South African’s Koeberg Power Station has announced plans to build the country’s first Pebble Bed Modular Reactor in a smaller facility. Koeberg, 27 km north of Cape Town, is the only nuclear plant on the continent. Koeberg was opened in 1984 and accommodates 6.5% of South Africa’s power demands. Its developers hope that by 2010 the plant will be operational and providing enough electricity for Cape Town’s four million residents and beyond. The gas-cooled reactor uses more than half a million pebble shaped particles of enriched uranium which operate at high temperatures, increasing the amount of energy the reactor can convert into electricity. The reactor is also small enough to be housed in a three-storey building and does not need water as a coolant, which means it can be built away from rivers and the coast.
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