There weren't 2 million deaths from Chernobyl. Crackpots keep spewing out junk science studies that are deeply flawed, and people who have a pre-existing bias to accept every bad thing said about nuclear power keep latching on to such studies (just like the one the previous post mentioned about the 14,000 deaths from Fukushima) with no skepticism at all. They have plenty of skepticism for anything good said about nuclear power. Anything that contradicts their bias.
Seriously, the only "study" which concludes 2 million deaths from Chernobyl has basically been retracted by the New York Academy of Sciences, who published a translation of it in the U.S.
On that page, they have a link to a review of the "study" by a scientist that NYAS decided was important to link to. Here's some enlightening quotes from that review:
"In the opinion of this reviewer, the authors unfortunately did not appropriately analyze the content of the Russian-language publications, for example, to separate them into those that contain scientific evidence and those based on hasty impressions and ignorant conclusions."
"The value of this review is not zero, but negative, as its bias is obvious only to specialists, while inexperienced readers may well be put into deep error."
"Yablokov's assessment for the mortality from Chernobyl fallout of about one million (!) before 2004 (Subsection 7.7) puts this book in a range of rather science fiction than science. It is obvious that if such a mass death of people occurred, it would not have remained unnoticed, even more because it is not so much about the population of the three countries, than about the rest of Europe and even countries outside Europe (!)."
Don't forget cellulosic ethanol
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There's been some talk over the past decade about cellulosic ethanol. I believe there's a couple demo plants being constructed a few places in the country. From my understanding, you could just as easily use cellulose from hemp as from switchgrass or trees.
So, you could take the seed and make bio-diesel (and, perhaps, lubricating oils - not sure if the hemp seed oil would be any good for lubrication or not?) for diesel engines, and cellulosic ethanol from the rest of the plant (which accounts for what, like 99% of the plant mass)?
Because of that last bit, I suspect you would get far, far more ethanol from the plant, per acre, than bio-diesel from the seeds?
Maybe ethanol, but not corn ethanol
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We've seen that getting ethanol from corn kernels is not a good way to go about storing solar energy.
We've yet to see whether cellulosic ethanol plants work out as hoped, or not. If CE plants are able to cost effectively generate ethanol from cellulose-rich plants (like switchgrass, industrial hemp, etc), then there might be a future for ethanol as a biofuel, but not corn ethanol.
As a plant, it just takes too much energy to grow the corn, transport it, and you get too little energy back.
This might sound crass. . . while I do feel bad for those workers, and their friends and family, a couple of deaths in a large industrial accident would be no worse than almost any other heavy industry. Does that mean we should shut down all industry?
My OP was a reply to the claim that there is a "Fukushima Death Zone", and is really more focused on the perceived threat to public health, not a couple workers at the plant.
As for those workers, however, there is a good possibility that they will be fine. Radiation exposure at those levels can increase the risk of cancer, but is by no means a guarantee they will get cancer. Jimmy Carter got a large exposure to radiation as a young naval officer, it doesn't appear to have shortened his life - he's lived to a ripe old age, it seems to em.
Of course, not everyone will be so lucky in the same situation as Jimmy, but the point is, 2 people getting a large exposure which may or may not give them cancer in 10 or 20 years doesn't seem an unreasonable risk for such a hugely beneficial industry as electricity generation.
Yes, I'm sure. That Mangano-Sherman "Study" has been roundly criticized as using extremely flawed methods and cherry picking data to come to a pre-determined conclusion.
Mutated vegetables? Please, that kind of thing has been going on forever. You'll find wierd looking produce in any garden or field of appreciable size. If you can show that the rates of mutation are much higher, statistically, than *normal*, that's one thing, but having a smart-ass blog with a few mutated fruits and veggies doesn't prove anything.
You could almost certainly even find babies from Japan with Birth Defects that have been born since Fukushima, but again, humans have been being born with Birth Defects for as long as their have been humans. That doesn't mean Fukushima caused those defects.
Nice troll. Attack a meaningless aesthetic issue (someone's knickname on/. - btw, my name isn't Biff, that's just part of a knickname) instead of something meaningful, then put words in someone's mouth that have nothing to do with what they said.
