The announcement on 22 September of an inter-governmental agreement between South Africa and Russia on strategic partnership and co-operation in nuclear energy and industry has been greeted with bemusement by South Africans. The agreement was signed by South African energy minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson and the director-general of Russia’s state atomic energy corporation Rosatom, Sergey Kirienko, at the 58th general conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.“The agreement lays the foundation for the large-scale nuclear power plant (NPP) procurement and development programme of South Africa based on the construction in RSA of new nuclear power plants with Russian VVER reactors with total installed capacity of up to 9.6GW (up to 8 NPP units),” said a joint statement published on the Department of Energy and Rosatom websites.