Since December, when President Jacob Zuma, with unbelievable incompetence, abruptly and, to this day without giving any good or believable reason, dismissed then Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene and announced his replacement by little-known and low-ranking politician David van Rooyen, immediately triggering a major economic, financial and, consequently, political crisis that ended only with Zuma dismissing Van Rooyen a couple of days later and reappointing a previous (and highly respected) Finance Minister, Pravin Gordhan, to the post, the atmosphere around South African politics and political commentary has been decidedly heated.

The atmosphere gets particularly perfervid when it comes to the alleged activities of the Gupta family and their relations with the President and other senior African National Congress politicians and their family members. (The Guptas are a family of Indian origin who immigrated to this country about 23 years ago and now own a business empire and are widely believed to benefit from their political connections.) Thus, there are allegations that a driving force behind the country’s plans to build new nuclear power plants (NPPs) with a total capacity of 9 600 MW is the desire to benefit the Guptas and their political allies (particularly the President and his family), because the Guptas own uranium mining assets.

Now, there are legitimate questions around the programme for NPPs. For example, why did Cabinet, in early December, reaffirm the original target of 9 600 MW of new nuclear power, when South Africa’s electricity demand has fallen so much? (Electricity sales are now back to 2007 levels.) But some critics seem to confuse legitimate commercial confidentiality with illegitimate secrecy. Nuclear companies, like all others, have a right to commercial confidentiality: they operate in a highly competitive environment, after all. And huge conspiracy theories about Zuma wanting to rig the deal to benefit Russia and that country’s State-owned nuclear group, Rosatom, have been constructed on the foundation of a single poorly phrased press release written by people whose home language is not English! Moreover, the Chinese are known to be very interested in South Africa’s planned new NPP programme. Does anyone seriously believe that Zuma, of all people, would freeze the Chinese out? That he would anger Beijing by running a crooked nuclear acquisition process that would give the Chinese bidders no hope of winning? Finally, as Areva South Africa MD Dr Yves Guenon recently pointed out to Engineering News, if his company believed that Rosatom had a done deal for the South African programme, it would not bother to make a bid. But it would take part.

As for the Guptas benefiting from the programme because of their uranium assets – there would be little, if any, direct link between new South African NPPs and sales of South African uranium. It is necessary to understand the nuclear fuel cycle. This starts with the mining of the uranium ore. This ore is then milled, which is usually done at or close to the mine to extract the uranium from the ore and produce uranium oxide concentrate, popularly called yellowcake; this is usually composed of 80% or more uranium. But yellowcake contains mostly uranium-238, which is not fissile and cannot be used as nuclear fuel; only a small proportion is the fissile uranium-235 (U-235). So the uranium must be enriched – that is, the proportion of U-235 must be increased. To do this, the yellowcake is converted into uranium hexafluoride. This, in turn, is sent to an enrichment plant where, in gas form, it is split into two streams: one is enriched (usually in centrifuges), becoming uranium dioxide, while the other is depleted in U-235, becoming “tails” or depleted uranium. NPPs use low-enriched uranium, with enrichment levels of between 3.5% and 5%. Now, the fuel can be fabricated. The low-enriched uranium dioxide is sintered into ceramic pellets, which are then placed in metal tubes known as fuel rods. These fuel rods are then grouped together to form fuel assemblies, which are loaded into the reactors to power the NPP. (The nuclear fuel cycle also includes the reprocessing of spent fuel and the disposal of wastes.)

Currently, according to the World Nuclear Association, uranium is enriched in China, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, the UK and US. Nuclear fuel is fabricated in Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Kazakhstan, South of Korea, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US, but, globally, the sector is dominated by just four companies: Areva (France), Global Nuclear Fuel (US-Japan), TVEL (Russia, part of the Rosatom group) and Westinghouse (US, but owned by Japan’s Toshiba group). For example, Westinghouse operates fuel fabrication facilities in Sweden and the UK, as well as the US, while Areva has such facilities in Germany and the US, as well as in France.

A uranium mine has to sell its yellowcake to one of the enrichment companies. Thereafter, there’s no telling which customers will receive the subsequent nuclear fuel assemblies. And those fuel assemblies may very well contain uranium that came from several different miners.

South Africa does have a desire to restore the complete nuclear fuel cycle within the country, but that is explicitly a long-term project not to be undertaken until there are enough NPPs in the country to make such a programme commercially viable. So it’s a project for future decades, not years.

Of course, building new NPPs in South Africa would benefit the Guptas by increasing global uranium demand; but it would benefit all other uranium miners in exactly the same way. Conversely, if South Africa does not build new NPPs but another country does, then the Guptas and the other uranium miners would still benefit. And, if South Africa did commission 9 600 MW of new NPPs, but a greater amount of nuclear capacity was decommissioned in the wider world during the same period, global demand for the energy metal would fall and hurt all uranium miners, including the Guptas.

The complex dynamics of the real world of nuclear power provide little support for conspiracy theories about South Africa’s proposed new NPP programme. Yes, it is legitimate to fear that the politically well connected will try to exploit such a programme, but this is more likely to happen in areas other than uranium, such as construction and components manufacture. An obsession with a single, foreign-origin family may very well distract from proper monitoring of the programme and its implementation (if it happens).