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Is SA playing Russian roulette with nuclear energy?

Cape Town – Russia’s decision this week to freeze the implementation of a 16-year-old atomic programme with the US highlights a critical red flag regarding South Africa’s nuclear build programme.

Russian state-owned nuclear energy firm Rosatom is gearing up to submit its application to win a tender to partner South Africa in its 9.6 GW nuclear build programme. It is a lucrative deal that will unlock an industrial partnership that will last up to a century - and Russia is seen as the frontrunner.

The concern is that if Russia can freeze ties with the US over conflict in Syria, what’s to say it won’t do the same with South Africa if the two countries have a falling-out in a few decades’ time? The threat of half-built, expensive nuclear stations sitting idly while the country experiences load shedding could therefore be flagged as a concern.

Russia’s aim to reclaim Africa

Nuclear energy is seen as Russia’s big move to become a major player in African geopolitics. After educating and supporting many African anti-colonial revolutionaries before 1990 – including President Jacob Zuma – Russia dropped the ball as Africa began moving into its post-colonial era.

In 2005, a Russian diplomat said of Africa that “what we lost was not worth keeping”, according to a report by the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) in 2013. This attitude changed in 2008, when then Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said: “Frankly, we were almost too late. We should have begun working with our African partners earlier, more so, because our ties with many of them have not been interrupted, they are based on decades of developing friendly relations.”

Since then, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian stakeholders have been hard at work to build up new relations with African partners.

Just this week, Russian and South African competition agencies signed a memorandum of understanding in Cape Town to develop and strengthen cooperation between the countries in the field of competition law enforcement and competition policy development.

The bilateral agreements with South Africa started gaining steam at the 2013 Brics summit in Durban. “On a bilateral level, the most important event was the signing (in 2013 at the Brics summit) of the joint declaration on the establishment of a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between the Russian Federation and the Republic of South Africa,” the SAIIA report explained.

Nuclear central to Russian policy

Nuclear has recently become central to Russia’s African ambitions. Rosatom has signed nuclear energy agreements with Nigeria, Ghana and Egypt in the last year. Its agreement with South Africa signed in 2014 is a matter before the courts, with lobby groups Safcei and Earth Life SA claiming the cooperation agreement is binding and therefore illegal. Rosatom and the Department of Energy dispute this claim.

READ: Civil bodies a step closer in nuclear deal challenge

Legally, there is nothing in the agreement between Rosatom and the Department of Energy that indicates a nuclear deal has been concluded, Viktor Polikarpov, regional vice president for sub-Saharan Africa, told Fin24 on Thursday. “When you read the agreement itself, you will see that it is very general and does not contain any signs of a deal from a legal point of view,” he said.

FULL STORY: Civil bodies have no nuclear legal case - Rosatom

Rosatom has set up shop in Johannesburg since 2014 and has been patiently building relationships with the media and businesses ahead of the bid. While its patience might be running out, Polikarpov said Rosatom is “still upbeat about bidding for the tender”.

FULL STORY: Rosatom still "upbeat" about nuclear bid

Russia cuts ties with US over nukes

This week, Putin announced the suspension of the implementation of the Plutonium Disposition and Management Agreement (PDMA) signed in 2000 between Russia and the US.

Putin’s decree accused the US of “unfriendly” actions that posed a “threat to strategic stability”.

“This is an announcement that we are disappointed by,” Bloomberg quoted White House spokesperson Josh Earnest as saying this week. “The United States has been steadfast since 2011 in implementing our side of the bargain and we’d like to see Russia do the same thing.”

The PDMA "specified that each side should eliminate 34 tonnes of weapon-grade plutonium. The radioactive material, which formed part of the Fat Man bomb dropped by the US on Japan’s Nagasaki in 1945, was to be converted into fuel for nuclear power stations", Bloomberg reported.

Russian economy taking strain

The suspension follows sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and European allies following its annexation of the Crimea in 2014. Since then, Russia’s economy has been stalling with a 40% drop in gross domestic product from 2013 to 2015.

The tension is clearly escalating between the countries that kept the world on the brink of nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War.

“The Russian economy is currently taking real strain, largely due to sanctions from the West and, as you know, we have a new Cold War between Russia and the USA/the West,” Jakkie Cilliers, head of African Futures and Innovation at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, told Fin24 this week.

“The issues (of suspending the PDMA agreement) … cut to the heart of what Putin believes to be Russian national interests and (are) part of a concerted effort to regain its former great power status,” he said.  

Risk of Russia cutting ties with SA is slim

However, Cilliers said a commercial agreement with South Africa would be quite different.

“South Africa is increasingly a partner to Russia, among others within the Brics and other arrangements,” he said. “So we are generally likely seen as a friendly nation by Russia, not part of a competitive club.  

“The broader challenge is that Russia generally does not abide by the rule of (international) law. So from that perspective this type of action reinforces the concern that Russia may take unilateral action as it has done with gas exports to Europe some years ago.  

“But I would argue the risk of that would be quite slim,” he said. “The damage that it would suffer to its reputational risk, should it cancel or unilaterally withdraw from a commercial agreement, would be huge.”

Rosatom ‘never goes back on its contracts’

The risk of Rosatom pulling out of programmes due to national politics surfaced earlier this year. Western media published reports that claimed Rosatom had pulled out of its nuclear build programme with Turkey after a Russian jet was downed in Turkey. This was denied by both countries. President Erdogan and Russian President Putin met in August where they recommitted to Rosatom building the Akkuyu nuclear power plant for about $22bn (R306bn).

However, Rosatom's SA chief Polikarpov told Fin24 on Thursday that Rosatom “never goes back on its commercial contracts”.

He said Rosatom would remain committed to South Africa if the deal goes ahead, “even under the conditions of different instabilities in the world”.

“We still continue with the countries with whom we started our… commercial relationships,” he said. “And we will implement our programmes.

“We are in a business,” he said. “We run a business of building peaceful sources of power plants that generate electricity for peaceful purposes.”

He said the PDMA is a “government to government” relationship. “If a government does not fulfil its agreement, which the US had been doing, they had not been fulfilling the agreements, which were signed. And Russia had been fulfilling it unilaterally.

“The question is whether it is worth continuing or not,” he said. “Plutonium is part of the arms reduction, and this is a politicised problem, I won’t go into that.”

Russia needs Africa


In its 2013 report, the SAIIA explained that Russia wasn’t simply trying to emulate China with its African policy and that it had clear objectives.

“Russia is keen to collaborate with Africa in the sphere of natural resources,” the report says. “With the splitting up of the Soviet Union, Russia found itself deprived of many of the supplies of vital minerals for its economy, as these were now outside its borders.

“This has encouraged the search for resources from other locations. Imports from Africa of, among others, manganese, chrome, nickel, zinc, lead and bauxite have become more important. Russia is also increasing its investments in mining in Africa.”

On its website, Rosatom claims: “We at Rosatom view Africa as the final frontier, it is the last booming economy, and it is currently the fastest growing economy in the world, with a regional growth of 5.7% per annum.

“Rosatom has been in communication with a number of interested African nations and we are willing to do everything in our power to assist them in achieving their nuclear ambitions.”

Russia clearly needs Africa for its economic development, especially as it faces increasing opposition from the West. As long as Africa plays ball with Russia, the dream of industrialisation and nuclear energy could be realised. What would happen if it suddenly stops playing ball remains to be seen.

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