There are some "hotspots" where people should definitely not live till it's cleaned up. The immediate evacuation of the zone was certainly the right thing to do, until the fallout had fallen out, and measurements could be made of actual contamination. At this point, there are many parts of the zone where people can return and live safely, because the increase in radiation in those areas is just too low to be a hazard.
The more contaminated parts of the zone could be cleaned up; that might be happening, I'm not sure, but when you have a few small hotspots, you can clean those up, and leave the areas with very low contamination alone.
Outside of nuclear power, there's very few industries where you can pretty easily save pretty much everyone's life by doing a simple, orderly evacuation for a few weeks, then let people return to their homes. People somehow view nuclear accidents as worse than other Industrial Accidents, but I don't. Industrial Accidents are part of life (a part we try to take as much precaution as possible to avoid, but they will happen from time to time).
It's just that Nuclear Accidents, if you look at it rationally, are mostly much more benign than any other type of industrial accident.
I'd happily go live in the evacuation zone, except, I have no interest in living in Japan. My job, family, and life are here in the US.
So, the cesium is in the concrete. We need a way to block the radiation. Lead is usually a pretty good material for blocking radiation.
Oh... Lead Paint!
You're welcome.
John Hodgeman would be proud.
On a more serious note, does this actually matter? Kids don't stay at home 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so any estimates of the increase in exposure should, I hope, include the fact that kids are going to be gone something like 1/4 - 1/2 of the time they live there?
We live in a constant bath of low-level radiation. I'm not too worried about a slight increase in that background level of radiation.
Life evolved to live in varying levels of low-level radiation and survive. I'd have no fear of living there, or having my kids live there (I don't currently have kids, but I have no fear of low levels of radiation).
You're right if only a small percentage of the grid in a particular area is made up of cabling such as discussed in this article, or aluminum clad steel, etc.
But, if all of the power and phone cabling, etc gets replaced, and *every time* the thieves steal cable, it's almost worthless, after a few weeks or months you'd see the theft rate drop dramatically as they'll have learned that there's nothing worth stealing anymore.
I think, perhaps, here, the challenge would be finding a rapid, cheap way to write/read the data, but one idea that occured to me, instead of ionizing atoms is, what if you could find a simple molecule which could be changed to another simple molecule by the addition/reduction of one atom.
Something like Carbon Monoxide = 0, Carbon Dioxide = 1. Seems like you could potentially get a lot of data density with something like that?
I just disagree. I don't at all see that it makes the most sense to measure the speed of anything in bits, pages, or sectors. I mean, sure, at a low level that's what's happening, but you can convert all of those to bytes. a page might be 1024b, or a 1024kb, or 512kb. Whatever, at the end of the day, everything can be expressed as bytes.
Yeah, but you seem to be missing my point. Why it communications (networks, modems) still measured in bits when everything else has moved on to 8-bit bytes as the basic unit of measure? We needn't be slaves to the past.
Without Shannon's work, we'd never be where we are today, but that doesn't mean we can't adjust terminology as it becomes inconvenient/confusing to continue to use the old way of saying the same thing.
Perhaps bandwidth should never have been rated in bits per second in the first place? I blame my CompSci/IT predecessors (and marketing people, no doubt). I think they wanted a bigger number, and 300 bits per second sounded more impressive for that modem they designed than 37.5 bytes per second.
But, since the byte is really the smallest meaningful unit of data is a byte (yes, a single bit can represent a boolean value, but you can't transmit a single bit; in the simple case of a modem, you would generally transmit a byte; with modern networks, you transmit a packet, and I believe the smallest amount of data you can encapsulate in a packet is also one byte, isn't it?), data speeds should really be measured in *bytes* per second.
Also, most people think of data in terms of bytes - they buy hard drives in bytes (well, gigabytes and terrabytes), RAM, USB flash drives, sd cards for their phones, cameras, and other consumer electronics. In fact, bandwidth is the only place we still talk about bits instead of bytes, and that's ridiculous. It needs to change and the bits per second standard needs to die.
Actually, the more important question is capability. I mean, I don't really care if it takes 3 drones to do the job of 1 manned aircraft if they can do the same job, and the drones cost less than 1/3 the cost of a manned aircraft. If you have cheap, "disposable" drones, you don't care if they get destroyed by the enemy - no pilot, no casualties.
