I am writing this column sitting in the airport just outside Hanoi, in Vietnam. I was invited by the Vietnamese nuclear authority to attend a seminar and give a presentation on the development of a Vietnamese nuclear power infrastructure.

There were two foreign guests in the nuclear project management field – the head of the Indonesian nuclear authority and I. Indonesia too has been looking into the development of a nuclear power infrastructure.

It has been interesting to see just how similar the scenarios of Indonesia and Vietnam are to ours in South Africa. First, let me address the geographical issue.
In South Africa, our coal is 1 500 km away from Cape Town, which is the same distance as Rome to London. So, it is not wise to keep building more coal stations to supply the Cape. We need to expand the nuclear power electricity from the south upwards.

In the case of Vietnam, the country is ‘long and thin’, so to speak. The distance from the top to the bottom is some 1 500 km, but, at its narrowest point, the whole country is no wider than the distance between Pretoria and Johannesburg. So, for them, they cannot easily supply power from the one end of the country to the other end.

In the case of Indonesia, of course, the country is a collection of islands, so it is not very practical to have one big national power grid, so to speak. You would have to run power cables from one island to another. They already do that for some islands, but are not keen to keep doing this. One option that they are looking at is small nuclear reactors like the 100 MW to 200 MW reactors that South Africa was developing under the pebble-bed modular reactor project.

The main point is that all three of our countries cannot look to Europe for solutions, because European geographic conditions are so different that they started with a different mindset for electricity over 100 years ago.

Many African countries are so large, in comparison to European countries, that it is problematic to produce electricity where a coal deposit is, if they have one, or where a major hydro dam can be built, and then to possibly have to transmit the electricity 1 000 km to use it.

So, it is much more practical to look at grids radiating out from where you want to produce electricity, because it is convenient to locate the power near where you want to use it.

The only power source that lends itself to this is nuclear. In the case of Vietnam and Indonesia, they both have extensive coastlines, so access to cooling water is not a problem for them.

However, other issues of common interest also came up. For example, in both these countries, they have a public opinion problem, just like us. Their citizens are also generally uninformed about nuclear, and have been frightened by scare stories propagated by antinuclear organisations such as Greenpeace.

Both these countries have initiated programmes to inform school children and the public in general. However, both reported that much more needed to be done.

At the seminar, both the head and the deputy head of the Vietnamese nuclear authority were present, and all openly discussed the problem not only of convincing the public, but also of convincing senior politicians and business leaders. They said that they knew that politicians and business leaders needed to take general public opinion into account; so, it was necessary to develop an accurately informed public.

This all indicated the extent to which nuclear power is becoming an international business in which many countries need to collaborate.

This collaboration feeling also came out in the discussion of the construction of nuclear plants. It was recognised that organisations like the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) played a major role, and it was recognised that, essentially, the IAEA could stop any country from developing nuclear if the country did not conform to international standards.

The IAEA could do this by putting an arm-lock on countries that had signed the IAEA collaboration agreements, and so prevent them from dealing with those which did not cooperate.

So, what was really evident during these deliberations was that nuclear power is an international business that needs international collaboration.