PRETORIA, April 3 (Itar-Tass) — Russia’s state-run nuclear power corporation sees strong potential to step up comprehensive and integrated nuclear cooperation with South Africa, the director of Rosatom’s international business department, Alexei Kalinin, said in an interview with Itar-Tass.
Rosatom’s delegation arrived in Johannesburg to hold a seminar on relations with South African partners.
“Our company’s aspirations in Africa are now targeted at the Republic of South Africa that significantly differs from other countries of the continent, first of all, by its developed nuclear industry,” he said. “There are many professionals and nuclear power specialists, many nuclear power facilities and there we speak one language with our partners.”
“Rosatom can help South Africa to create “bigger production and vaster opportunities for the nuclear industry’s development,” Kalinin said. In every sector of nuclear technologies the corporation can also “offer its own initiative not only as concerns export items, but also technologies that we can transfer.”
“We are ready to propose investments to our South African partners as well. I am confident that we have good prospects there,” he said.
Speaking about the South African government’s plans to adopt a twenty-year integrated resource development plan soon and to announce a tender for the construction of several nuclear power plants worth around 130 billion dollars, Kalinin noted that this is one of the largest programs in the history of nuclear power development. “We will take a decision on how to bid depending on concrete details,” he said.
“First, we have opportunities to take part in the tender in full volume and we see certain advantages for ourselves in this. In our opinion, it would be extremely reasonable if our South African partners begin to take an approach of serial construction of nuclear power plants that we apply in Russia,” Kalinin said. “This would help to maximally employ the effect of large-scale projects in technology transfer and in the creation of local productions.”
“Moreover, we as a company demonstrate significant flexibility and are ready for global alliances – recently we signed an agreement with Rolls-Royce. We have good partnership relations with Electricite de France S.A. and Areva. But first of all, we undoubtedly focus on support of our South African partners,” he said.