The bigger concern is capture - like what happened in Iran. What would be particularly scary is if an enemy can take control of the drone, and either launch weapons at us or our allies, or at a civilian population - could you imagine if a Syria or Iran managed to take control of a U.S. drone and use it to attack protesters? Or a mosque, or a school? They could claim it was the U.S. doing the attack, and further incite hostilities amongst their people and cement their hold on power.
. . . that lots of great writers will never get the Nobel Prize (or Great Scientists, etc). They can only give one per year (in each category), they can't award it to the dead. Which means, that some years (probably most) you'll have a number of nominees who really are "Nobel-material", but who get disqualified in favor of whoever gets chosen. That's the nature of arbitrary, number-limited awards.
Sure, you can put a solar panel on your roof, but you can't power a country that way. Seriously, you can't. You can power your house that way, part of the time, not even all the time.
To try to power a country with solar, you'd need some industrialized solar farms, where you cover almost every square meter of land with reflectors or PV cells.
As for Windmills, there's a lot of people complaining about stress-related health effects from the low frequency noise they emit. So I would say, no, you can't build a house within a mile of a windmill - sure, some people aren't bothered at all by the noise, but other people are bothered a lot. Also, with windmills, again, you typically want a lot of them in a good location.
Granted, as I said, the major difference is, typically these industrial wind/solar facilities would be built in places there aren't any houses *anyway*, so who cares, right? But the point is, it is land use which is dedicated for very long periods of time, which precludes other agricultural or residential uses (ok, wind farms you can do some agriculture underneath, because the turbines are spaced pretty well apart; not so much with solar).
You're right - when a solar or wind generator gets *built* it renders the entire area uninhabitable, and continues to be so for as long as the wind farm / solar farm is there.
Granted, there is a difference - land which has been purposed to that, as opposed to an emergency evacuation of people who've already built/bought homes in the area and can't sell them.
However, let's look at Fukushima - in reality, much of the area has such low contamination that people could safely live there - the radioactivity is lower than the background radiation in some other parts of the world where people have been living for hundreds or thousands of years.
It's mostly a political problem - the politicians don't want to risk being labelled as putting people at risk if they say that people can move back, if the people don't believe the politico's and feel they're lieing.
So, we have land where people *could* live, but people are afraid of something they shouldn't be, and so either won't or aren't allowed, to move back.
I'll finish with this: everyone always throws back, to such a comment, "Why don't you go live there". I wouldn't have any problem living there from a safety standpoint, but I live in the U.S., my job, friends, family, my life are all here. I'm not going to uproot myself and move to a strange land with a language I don't know just to prove a point to silly people.
I'm a fan of Thorium too, but lets be realistic - Kenya isn't likely to be pioneering new technology. They probably won't be building it all (well, maybe some local labor might get hired, and some local contractors used for some things). Most likely, what's going to happen, is they hire a nuclear firm from another country, like France, Russia, China, India, S. Korea, The US, Canada, etc to come build a reactor for them.
If they are looking to build a new reactor in the next 20 years, then I suspect the most "exotic" plant they might build may be a high-temperature gas cooled pebble bed reactor. China took the German design, and have continued R&D on it, and are about to build an approx. 200MW small modular reactor based on the pebble bed tech. If that works out for China, then I expect China to start heavily marketing those to developing nations - China can build them cheaper than anyone, the small size/cost means they would be within the reach and needs of most developing nations (which might not want to buy a Super-Size reactor like an APR-1000 (which is actually like 1400 or 1600 MW production, not 1000).
The Pebble Bed reactor, if the Chinese manage to work out the bugs that caused the German test reactor to be shutdown, is supposed to be inherently safe - the pebbles can't melt-down, and they're not physically able to reach a temperature where they catch on fire.
That does still leave nuclear waste as an issue, but. . . I suspect that China, and perhaps eventually other countries, will be willing to take the "waste" off their hand for them, to be recycled (well, ok, right now it's difficult to recycle the pebbles, but perhaps someone will figure out a way to make that work) and produce lots more energy from that "waste".
