Last week Kevin Mileham, shadow minister of mineral resources and energy in the Democratic Alliance (DA), said his party would not support any expansion of South Africa’s “nuclear and coal ambitions”.

Renewables, he said, should be this country’s main source of energy “in the short term”, fossil fuels and nuclear being unsustainable and unaffordable and a “thing of the past”. The minister of mineral resources and energy, Gwede Mantashe, was “out of touch”.

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