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Dr. Alex Cannara's avatar

Germans were once viewed as smart & wise.

Greenpeace, by the way, doesn't reveal its funding, especially from the petro biz.

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John Ledger's avatar

Thank you for an excellent analysis. South Africa is also on a risky policy road to 'Net Zero', with government increasingly committing to wind and solar in an apparent attempt to emulate Germany. Fortunately some reality has been forced on government by a period of electrcity supply shortfalls, , euphemistically termed 'load-shedding'. This has resulted in a delay in the planned shuttering of coal-fired power stations (80% of our electrcity comes from coal), and new interest in nuclear. South Africa has one French-designed nuclear power station (Koeberg in the Western Cape) that has been running well since 1984. The country also made sigificant progress on its home-grown SMR, the PBMR project, and we have a pilot plant that successfully produced pebble fuel. The project was closed around 2008 for financial reasons as well as lawfare by the local anti-nuke activists. There is talk of trying to revive the PBMR project, but this is unlikely to happen. The skilled PBMR ex-peronnel are now scattered around the globe, with some leading experts with X-Energy in the USA. A large contingent of South Africans worked on the new nuclear plant in the UAE. ' Climate catastrophe' rules the media waves in South Africa and contrarian views get no mention at all. Keep up your good work. John Ledger.

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