I would think a vital part of that model would be how much a country has to import, whether what you are importing is natural resources (fuel, raw materials), or finished products. If you import more than you export, you'll probably end up broke, no?
I mean, theoretically, if a country had sufficient resources, they could be completely self-sustaining with no exports at all (though very few countries have access to every resource they need).
Anyhow, I do agree with you generally - exports are good, to help you pay for your imports. With nuclear power, Kenya might be in a good position to export power, as well as maybe increase whatever manufacturing they might have, or maybe they have natural resources they can export more than they already are, if they had access to more energy.
That's funny, I find I need electricity after nightfall in order to see.
Then you go to bed and turn off the lights.
You're probably right that during "prime time" (dusk till about 11pm) that there is continued power demand, I don't know for sure, but even though you are turning on your lights, you also have to remember that a lot of businesses are closing for the day, and turn out most of their lights, turn off electric-hungry equipment (computer, printing presses, manufacturing equipment, copiers, etc etc).
Light bulbs tend to be a very low-power consumption source - especially as newer light bulbs get more efficient (although, I imagine people in developing nations are probably still using a lot of the old, cheap incandescent bulbs.
I think even a 100 watt bulb takes much less energy than a washing machine, commercial refrigerator, or stove/oven (ok, the bulb might run a lot longer so in the end, might come close, if you only use the stove for 10 minutes).
Anyhow, all the sources I've seen indicate that power consumption tends to peak during the day, and decrease at night. In the U.S., part of that is air conditioning, but even without a lot of AC, from what I understand, demand still peaks in the day, just not as high as when the AC units are going full blast.
More to the point, I believe the thinking is that having a large supply of reliable, and relatively affordable power may help strongly stimulate the Kenyan economy, thus making it so that a lot more people can afford the electricity.
We know that energy is used to make stuff, transport it, and preserve it. It follows that access to affordable energy is required for any economy to grow. Too often our discussions about energy revolve around "creature comforts", but this is about more important things than air conditioning, televisions, and computers.
I don't really know for sure, but I suspect that Kenya and other developing nations might want newer, cheaper, safer, more efficient technologies, such as the small modular reactors which should start coming on the market in 10 or 20 years.
There's a quote from Al Gore to the effect that the problem with nuclear power is that it only comes in one size - extra large. That is how our current nuclear plants are built: $3Bn - $10Bn (the range reflects that construction costs are different in different countries - China is building reactors for about $3Bn, and I bet the chinese might end up building reactors in Africa) reactors that produce 1GW or more.
That reactor from Japan might be 800MW or 1GW, and might be "too big" for Kenya's current and near-future needs. They might prefer a 150MW small modular reactor which costs a fraction of the price, and is based on safer technology (like High Temp Gas-Cooled Pebble Bed reactors, which China has been doing R&D work on: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/china-210-mwe-pebble-bed-reactor-starts.html ).
I don't understand why this always has to be an either/or argument. Personally, I'm of the opinion that solar, wind, and nuclear all have a role to play in providing energy.
If Kenya had a small modular nuclear reactor or two, they could provide baseload power to their own country, and possibly even have enough surplus to export some electricity to neighbors (bringing net revenue to the country).
Solar and/or Wind can provide energy, but they don't really provide any kind of guarantee that you'll have electricity all the time - the Sun doesn't always shine. Yes, you can do things like molten salts to store some of the Sun's energy, but there's a limit to how much you can store. You might have enough storage to last you through the night, but will the salt still be hot enough in the morning, if it's cloudy?
Solar is a good peaking power source - the Sun's energy tends to peak around the same hours that human demand for electricity peaks (because people are doing business, and running washers, dryers, and stoves, which they don't tend to do after dark). Nuclear is a good baseload power source.
People pointing out that solar can come online faster are correct, so that's partly why I favor a combination of both nuclear and solar/wind for both developing nations, and developed nations - get the solar built quickly and start benefiting from it, while also beginning the process of building some reactors.
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There weren't 2 million deaths from Chernobyl. Crackpots keep spewing out junk science studies that are deeply flawed, and people who have a pre-existing bias to accept every bad thing said about nuclear power keep latching on to such studies (just like the one the previous post mentioned about the 14,000 deaths from Fukushima) with no skepticism at all. They have plenty of skepticism for anything good said about nuclear power. Anything that contradicts their bias.
