When Mining Weekly called at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) workshops nearly 40 years ago, white-coated technologists were enthusiastically talking about nuclear fusion.
But fusion turned into confusion and the technology never saw the light of day. Critics still belittle nuclear fusion as always being 30 years away. Long delays and cost escalations have been associated, for example, with the Iter tokamak Project, in France, now expected to turn on in 2025.
Interestingly, though, the word ‘tokamak’ is firmly back, this time on the lips of the British, not in reference to the round tokamak vessel originally conceived in the 1950s in Russia, where it is still said to be the most popular type of fusion reactor, but in association with an announced £220-million, four-year investment in a nuclear fusion power station in the UK, which is scheduled to be completed in 2024.
The UK tokamak revival is being heralded with a flurry of trumpets as climate positive and economically viable. The UK Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Andrea Leadsom, is sold on the idea, which she says is poised to give the country access to clean, green, safe and carbon-free energy at a time of world decarbonisation.
Given the French experience, the jury is still out on the depth of the commercial viability of what the UK is calling the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production, which will be based on the spherical tokamak technology currently being developed at the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s owned and managed Culham Centre for Fusion Energy.
Scale will likely be needed to bring all this down the cost curve, which means that South Africa much rather follow the likes of Australia, where a 5 000 MW combined solar and wind farm is being developed in Western Australia that will produce renewable hydrogen for potential export to Asia. Sounds familiar? Yes, that is also South Africa’s plan, but where’s our announcement?
Siemens’ electrolyser technology will convert power from the solar and wind units into hydrogen. The project’s location, north of the coastal town of Kalbarri, places it closer to Japan than South Africa is.
But, as with the tokamak talk, South Africa desperately needs to turn talk into action, especially since the latest calculations from that same CSIR find that South Africa, with its superior sun, prime wind energy, ready- built Coega port, seawater and platinum to boot, is well placed to produce and export clean renewable hydrogen.
The South African people deserve leadership towards realising the hydrogen economy.
Asia wants the hydrogen it imports to be carbon free by 2040. South Africa can meet that requirement ten years earlier.
South Africa must get going to get growing.