Johannesburg  - South Africa wants to build up an export-oriented nuclear industry, of which the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) will be an indispensable part, a government minister said Thursday.

Minister for Public Enterprises Barbara Hogan was speaking at a conference in Johannesburg on the localization of the PBMR, a project to build small-scale, helium-cooled, high-temperature reactors.

South Africa is not the only country to develop a PBMR but aims to be first on the market, ahead of China and the United States, with a commercial model, which it has been developing since 1999.

Hogan said the PBMR "could be instrumental in creating a strong nuclear base" in South Africa.

"We can't afford as a country any more to import goods and skills we can produce in our own country," she said, saying the goal was a "world-class" nuclear facility that would create jobs.

The former apartheid government ran a secretive nuclear weapons programme. By the 1990s South Africa had developed six nuclear bombs, which were dismantled during the transition to democracy.

Apart from increasing South Africa's energy reliance, the PBMR also offered the chance to improve the country's export capacity, Hogan said, while stressing it was a long-term project.

The PBMR project is a public-private partnership between the South African government and US nuclear giant Westinghouse.

After running into financial difficulties, the project was reconfigured to produce both electricity and process heat and the prototype downscaled from 400 megawatts to 200 megawatts. The DPP 200 (Demonstration Power Plant) is not expected to be completed before 2014, PMBR CEO Jaco Kriek told the conference.

South Africa gets 94 per cent of its energy from coal, 5 per cent from its lone Koeberg nuclear power plant and 1 per cent from renewable energy.

To end the energy shortages that plagued the country last year particularly, state electricity supplier Eskom plans to invest 385 billion rand (around 48 billion dollars) over five years in building new power plants.(dpa)