Seriously, the only "study" which concludes 2 million deaths from Chernobyl has basically been retracted by the New York Academy of Sciences, who published a translation of it in the U.S.
http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Annals/Detail.aspx?cid=f3f3bd16-51ba-4d7b-a086-753f44b3bfc1
On that page, they have a link to a review of the "study" by a scientist that NYAS decided was important to link to. Here's some enlightening quotes from that review:
"In the opinion of this reviewer, the authors unfortunately did not appropriately analyze the
content of the Russian-language publications, for example, to separate them into those that
contain scientific evidence and those based on hasty impressions and ignorant
conclusions."
"The value of this review is not zero, but negative, as its bias is obvious only to specialists,
while inexperienced readers may well be put into deep error."
"Yablokov's
assessment for the mortality from Chernobyl fallout of about one million (!) before 2004
(Subsection 7.7) puts this book in a range of rather science fiction than science. It is obvious
that if such a mass death of people occurred, it would not have remained unnoticed, even
more because it is not so much about the population of the three countries, than about the rest
of Europe and even countries outside Europe (!)."
There's been some talk over the past decade about cellulosic ethanol. I believe there's a couple demo plants being constructed a few places in the country. From my understanding, you could just as easily use cellulose from hemp as from switchgrass or trees.
So, you could take the seed and make bio-diesel (and, perhaps, lubricating oils - not sure if the hemp seed oil would be any good for lubrication or not?) for diesel engines, and cellulosic ethanol from the rest of the plant (which accounts for what, like 99% of the plant mass)?
Because of that last bit, I suspect you would get far, far more ethanol from the plant, per acre, than bio-diesel from the seeds?
We've seen that getting ethanol from corn kernels is not a good way to go about storing solar energy.
We've yet to see whether cellulosic ethanol plants work out as hoped, or not. If CE plants are able to cost effectively generate ethanol from cellulose-rich plants (like switchgrass, industrial hemp, etc), then there might be a future for ethanol as a biofuel, but not corn ethanol.
As a plant, it just takes too much energy to grow the corn, transport it, and you get too little energy back.
This might sound crass. . . while I do feel bad for those workers, and their friends and family, a couple of deaths in a large industrial accident would be no worse than almost any other heavy industry. Does that mean we should shut down all industry?
My OP was a reply to the claim that there is a "Fukushima Death Zone", and is really more focused on the perceived threat to public health, not a couple workers at the plant.
As for those workers, however, there is a good possibility that they will be fine. Radiation exposure at those levels can increase the risk of cancer, but is by no means a guarantee they will get cancer. Jimmy Carter got a large exposure to radiation as a young naval officer, it doesn't appear to have shortened his life - he's lived to a ripe old age, it seems to em.
Of course, not everyone will be so lucky in the same situation as Jimmy, but the point is, 2 people getting a large exposure which may or may not give them cancer in 10 or 20 years doesn't seem an unreasonable risk for such a hugely beneficial industry as electricity generation.
Yes, I'm sure. That Mangano-Sherman "Study" has been roundly criticized as using extremely flawed methods and cherry picking data to come to a pre-determined conclusion.
Don't believe me? Try Scientific American.
Mutated vegetables? Please, that kind of thing has been going on forever. You'll find wierd looking produce in any garden or field of appreciable size. If you can show that the rates of mutation are much higher, statistically, than *normal*, that's one thing, but having a smart-ass blog with a few mutated fruits and veggies doesn't prove anything.
You could almost certainly even find babies from Japan with Birth Defects that have been born since Fukushima, but again, humans have been being born with Birth Defects for as long as their have been humans. That doesn't mean Fukushima caused those defects.
Nice troll. Attack a meaningless aesthetic issue (someone's knickname on /. - btw, my name isn't Biff, that's just part of a knickname) instead of something meaningful, then put words in someone's mouth that have nothing to do with what they said.
