Imagine that you run a canned-food factory and you decide to extend the plant by 25%. You will have to find a design team and building contractors. Or imagine that you are tasked with extending the Richards Bay harbour substantially and the estimate is that this will be a job valued at about R500-million.

Returning to the canned-food factory – imagine that you know an Indonesian designer who is excellent at doing such designs, but he lives in Indonesia. You decide to contract him and he brings his designs. You get to the point of construction and you now need to dig foundations, pour concrete, build walls, and so on.

Where will you get the construction people? Will the Indonesian fellow import sand, stone, cement, spades, wheelbarrows, and so on, from Indonesia? Will he bring in workers from Indonesia to mix the concrete, or will you get all of that locally?

If you are building the extension to the Richards Bay harbour and you bring in a world-renowned harbour designer from Holland who convinces you that you need to build new sea walls using thousands of tons of concrete, will you import the concrete from Holland, or will you contract a local civils company with a good record?

I imagine that there are not too many readers who are going to import sand, stone, cement and labour from Indonesia or Holland. They will do the sensible thing and appoint local contractors.

What about the water supply pipes? What about building the roof of any building, installing all the electrical wiring and lighting? Will that be imported, or sourced locally? Let us go a step up – what about the control room of the canned-food plant, or the harbour master’s control room at the port? Who will design and install the large electrical relays, gauges, alarms, and so on? Imported, or is there local talent to do that?

So, why is it that, as soon as people start talking about building a nuclear power plant, suddenly, they start to talk as if we will be importing the concrete to build the wall around the car park.

A fellow phoned me to gripe about the cost of building nuclear power plants and, like so many others, said: “We can’t afford to spend that much.” I asked him who would pour the concrete, lay the pipes, install the electricity and build the control room? And so we carried on.

Eventually, we got to the point where I asked him to specify exactly what it was that he imagined we could not do here. I asked him: “Which pipes can’t we weld and which metal component can’t we make?” He could not think of one. Okay, he is not a technical person, so he does not know about grain size in the metal of large steel vessels, and a few other things.

I then pointed out how much of the budget of the nuclear plants would be spent in South Africa. I pointed out just how many people would be employed in all that building. He relaxed a great deal and admitted that it was obvious that much of the money had to be spent here.

When I asked if he could imagine that the percentage could be 50%, he was quite happy to accept that. I do not know if he was a Democratic Alliance (DA) supporter or not, but it annoys me that the DA folks cannot seem to do this simple mental logic by themselves. DA members have been looking like a pagan midwinter religious ceremony – much wailing, gnashing of teeth, rending of clothes, and throbbing dancing in unison as they wail about the ‘cost’.
Why is the DA in the Port Elizabeth area not marching in the streets with placards, demanding that the next nuclear plant be built right here, right now, employing local people immediately?

There is absolutely nothing in a nuclear reactor that South African scientists do not understand. We are not at the mercy of any foreign suppliers. In deciding who will be contracted to supply the designs for the new nuclear plants, it will be a case of South Africans working with various foreign contractors to make the best decisions, profitable to all parties concerned. We will not be buying anything lock, stock and barrel blindly from anybody.
Further, local industry can gear up to export nuclear-standard fabricated parts to markets all over the world.