By: Andile Nxumalo

The Durban University of Technology (DUT) in partnership with French South Africa Schneider held a discussion on Tuesday aiming at exploring how nuclear related projects can
be established at DUT.

The French South Africa Schneider Electric Education Centre (F’SASEEC) with the Vice Chancellor of DUT, Professor Ahmed Bawa, discussed issues that could help the university
when installing the nuclear energy power project.

He added that the project is set to help train qualified and under qualified technicians in the fields of energy, electricity and maintenance in automated systems.

“It will be a risk for us to start training people, because we can quickly enrol the programme in our institution, but the problem would be what will be the next step since nothing has been
finalised about the nuclear project,” said ProfBawa.

Director of F’SASEC Training Centre, Alexandre Sebastiani, said that the introduction of the centre will see more qualified graduates having no problem when they have to search for
work training.

“Most technician’s struggle when looking for a job after completing training at a Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) or university, so we help them with one training
which will not require them to undergo training in the companies,” said Sebastiani.

Prof Bawa added that the initial failure of introduction of nuclear energy in the country around the early 2000’s when he was still  the vice chair of the Atomic Cooperation is
bringing fear to his attention of what is now to risk considering what happened in those years.

“The board’s aim was to value the importance of nuclear power in our country, and now I’m faced with the big decision to decide on the programme and direction of the university.

If there’s going to be revitalising of the nuclear in South Africa; it’ll be very risky to depend of foreign expects, we’ll therefore have to train our own technicians,” said Prof Bawa.

He also added that he believes the institution has enough capacity to begin the education and training of the students and that funding is not a problem since Eskom has shown its
willingness to help start the programme.