South Africa’s PBMR Company remains in the industrial alliance which is bidding for the second phase of the US Department of Energy’s Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP) programme. This alliance is led by US company Westinghouse Electric, which is itself part of Japan’s Toshiba group.

This is despite the recently revealed dramatic cut in government funding for the predominantly State-owned nuclear company, which has been developing the fourth-generation, high-temperature, gas-cooled, Pebble-Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR). As a result of its budget being slashed, the PBMR Company may have to lay off as much as 75% of its staff, who number nearly 800, in a process being euphemistically described as “rationalisation”.

The US/South African industrial alliance last year finished work on phase one of the NGNP programme. This was concerned with the pre-conceptual engineering of a nuclear co-generation plant that would produce  both electricity and hydrogen. Should the alliance win a second phase contract, it would bring additional revenues into PBMR.

On Tuesday, US President Barack Obama clearly endorsed nuclear energy when he announced $8-billion in Federal loan guarantees for the first two new nuclear power plants to be built in the US for 30 years. "To meet our growing energy needs and prevent the worst consequences of climate change, we'll need to increase our supply of nuclear power,” he said. “It's that simple."

Meanwhile, in South Africa, the government has appointed an interministerial task team to work on the future direction of the PBMR. It will seek to prevent the country losing the nuclear skills, expertise and technology that have been developed by the PBMR programme. The task team’s decision is expected in August.

The radical downsizing being considered by the PBMR Company is intended to keep it going, on its existing funding, until the government announces its decision. But the indications are that many of the highly skilled specialists now employed by the company will have left it and gone abroad by then, joining strongly growing nuclear programmes in other countries.