Abstract:
South Africa recently announced a resurgence in its commercial nuclear
power programme. The implications for the development of the necessary
high-level manpower within South Africa’s tertiary educational system
and its national research and development (R&D) capacity in materials
science and engineering, as well as in other engineering disciplines, are
placed into perspective. An organized national process of developing this
manpower by moving away from the previously high-risk and costly ’large
programmes’ to rather a selection of ‘small and better’ research projects
and a redefinition of what constitutes ‘nuclear materials’ are proposed as
parts of this strategy.