There are some "hotspots" where people should definitely not live till it's cleaned up. The immediate evacuation of the zone was certainly the right thing to do, until the fallout had fallen out, and measurements could be made of actual contamination. At this point, there are many parts of the zone where people can return and live safely, because the increase in radiation in those areas is just too low to be a hazard.
The more contaminated parts of the zone could be cleaned up; that might be happening, I'm not sure, but when you have a few small hotspots, you can clean those up, and leave the areas with very low contamination alone.
Outside of nuclear power, there's very few industries where you can pretty easily save pretty much everyone's life by doing a simple, orderly evacuation for a few weeks, then let people return to their homes. People somehow view nuclear accidents as worse than other Industrial Accidents, but I don't. Industrial Accidents are part of life (a part we try to take as much precaution as possible to avoid, but they will happen from time to time).
It's just that Nuclear Accidents, if you look at it rationally, are mostly much more benign than any other type of industrial accident.
I'd happily go live in the evacuation zone, except, I have no interest in living in Japan. My job, family, and life are here in the US.
Wait, why is it the Fukushima Death Zone? Because of the people that died there when they drowned or were crushed by the tsunami?
Nobody has died from the radiation released by Fukushima, and likely no one will.
So, the cesium is in the concrete. We need a way to block the radiation. Lead is usually a pretty good material for blocking radiation.
Oh... Lead Paint!
You're welcome.
John Hodgeman would be proud.
On a more serious note, does this actually matter? Kids don't stay at home 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so any estimates of the increase in exposure should, I hope, include the fact that kids are going to be gone something like 1/4 - 1/2 of the time they live there?
We live in a constant bath of low-level radiation. I'm not too worried about a slight increase in that background level of radiation.
Life evolved to live in varying levels of low-level radiation and survive. I'd have no fear of living there, or having my kids live there (I don't currently have kids, but I have no fear of low levels of radiation).
You're right if only a small percentage of the grid in a particular area is made up of cabling such as discussed in this article, or aluminum clad steel, etc.
But, if all of the power and phone cabling, etc gets replaced, and *every time* the thieves steal cable, it's almost worthless, after a few weeks or months you'd see the theft rate drop dramatically as they'll have learned that there's nothing worth stealing anymore.
Yeah, but it'll take 24 thousand years just to get rid of *1/2* the thieves. . .
I think, perhaps, here, the challenge would be finding a rapid, cheap way to write/read the data, but one idea that occured to me, instead of ionizing atoms is, what if you could find a simple molecule which could be changed to another simple molecule by the addition/reduction of one atom.
Something like Carbon Monoxide = 0, Carbon Dioxide = 1. Seems like you could potentially get a lot of data density with something like that?
I just disagree. I don't at all see that it makes the most sense to measure the speed of anything in bits, pages, or sectors. I mean, sure, at a low level that's what's happening, but you can convert all of those to bytes. a page might be 1024b, or a 1024kb, or 512kb. Whatever, at the end of the day, everything can be expressed as bytes.
Yeah, but you seem to be missing my point. Why it communications (networks, modems) still measured in bits when everything else has moved on to 8-bit bytes as the basic unit of measure? We needn't be slaves to the past.
Without Shannon's work, we'd never be where we are today, but that doesn't mean we can't adjust terminology as it becomes inconvenient/confusing to continue to use the old way of saying the same thing.
Wow, does anyone still use 7-bit bytes? I thought we left that behind in the 80's?
Perhaps bandwidth should never have been rated in bits per second in the first place? I blame my CompSci/IT predecessors (and marketing people, no doubt). I think they wanted a bigger number, and 300 bits per second sounded more impressive for that modem they designed than 37.5 bytes per second.
But, since the byte is really the smallest meaningful unit of data is a byte (yes, a single bit can represent a boolean value, but you can't transmit a single bit; in the simple case of a modem, you would generally transmit a byte; with modern networks, you transmit a packet, and I believe the smallest amount of data you can encapsulate in a packet is also one byte, isn't it?), data speeds should really be measured in *bytes* per second.
Also, most people think of data in terms of bytes - they buy hard drives in bytes (well, gigabytes and terrabytes), RAM, USB flash drives, sd cards for their phones, cameras, and other consumer electronics. In fact, bandwidth is the only place we still talk about bits instead of bytes, and that's ridiculous. It needs to change and the bits per second standard needs to die.
