The logic behind Koeberg was economic, not ideological. By the 1970s, Cape Town's existing fossil-fuel plants were too small and too expensive to expand. Coal had to be transported thousands of kilometers from the Mpumalanga coalfields, and new coal plants would have required 300-meter-tall chimneys to comply with clean-air regulations. Nuclear power offered a self-contained alternative. Construction began in 1976, using a French Framatome design for two pressurized water reactors. Unit 1 synchronized to the national grid on April 4, 1984; Unit 2 followed on July 25, 1985. Together, the reactors deliver 1,860 megawatts -- each producing 930 megawatts net -- and the station's average annual output reaches 13,668 gigawatt-hours.

Koeberg was attacked before it ever produced a watt of electricity. On December 18, 1982, Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress, bombed the station while it was still under construction. The bomber was Rodney Wilkinson, a former international fencing competitor for South Africa, with intelligence provided by Renfrew Christie. Damage reached an estimated 500 million rand and delayed commissioning by 18 months. Two decades later, in August 2002, twelve Greenpeace activists breached the facility's perimeter, with six scaling the wall to hang an anti-nuclear banner. They were arrested and fined. The episodes bookend the apartheid era's end, illustrating how Koeberg has served as both a strategic target and a symbol of contested energy policy.

The station's most difficult period began in November 2005 with a cascade of failures that exposed the fragility of the Western Cape's power supply. A transmission busbar fault on November 11th cut electricity to most of the region for two hours. Five days later, a fire under a 400-kilovolt line triggered another shutdown. On November 23rd, a routine inspection found a chemical concentration below specification, leading to a controlled reactor shutdown. Then came the Christmas Day bolt disaster. With Unit 1 crippled and Unit 2 brought down for its own refuelling, the Western Cape endured widespread load shedding for months. A replacement rotor had to be shipped from France, and Unit 1 did not return to service until May 2006. Economic losses exceeded 500 million rand and were projected to reach as high as 2 billion.

Perhaps the strangest thing about Koeberg is its buffer zone. Originally built far outside the metropolitan area, urban sprawl has since pushed suburbs close to the facility. Regulations limit housing density to facilitate evacuation, which has had an unintended benefit: the 22-square-kilometer Koeberg Nature Reserve. Open to the public, the reserve hosts more than 210 bird species alongside zebra, eland, and springbok. The reactor's cooling system draws 80 tons of seawater per second from the cold Atlantic, while low- and intermediate-level waste travels 600 kilometers by road to the Vaalputs disposal site in the Kalahari Desert. In 2019, South Africa's Integrated Resource Plan extended Koeberg's operating life through 2044, and in November 2025, the National Energy Regulator granted Unit 2 a license to operate for another 20 years, through 2045. Koeberg was designed to withstand a magnitude 7 earthquake, and post-Fukushima stress tests in 2013 confirmed its seismic robustness at even higher thresholds. Africa's only nuclear plant, it seems, is not going anywhere soon.