National Assembly: 12 August 2010 

Honourable Speaker:

The IFP is extremely concerned that Government has not taken into account the human capital invested into the Modular Pebble Bed Reactor program and the large-scale unemployment that will be created by the project's sudden termination. At its inception, it was projected that 57 000 South Africans would be employed.

The Ministry of Energy, the State and the country for that matter can ill afford such turnarounds in policy decisions, especially when we were already so far down the road.

Besides the unemployment that will be created by this decision, the loss of money, tax payers' money, is going to be enormous. As recently as October 2007, the then Minister of Finance, Hon Trevor Manuel, brought before this House a special adjustments appropriation Bill which was approved wherein an additional amount of R1,8 billion rand was transferred to the PBMR project for operational expenses, bringing the total transferred to R8.8 billion rand spent on this project by government since 1999.

Notwithstanding these calamities, we are now further burdened by the prospect of no direction in terms of our future energy sources.

We urge the Minister and her Department to fully investigate all options available before they commit to the next energy route that this country is going to follow, lest we have a similar situation on our hands in the future.

This House deserves a full report on governments' direction in this regard.