Actually, the more important question is capability. I mean, I don't really care if it takes 3 drones to do the job of 1 manned aircraft if they can do the same job, and the drones cost less than 1/3 the cost of a manned aircraft. If you have cheap, "disposable" drones, you don't care if they get destroyed by the enemy - no pilot, no casualties.
The bigger concern is capture - like what happened in Iran. What would be particularly scary is if an enemy can take control of the drone, and either launch weapons at us or our allies, or at a civilian population - could you imagine if a Syria or Iran managed to take control of a U.S. drone and use it to attack protesters? Or a mosque, or a school? They could claim it was the U.S. doing the attack, and further incite hostilities amongst their people and cement their hold on power.
. . . that lots of great writers will never get the Nobel Prize (or Great Scientists, etc). They can only give one per year (in each category), they can't award it to the dead. Which means, that some years (probably most) you'll have a number of nominees who really are "Nobel-material", but who get disqualified in favor of whoever gets chosen. That's the nature of arbitrary, number-limited awards.
Sure, you can put a solar panel on your roof, but you can't power a country that way. Seriously, you can't. You can power your house that way, part of the time, not even all the time.
To try to power a country with solar, you'd need some industrialized solar farms, where you cover almost every square meter of land with reflectors or PV cells.
As for Windmills, there's a lot of people complaining about stress-related health effects from the low frequency noise they emit. So I would say, no, you can't build a house within a mile of a windmill - sure, some people aren't bothered at all by the noise, but other people are bothered a lot. Also, with windmills, again, you typically want a lot of them in a good location.
Granted, as I said, the major difference is, typically these industrial wind/solar facilities would be built in places there aren't any houses *anyway*, so who cares, right? But the point is, it is land use which is dedicated for very long periods of time, which precludes other agricultural or residential uses (ok, wind farms you can do some agriculture underneath, because the turbines are spaced pretty well apart; not so much with solar).
You're right - when a solar or wind generator gets *built* it renders the entire area uninhabitable, and continues to be so for as long as the wind farm / solar farm is there.
Granted, there is a difference - land which has been purposed to that, as opposed to an emergency evacuation of people who've already built/bought homes in the area and can't sell them.
However, let's look at Fukushima - in reality, much of the area has such low contamination that people could safely live there - the radioactivity is lower than the background radiation in some other parts of the world where people have been living for hundreds or thousands of years.
It's mostly a political problem - the politicians don't want to risk being labelled as putting people at risk if they say that people can move back, if the people don't believe the politico's and feel they're lieing.
So, we have land where people *could* live, but people are afraid of something they shouldn't be, and so either won't or aren't allowed, to move back.
I'll finish with this: everyone always throws back, to such a comment, "Why don't you go live there". I wouldn't have any problem living there from a safety standpoint, but I live in the U.S., my job, friends, family, my life are all here. I'm not going to uproot myself and move to a strange land with a language I don't know just to prove a point to silly people.
I'm a fan of Thorium too, but lets be realistic - Kenya isn't likely to be pioneering new technology. They probably won't be building it all (well, maybe some local labor might get hired, and some local contractors used for some things). Most likely, what's going to happen, is they hire a nuclear firm from another country, like France, Russia, China, India, S. Korea, The US, Canada, etc to come build a reactor for them.
If they are looking to build a new reactor in the next 20 years, then I suspect the most "exotic" plant they might build may be a high-temperature gas cooled pebble bed reactor. China took the German design, and have continued R&D on it, and are about to build an approx. 200MW small modular reactor based on the pebble bed tech. If that works out for China, then I expect China to start heavily marketing those to developing nations - China can build them cheaper than anyone, the small size/cost means they would be within the reach and needs of most developing nations (which might not want to buy a Super-Size reactor like an APR-1000 (which is actually like 1400 or 1600 MW production, not 1000).
The Pebble Bed reactor, if the Chinese manage to work out the bugs that caused the German test reactor to be shutdown, is supposed to be inherently safe - the pebbles can't melt-down, and they're not physically able to reach a temperature where they catch on fire.
