Eskom Invites Bids to Start Nuclear Building Program

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--In a start to its ambitious plan to add 20,000 megawatts of nuclear power capacity to the national grid by 2025, South Africa's power utility Eskom has announced that France's Areva and Westinghouse have been invited to submit bids for the first of six new nuclear plants. Areva's bid will be based on its EPR reactor and Westinghouse on its AP1000. The plant is expected to have almost twice the generating capacity, at 3,500 MW, of the country's existing Koeberg nuclear plant's 1,800 MW.

Environmental impact assessments are underway at five coastal sites: Brazil; Schulpfontein on the Northern Cape's west coast; Duynfontein near Koeberg; Bantamsklip on the Western Cape's coast; and Thyspunt on the Eastern Cape's coast. Eskom aims to evaluate bids in the first quarter of this year and report back to the board by the end of March.

The Department of Environmental Affairs is expected to give approval for the site selected by June 2009. Eskom expects construction to start by 2010 and to have the new plant ready for commissioning by 2016 and feeding power to the national grid by 2017.

Eskom was shy about revealing the cost of the project to prevent bidders tailoring its bids, but the company recently said that the plant could cost up to $17 billion and that the total cost of the nuclear plant building program could be more than $100 billion.

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