W32.Y2026: PELINDABA

we are starting this week’s issue off with the song “Johannesburg,” by Africa Express, because this week we will be taking a lengthy trip through South Africa that involves uranium, medical isotopes, cool architecture, uranium enrichment (& secret weapons tests??), several corporate shells, one aging-but-still-relevant research reactor, & the only state known to have developed its own nuclear weapons arsenal & then voluntarily dismantled the entire thing.

we are taking this history-rich adventure because ASP Isotopes—$ASPI ( ▼ 5.59% )—keeps pulling old South African isotope work into an increasingly strange public company.

the company is selling a future built from pieces of the history below.

Pelindaba's name comes from phelile indaba, usually translated as "the discussion is finished."

nearby Valindaba, where South Africa built its secret plant for enriching uranium, morphed the saying into something closer to "we do not talk about this at all."

before Pelindaba became a nuclear site, it was a farm belonging to Gustav Preller, an Afrikaner historian & mythmaker whose circle included the poet, naturalist, lawyer, journalist, & morphine addict Eugène Marais.

Marais studied termite societies & baboon behavior, wrote "Winternag," & self-ended his journey here on Earth on Preller's farm in 1936.

the rondavels built there for writers & artists still stand inside the nuclear security perimeter.

then came Brian Sandrock's concrete buildings, a U.S.-built vessel for a reactor based on an Oak Ridge design, highly enriched uranium supplied under the United States' Atoms for Peace program, & SAFARI-1's first criticality at 18:33 on March 18, 1965.

during loading at an American workshop, a cable strap snapped, & the reactor core box hit the floor hard enough to bend a beam tube & delay the project by a year.

the machine arrived in South Africa wounded. it ran anyway.

SAFARI-1 produces neutron flux without generating electricity. those neutrons can irradiate materials, transmute elements, & produce isotopes.

the reactor began as a civil research machine built through American cooperation, became entangled with an apartheid nuclear complex that pursued weapons, survived the end of American fuel exports, & now produces medical isotopes for cancer & cardiac diagnosis.

Sandrock's concrete, artistic building continues to house a country’s isotope dreams.

the country around the reactor changed governments, but the reactor has stayed.

South Africa publicly announced an indigenous project to enrich uranium in 1970.

gun-type research received approval in 1971, a limited deterrent program followed in 1974, & work began on test shafts in the Kalahari Desert.

by the end of 1976, the United States had banned further exports of SAFARI-1 fuel. in 1977, the resulting supply constraint pushed the reactor down to 5 MW.

withdrawal exposed a dependency that South Africa was already trying to escape, intensified a program already underway, & forced the reactor & the surrounding technical system to improvise.

SAFARI-1 dropped to 5 MW & ran during office hours on alternating weeks to preserve fuel.

local engineers built components, transport containers, fuel capability, & hot-cell infrastructure under sanctions & isolation.

by 1981 or 1982, locally enriched fuel had arrived.

Valindaba's Y-Plant used South Africa's Helikon process, which forced uranium hexafluoride mixed with hydrogen through aerodynamic separation stages. it consumed absurd amounts of electricity & lacked the delicate spinning machinery of a conventional centrifuge.

but it worked.

the same technical base could supply reactor fuel & weapons-grade uranium, although capacity constraints meant that those purposes competed for material.

in August 1977, Soviet intelligence found South Africa's secret Kalahari nuclear test site & told Jimmy Carter. American imagery confirmed the preparations.

Carter's handwritten instruction allowed Pretoria room to lie if lying prevented a test: “if they have to lie about what their plans were, let them do so—Let them save face.”

South Africa dismantled parts of the visible test site infrastructure to conceal it while the weapons program continued.

later evidence points to a cold component test, with no intended nuclear yield. a real shaft & a real weapons program still existed beneath the distinction.

then, on September 22, 1979, a Vela satellite detected a double flash over the South Atlantic. White House science advisers preferred a non-nuclear explanation. the CIA put the probability of a nuclear test above 90 percent.

a prominent later theory describes an Israeli test conducted with South African logistical help, though the public record remains incomplete, & important files remain classified.

South Africa eventually completed six nuclear devices assembled around a gun-type core & an incomplete seventh.

in November 1989, the government decided to terminate the program. F.W. de Klerk ordered the devices dismantled on February 26, 1990.

South Africa acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty the following year, & the IAEA later found no indication that the declared inventory was incomplete or that the weapons program had survived dismantlement.

materials returned to safeguards, facilities were stripped or converted, & specialist knowledge stayed inside people's heads, old operating records, buildings, machines, & institutions.

after south africa dismantled the devices, joined the npt, & opened its declared inventory to the iaea, it turned safari-1 much more aggressively toward commercial medical-isotope production.

in 1995, a national review considered closing SAFARI-1.

its staff proposed a commercial rescue through production of medical isotopes & received one year to cover 30% of the reactor's operating costs. isotope sales covered 66% within that year & more than 90% by the early 2010s.

