The world was a very different place on March 11th, 2011, than it was on April 26th, 1986. While it was the detection of a radioactive plume at the Forsmark Nuclear Plant in Uppsala, Sweden, that alerted the world to what had gone wrong at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the flooding of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant was livestreamed. Nothing could hide what looked like a mushroom cloud as it towered over Unit4.
The images of senior citizens, being wheeled out of the ICU still catheterized, transposed with scenes of destruction from the Tsunami, completely drowned out reality, such that to this day some people erroniously think the explosion killed them and not the Tsunami.
Despite zero casualties, Germany embarked on ‘Energiewende’, triggering a literal Dark Age no one in living memory had experienced since electricity was discovered. Subsidies to replace vegetation with solar panels were so ample that, for the first time in the history of mankind, a commodity like electricity had a negative price.
By the time Ralph Nader was being challenged to a public “hazard” eating contest to back up his views on radiation risk, the Sierra Club was fully operational. Nader, of course, refused to eat as much caffeine as Bobby Cohen was willing to eat plutonium, but that did not stop the emergence of radioactive monsters like Godzilla. When the stuck valve at Three Mile Island (TMI) in Pennsylvania triggered a Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA), the public chose to ignore the experts and instead went with scenes depicted in the recently released “China Syndrome.”
It is impossible for a reactor to melt through the Earth’s core and emerge on the other side of the world, but recently unearthed internal memos from the 1970s show why such a benign accident that killed no one, and not the Banqiao Dam collapse that killed millions, triggered so much panic.
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The Sierra Club members, in their air-conditioned mansions, are too Ivy League educated to be unaware of the correlation between access to cheap, safe, clean electricity and prosperity. They are, however, disciples of Thomas Malthus, the eugenicist whose ideas inspired early conservationism. His pupils are the people who saw no irony in grabbing and cordoning off vast swathes of land to “protect the animals.” Malthusians, “conservationists are the same people who literally hunted the dodo into extinction in a single generation in Madagascar.
Like a game of musical chairs where the music occasionally stops and everyone changes seats, yet it is always the orchestra playing, the Malthusian admixture of climate alarmism & anti-nuclear rhetoric has reared its ugly head once again in Siaya.
Global Nuclear Energy
The appointment of a fact-finding team of experts led by the competent professional who was at the helm of KEBS, coordinated the use of nuclear techniques for industrial non-destructive testing, deserves applause as an example of what discourse before such a project should involve. The accompanying amplification of debunked hoary myths, however, is more a work of low-budget science fiction than it is of competent journalism.
There are 440 nuclear reactors in the world, 4 of which are under construction in Egypt, which, like the UAE, has 4 reactors at its Barakah Nuclear Power plant and is a literal desert with more solar power potential than East Africa combined. Rwanda will be constructing Dual Fluid’s “Gen V” reactor near Kigali. France has 56 nuclear reactors, some of which are located on rivers. Doornfontein is 2 km from the nearest reactor at the Koeberg Nuclear Power Plant, but Cape Town, about 20 minutes away, receives more tourists than all the Lake Basin Counties combined. Uganda wants to build a couple of Korean APR1400s at Bunyende. Ethiopia would’ve used LAPPSET to transport the Russian VVERs to inland locations. However, the coal power plant meant to power the deep-sea port in Lamu was sabotaged.
The Sierra Club has shares in companies like Microsoft, which reopened the TMI Nuclear Power Plant to power data centres. TMI is the same place where Ralph Nader kept declaring how plutonium was the most dangerous substance, only stopping after Bobby Cohen told him to put caffeine where his mouth was. It is truly difficult to teach someone something new if their paycheck depends on their refusal to understand.
Also Read: KenGen Joins the Silicon Savanah’s Nuclear Relay Team
Kenya might not have a strong safety culture yet, but the Late Raila Odinga was well aware that, despite the financial woes, planes are not falling from the sky in Kenya every day. Baba the engineer did a cost-benefit analysis of how, in a year, Kenya loses 100 times more people to grizzly road accidents than the fewer than 24 emergency workers who lost their lives at Chernobyl in 1986, and the 19 who have succumbed since then. Baba knew that 14 years of an anti-nuclear phase-out made 2 in every 3 companies flee Germany, the country in which he was trained, citing the hideous energy prices.
After an illustrious career as an engineer, the most impactful work of infrastructure in the country and beyond, Baba’s final instructions were crystal clear.
“Build that thing in my own backyard.”
The least we can do is ensure that all discourse, for or against the project, is grounded in fact, not cartoons.
The writer is also a Director at NuPEA, a nuclear engineer, and was listed in this year’s “Africa Energy and Power Elites” by ESI Africa.
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