That does still leave nuclear waste as an issue, but. . . I suspect that China, and perhaps eventually other countries, will be willing to take the "waste" off their hand for them, to be recycled (well, ok, right now it's difficult to recycle the pebbles, but perhaps someone will figure out a way to make that work) and produce lots more energy from that "waste".
I would think a vital part of that model would be how much a country has to import, whether what you are importing is natural resources (fuel, raw materials), or finished products. If you import more than you export, you'll probably end up broke, no?
I mean, theoretically, if a country had sufficient resources, they could be completely self-sustaining with no exports at all (though very few countries have access to every resource they need).
Anyhow, I do agree with you generally - exports are good, to help you pay for your imports. With nuclear power, Kenya might be in a good position to export power, as well as maybe increase whatever manufacturing they might have, or maybe they have natural resources they can export more than they already are, if they had access to more energy.
That's funny, I find I need electricity after nightfall in order to see.
Then you go to bed and turn off the lights.
You're probably right that during "prime time" (dusk till about 11pm) that there is continued power demand, I don't know for sure, but even though you are turning on your lights, you also have to remember that a lot of businesses are closing for the day, and turn out most of their lights, turn off electric-hungry equipment (computer, printing presses, manufacturing equipment, copiers, etc etc).
Light bulbs tend to be a very low-power consumption source - especially as newer light bulbs get more efficient (although, I imagine people in developing nations are probably still using a lot of the old, cheap incandescent bulbs.
I think even a 100 watt bulb takes much less energy than a washing machine, commercial refrigerator, or stove/oven (ok, the bulb might run a lot longer so in the end, might come close, if you only use the stove for 10 minutes).
Anyhow, all the sources I've seen indicate that power consumption tends to peak during the day, and decrease at night. In the U.S., part of that is air conditioning, but even without a lot of AC, from what I understand, demand still peaks in the day, just not as high as when the AC units are going full blast.
More to the point, I believe the thinking is that having a large supply of reliable, and relatively affordable power may help strongly stimulate the Kenyan economy, thus making it so that a lot more people can afford the electricity.
We know that energy is used to make stuff, transport it, and preserve it. It follows that access to affordable energy is required for any economy to grow. Too often our discussions about energy revolve around "creature comforts", but this is about more important things than air conditioning, televisions, and computers.
I don't really know for sure, but I suspect that Kenya and other developing nations might want newer, cheaper, safer, more efficient technologies, such as the small modular reactors which should start coming on the market in 10 or 20 years.
There's a quote from Al Gore to the effect that the problem with nuclear power is that it only comes in one size - extra large. That is how our current nuclear plants are built: $3Bn - $10Bn (the range reflects that construction costs are different in different countries - China is building reactors for about $3Bn, and I bet the chinese might end up building reactors in Africa) reactors that produce 1GW or more.
That reactor from Japan might be 800MW or 1GW, and might be "too big" for Kenya's current and near-future needs. They might prefer a 150MW small modular reactor which costs a fraction of the price, and is based on safer technology (like High Temp Gas-Cooled Pebble Bed reactors, which China has been doing R&D work on: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/china-210-mwe-pebble-bed-reactor-starts.html ).
I don't understand why this always has to be an either/or argument. Personally, I'm of the opinion that solar, wind, and nuclear all have a role to play in providing energy.
If Kenya had a small modular nuclear reactor or two, they could provide baseload power to their own country, and possibly even have enough surplus to export some electricity to neighbors (bringing net revenue to the country).
Solar and/or Wind can provide energy, but they don't really provide any kind of guarantee that you'll have electricity all the time - the Sun doesn't always shine. Yes, you can do things like molten salts to store some of the Sun's energy, but there's a limit to how much you can store. You might have enough storage to last you through the night, but will the salt still be hot enough in the morning, if it's cloudy?
Solar is a good peaking power source - the Sun's energy tends to peak around the same hours that human demand for electricity peaks (because people are doing business, and running washers, dryers, and stoves, which they don't tend to do after dark). Nuclear is a good baseload power source.
People pointing out that solar can come online faster are correct, so that's partly why I favor a combination of both nuclear and solar/wind for both developing nations, and developed nations - get the solar built quickly and start benefiting from it, while also beginning the process of building some reactors.