State-owned utility Eskom has been ordered by a high court to pay more than R1-billion to French nuclear energy company Framatome, after contract and project management problems delayed a steam generator swap at the entity’s Koeberg nuclear power plant, newspaper Business Day reports.

In an article on July 21, reporter Kabelo Khumalo reports that the adjudication process, which was handled by advocate Peter Ramsden, resulted in the court ordering Eskom to pay Framatome €35.2-million (R727-million) and a further R256.6-million, in line with Ramsden’s earlier findings.

This excludes value-added tax, interest and Framatome’s French-based attorney’s fees.

The dispute arose in 2022 when Eskom took Koeberg Unit 2 offline, for what it said would be a five-month outage to refuel and replace its three steam generators. However, Eskom months later informed Framatome that it would not be continuing with the work, leaving the latter to claim compensation for breach of contract, Khumalo reports.

The article indicates that Eskom was of the view that the utility and the contractor were both responsible for the delays, arguing that both parties had contributed to the deficiencies.

Framatome, however, blamed Eskom, citing the utility’s role in contributing to delays as including that the facilities required to house the old steam generators, once removed, were not ready for use.

Engineering News in March 2022 reported that Eskom had announced the deferral of a project to replace three steam generators at Koeberg Unit 2 to August 2023 following a review, conducted with Framatome, which indicated that the replacements were unlikely to be completed within the six-month timeframe allocated for the project.

Then COO Jan Oberholzer had indicated that certain facilities, including the completion of the building that would house the radioactive steam generators being removed, were deemed to be not fully in place to ensure that the replacement could be completed to expected quality and schedule parameters, Engineering News reported.

The parties then engaged an adjudicator over the dispute, Khumalo reports, informing that Eskom did not participate in the adjudication, and then challenged the adjudicator’s findings in court.

The court described Eskom’s legal submissions as “contrived and unconvincing” and refused to set aside Ramsden’s award, the article points out.

Engineering News has also reported that Eskom this month announced a delay to the return of Koeberg Unit 1 from another extended maintenance outage; however, the entity insisted that the risk of loadshedding this winter had not increased as a result.