Civil society group Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) reported on Monday morning that more than 17 000 individual submissions had been made through its web portal, regarding national electricity utility Eskom’s proposed locations for new nuclear power plants (NPP). The organisation affirms that it tracks all the submission through its portal, so that the government cannot deny receiving them.
The original deadline for submissions on the siting of the NPPs was midnight August 28/29. But Eskom has since acknowledged that this deadline did not give people the legally prescribed 30 days’ period in which to comment on the proposals.
The utility had published notices of its Nuclear Installation Site Licence applications in ten local newspapers and the Western Cape Provincial Gazette on July 29 but in the Eastern Cape Provincial Gazette only on August 8. Two sites were involved: Duynefontyn in the Western Cape and Thyspunt in the Eastern Cape.
Outa also insists that NPP site decisions are a national matter, not a regional one, and that the notifications of the licence applications should have been published in the National Gazette and not just the Provincial Gazettes. The organisation affirmed that this was an attempt to slip the process “under the public participation radar” and to gain the licences to build two new NPPs “without proper public scrutiny”, in the words of its press release.
Consequently, Outa invited members of the public to make submissions to the government on the issue through its portal. “With over 17 000 submissions thus far, this high volume of public submissions indicates a growing active citizenry on the nuclear issue, one which the regulator and government as a whole cannot ignore,” asserted organisation chairman Wayne Duvenhage.