Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa says he’s worried about a range of issues at the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station.
He made the comments during a media briefing yesterday, after his visit to the plant on Thursday.
Ramokgopa shared a number of concerns about the life-extension project, which is running behind schedule.
These delays include maintenance overlaps at the plant.
Currently, Unit 1 is offline for maintenance and there is a possibility that it will not return to service by the planned date in September.
But Unit 2 is scheduled to shut down in October for maintenance.
That would mean the entire plant would be offline, which would have an impact on generating capacity.
He is also worried about money set aside to conduct the maintenance work.
In 2010, Eskom had budgeted around 20 billion for the project.
Ramokgopa says he’s also been made aware of unconfirmed reports about the safety concerns of the technology used in the plant.
“But the more you delay it suggests that there’s something that is brewing there that might be a safety concern and you don’t want that directive to gain traction going forward. You should have had your best project managers just focusing on that. In fact, my preliminary impressions from what was shared with me were some of these things are internal, it’s just our inability to be able to manage the programme and the project of this magnitude and also manage the players that are within that space”.
