner.”

The national energy policy favoured reprocessing.

De Waal also revealed that in the past Russia had offered to buy South Africa’s spent reactor fuel.

“It was just a commercial possibility and at this stage I’m not sure what happened to that investigation and whether they continued with it or not,” he said.

Earlier, Maqubela, told the committee it was international best practice to have an independent agency manage nuclear waste.

However, committee chairman Nqaba Ngcobo warned that financing such an agency, and finding the skills locally to staff it, could be “a nightmare”.

He called for a workshop with the Department of Minerals and Energy to further debate the issue.

Maqubela responded by saying the main question was “do we do it (manage nuclear waste) in terms of international best practice, or do we do it our way?”

Government had also approved a policy calling for the establishment of a management agency in 2005.

If the Bill is passed by Parliament, the agency will replace the National Nuclear Regulator as the authority responsible for the management of such waste in South Africa.

Maqubela said having the National Nuclear Regulator in charge of radioactive waste disposal was contrary to international conventions to which South Africa was party. — Sapa