This wanders all over the place, but bear with me.
Per KW Nuclear is more expensive than coal when actual costs are looked at; instead of the it will only cost "R1 billion", vs R3 billion actual its likely to be. Nuclear is less polluting than coal, sure, but the long term safety aspects are horrendous.
Neither are good solutions, although Nuclear is slightly less of a concern than coal is.
Solar and Wind are increasingly becoming no brainers - the price per KW is cheap, and getting cheaper. Wind is already cheaper than coal, and it doesn't have the massive damage to the environment that Coal does, or the pollution.
Polluting the planet by burning coal is going to get excessively more expensive as carbon taxes become more of a reality on a global scale (instead of a cheap scam to sell credits like it is now).
Storage at a grid scale is an issue, but that can be dealt with fairly easily on an economic basis. Heck, Eskom doesn't even need to fund it.
Encourage Solar users to add storage, and allow feed back into the grid. Or mandate generation + storage in the REIPPP bids. This has been done oversea's, and works.
Currently we use Diesel to run Gas Turbines - that provide 2444MW of power. Replacing that with solar and wind would be a good start.
Adding more large scale storage (hydro), and investing in transmission infrastructure is needed, not Nuclear.
We can add another 10GW of renewables into our current system without too much issue. Right now we have a little over 2GW installed, and slightly less generating, as Eskom can't be bothered to build the transmission infrastructure they promised.
They keep talking about "base load". There is no such thing as base load per se.
Base load just refers to how much generating capacity you keep running regardless of whether you need it or not.
All infrastructure has latency (time needed to power up and provide power).
Nuclear power plants can't ramp up and down to cater for need quickly.
They are also horrible at doing that, as much of the cost is in the capital costs, running costs are "relatively" low, so, for the most part, they're run at 100% usage, as financially its stupid to do it any other way.
Coal stations are similar beasts. They also don't ramp up and down very well.
Renewables on the other hand can provide lots of power fairly cheaply, although output can be variable, which is why storage is a must.
Having too much generation in 2 Nuclear power plants leads to all eggs in one basket syndrome, its better to have a mix of smaller distributed generation than large scale monolithic ones.
Its better to have 50 wind farms, rather than 1 monolithic Nuclear plant. Both will supply the same amount of power, and the Wind farms will be more stable, especially when distributed over the country.
The naysayers amongst you will go - but Wind provides 30% of nameplate on average. So? Build more Wind farms, its still far cheaper to overload on Wind than to build Nuclear. Wind and Solar are fairly predictable, as is Hydro.
Excess capacity when the wind is blowing can be sent to storage, or time insensitive applications - water desalination is one biggie that comes to mind.
Thats why we have a mix of generation, and why we have "base load". The inflexibility of existing coal and nuclear stations to ramp up and down to follow demand, together with storage capacity (or lack thereof) is the issue, not "base load".
The solution isn't to hope that it will go away if you ignore it, the solution is to invest in storage and transmission.
Even battery technology on industrial scale is almost there - flow batteries are coming of age finally, and trickling into the market.
Those that will go on about the "daily peak" should realise that thats also an easily solvable solution. The daily peak at 7pm is due to cooking. All Eskom / Government needs to do for that is either subsidise gas installs, or make electricity price sensitive around those points, and people will gladly move to more efficient cooking methods. Same for heating water, Geysers make for a perfect solution in most of the country. Short term thinking together with BEE kickbacks have led to the Geyser subsidy program being cancelled.
Follow the money there and you can see why - it BEEhoves one to see who sells the Diesel and the Coal...
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The Abengoa plant is 280 MW and does have storage 
