Westinghouse Electric Company says it has appointed Professor Itumeleng Mosala as the company's regional vice president in South Africa. Professor Mosala takes over for Dr. Rita Bowser, who is now serving as vice president, United Kingdom AP1000 Projects for Westinghouse.
Professor Mosala will work to maintain and build relationships with key stakeholders in the South African nuclear industry. He brings extensive government, political and academic experience to Westinghouse in South Africa. He studied in South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States.
In his personal capacity, Professor Mosala has been in the forefront of transformation processes in South Africa both through government and industry. He served as the Research Supervisor for the Black Economic Empowerment Commission together with Cyril Ramaphosa, among others. He is the founder Board Member of the Freedom Park Trust established by the Cabinet of South Africa in 2001 and former Director-General of the Department of Arts and Culture.
Westinghouse is well known in the global nuclear industry for its nuclear technology as well as its successful localization programmes in various countries - the latest ones being Korea and China.
Although being active in South Africa's nuclear industry (mainly through support to Koeberg Nuclear Power Station) since the 1990s, Westinghouse's main localization drive started in 2007 when it acquired IST Nuclear (Pty) Ltd., now operating as Westinghouse Electric South Africa (Pty) Ltd.
In preparing Westinghouse Electric South Africa for future local AP1000 engineering support, a substantial number of AP1000 engineering completion tasks are being done by South African engineers. During the past year more than 40,000 engineering hours of such work has been executed by the team in South Africa. There are currently 50 South African engineers allocated to AP1000 and other international projects - they are applying their skills in the areas of process engineering, computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, structural and piping engineering as well as control and instrumentation related engineering.
As a next step in preparing the South African supply chain for the planned nuclear new build program, Westinghouse is evaluating local suppliers and manufacturers with potential of these suppliers to join its global supply chain. In this regard, Westinghouse signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the South African heavy manufacturing company DCD Dorbyl (Pty) Ltd. in February 2010. Under this agreement, Westinghouse is working with DCD Dorbyl to identify specific areas of supply and to develop DCD Dorbyl's quality and related systems to comply with the relevant standard for supplying components to AP1000 globally.
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