South Africa has endorsed the Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy Capacity by 2050, joining 33 other countries that signed the nonbinding pledge during the United Nations climate summit in Dubai in 2023.
Tsakane Khambane, spokesperson for South Africa’s Ministry of Electricity and Energy, told Mongabay via email that the move marks a “significant moment” beyond South Africa’s borders. It reflects a commitment to “energy security, expanding energy access, and achieving climate goals,” Khambane said.
The decision was announced during the Africa Energy Indaba held March 5 in Cape Town. There, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, minister of electricity and energy, said nuclear power is of “structural necessity” for South Africa’s future energy mix.
But Ramokgopa said the biggest challenge for African countries to expand nuclear power is fairer financing from international lenders, multilateral institutions and supplier countries. “If the world is serious about tripling nuclear capacity by 2050, Africa must be central to that ambition. That requires financing structures aligned with developmental realities,” he said.
Currently, more than 80% of South Africa’s electricity supply is derived from coal, a primary driver of climate change. Renewables such as wind, solar and hydro contribute around 10%, while nuclear power, primarily from the Koeberg plant, accounts for about 4% of the country’s electricity generation.
South Africa is pursuing a diversified energy mix that includes coal, nuclear, renewables and hydropower. However, the government says it expects the composition to change significantly in the coming decades as renewable and nuclear energy expand.
Growing demand coupled with an unreliable electricity supply has caused years of rolling blackouts. As the government pushes for economic development while gradually phasing out coal, experts warn of a supply-demand imbalance in the coming years.
Officials say alternatives are underway. At a press briefing on the Integrated Resource Plan 2025 last year, Ramokgopa said the country plans to build an additional 5,200 megawatts of nuclear capacity on top of the 1,800 megawatts currently produced.
Adding that much nuclear capacity will require massive investments. Chris Yelland, an energy expert with EE Business Intelligence based in South Africa, said he doubts the South African government can secure the financing. And he questioned the utility of investing in nuclear to begin with.
“What we need is flexible power generation that can ramp up and down quickly [to] align with the variability of renewable energy, and nuclear is anything but flexible,” Yelland told Mongabay.
South African civil society organizations are also not convinced. Three groups have filed a High Court challenge against a proposed nuclear site at Duynefontein, in Western Cape province. The claimants argue the environmental impact assessment was based on outdated data and failed to consider alternatives like wind and solar.
This legal challenge could cause delays in the government’s ambitious plans for new nuclear capacity by 2039.
Banner image: Warning sign on a beach near the Koeberg nuclear power plant in Cape Town. Image by Louis Oelofse via Wikimedia Commons (CC0 1.0).
This story first appeared on Mongabay
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