NTP's own history says the highly enriched uranium used to fuel SAFARI-1 & make isotope target plates came from the same enrichment processes used for South Africa's weapons.

the reactor later converted to low-enriched uranium fuel & targets, shipping its first commercial batch of entirely LEU-produced molybdenum-99 to the United States in December 2010.

the conversion did real work & gave the institution a nicer story to tell about itself.

sanctions forced domestic invention because apartheid had made isolation deserved, & isotope production did real good without improving the weapons program that supplied some of its material & knowledge.

NTP turned reactor output into a business.

a narrower & less completely documented commercial bridge carried part of the isotope work into Klydon.

Klydon began developing its aerodynamic separation process in the early 2000s.

Hendrik Strydom, who co-founded Klydon & carries decades of isotope-enrichment experience, later became ASP Isotopes' chief technical officer, though the precise personnel & technology bridge to the older Helikon program remains incompletely documented.

ASPI was incorporated in 2021 & acquired or licensed Klydon plants, assets, & specific intellectual property through transactions from 2021 to 2023.

but ASPI stopped resembling a pure-play isotope company a while ago.

the current structure holds stable isotope facilities working toward commercial-scale production, operating radiopharmacies, nuclear fuel work, Renergen's LNG operations & planned helium output, a proposed listed Noble Africa affiliate, preclinical Alpa Theranostics candidates, & a controlled listed vehicle pointed at Kazakh tungsten & rare-earth assets.

a timely August 4 shareholder letter lays everything out.

according to management:

cold commissioning is preoperational equipment & system testing without nuclear feed material in the enrichment process.

$KAZR ( ▼ 0.47% ) is the furthest corporate branch. QLE bought another company’s (Skyline Builders) supervoting shares in 2025 & gained 79.14% voting power. then Skyline signed a business combination agreement with Cove Kaz in April 2026 and changed its ticker to the current one. the company holds interests in Kazakh tungsten, rare-earth, & lithium assets. Cove Kaz says it's advancing its tungsten project & will pitch it at an investor conference this month. (if their feasibility study goes well, it’ll help persuade the US DFC plus other US institutional investors & partners to give them money.)

QLE's present control of Skyline is real. the ownership & voting structure of the combined KAZR, the merger itself, & the project money remain >0% weird.

in summary, ASPI is a parent company listed in America, built from a documented piece of South African isotope work, with a subsidiary working back at Pelindaba, a proposed Kazakh critical minerals affiliate, South African helium & LNG, radiopharmacies, & preclinical therapeutic candidates.

it has started accreting everything that might become strategically annoying to source.

several of its largest promised businesses still exist mainly as construction plans, regulatory steps, or management forecasts.

back at Pelindaba…

SAFARI-1's current licence expires in 2030, but Necsa has begun the formal process for continued operation beyond that date. the old reactor's future depends on a detailed safety case.

an IAEA ageing review in February praised management commitment & early regulator engagement while recommending stronger resource planning, systematic screening of ageing systems, & formal programs for obsolescence & equipment qualification.

South Africa is also pursuing a 20–30 MW Multi-Purpose Research Reactor with expanded isotope production, beam lines, materials testing, & training facilities.

feasibility & an internal stage gate are complete. Necsa said in March 2026 that it was preparing the procurement tender & targeting operation in 2032 or 2033, though the public record still provides no firm commissioning date, total approved budget, or awarded main contractor.

but the next reactor needs to come online before the old one stops!

last week we said a dump had begun.

markets responded by recovering enough to convince some, but not all, that “we’re so back.” which is good. if everyone is delusionally optimistic—as they were, before Leopold’s “liquidation”—things can get bad, fast. like they sort of did!

the psychological+technical recovery was prompter & more forceful than one might’ve expected.

we’re not out of the weeds, but we are cautiously positive for August now.

a Nasdaq ATH with sustained breadth would make the post-dump repair more convincing. a failed breakout would give us pause.

heading into midterms and the end of the year, things could get WILD.

our base case for 2026 is WILD & WACKY, ROLLERCOASTER MARKETS. stability is a pause for breath. the norm is confusion and speedrunning the stages of grief in under a week.

in the long run, things still seem generally rosy. if you’re a long-term investor, it’s fine to just keep hibernating and/or investing in indices.

the market is a money jungle. we say that with affection (probably?).

record closes, yen intervention, a semiconductor relapse, all inside one week!

we remain cautiously positive but fully prepared to be proven wrong at a moment’s notice.

we’re being more liberal with our watchlist. it now includes stuff we’ve already owned or want to own, and it also includes anything we may be somewhat interested in at the time for various reasons. once we have more time to dig into this stuff, the watchlist may shrink. or it may grow!

see you next time.

AURUM NOSTRUM NON EST AURUM VULGI 🪱