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| Nuclear Bongs: Am certain the devil is somewhere in this sordid photo -- I just can't tell where exactly |
Tiny minds chose the biggest, broadest and most visible path that can be found (as it requires the least amount of reasoning). Qualitatively, better minds visualize and create paths where none exist. It is also often the case that little advantage is gained by seeking the path of least resistance . . . for in essence it means begging, stealing or buying the means or right of way from those already on it!
Therefore I ask could there be anything in this day and age as intellectually lethargic, dangerous, wasteful, unnecessary and as marginally beneficial or even counter-productive as embarking on nuclearization to solve a modern state's energy requirements? A state that is as well placed and naturally endowed as one in Africa? Let me put it more simply, can you trust the other mischievous tribes to 'safely' meddle with nuclear technology at your rural village? More so just behind your kitchen?
Even if a spin off industry in nuclear technology is factored in, is it worth the risk? That is, is it worthwhile to attain rogue/dirty status for potatoes and tomatoes in your neighbourhood merely to get the dubious distinction of sitting on the exceedingly costly and dangerous nuggets called nuclear power plants? Really, what 'wisdom' is there in catapulting one's country onto tonnes and tonnes of unglamourous, radioactive nuclear waste?
Nuclear weapons, the inspiration behind nuclear technology, have been around for close to seventy years now, but only two have ever been used in war. All the rest, ten's of thousands, are merely being held for ostentatious purposes by the nuclear powers (something like wearing a grenade necklace) -- making nuclear weapons costly and useless jewelry for rich show-offs and sabre-rattlers. The lethal bling on nuclear pimps and imps.
Having ten or a hundred thousand nuclear warheads does not really matter, using just one will probably herald the end of everything. (For the aggressor, aggressee and by-standers alike; simply because the deterrence fad will have been shattered and a free for all, tit-for-tat and pre-emptive nuclear wars will be the new game in town). It seems to me this technology is falling far short of expectations in the cost-benefit department.
Analyze this: even if you make one of these really scary and super-deadly nuclear weapons no one, (you yourself included) expects that you would ever use it -- yet hundreds of millions of dollars will have to go down the drain just to keep them safe and usable. Never mind that at the end of it all (after a couple of years) you have to throw away some more money to safely destroy them, otherwise they might blow up on you.
On the other hand if you use this nuclear technology to produce electric power (what Kenya is pretending it can afford to do), after only twenty years you will have tonnes of dangerous, radioactive nuclear waste all over the place with no clue whatsoever what to do with it for the next one hundred thousand (100,000) years. Yes, what you will not be told when they put up a nuclear plant is that it is 20 years of affordable electricity but eternity in perpetual cost of monitoring and securing WASTE from possible nuclear 'accidents' and 'terrorists'!
Thinking big has nothing to do with being outrageously clever. When someone like Benny Carson (who wrote an autobiographical book inundated with cliches, the one called Think Big, and which I happen to think as being deplorably shallow, woefully overstated and really a vapid pamphlet full of mushy, sentimental half-baked ideas) tells you to 'think big' what you should understand is that what the good doctor is trying to put across to you is that by the mere fact that you are on this planet you are a problem.
When still financially dependent you are a problem to your mother and father. By eating you are a problem to the national and global food security. By bathing you are a problem to the growing problem of fresh water scarcity. Amongst other things you are a problem to the government that has to educate you to forestall the possibility of you becoming a bigger problem in the future, which I think is a form of blackmail.
Moreover the government has to keep you alive through affordable medical services to make sure you provide for your parents and other retirees in their old age. By cooking with firewood and the fossil fuels to keep you happy monkeys lose their habitats and the Arabs have to live with authoritarian governments. Believe me, we are all one big major problem to everybody and everything, not in the least to ourselves.
Therefore before we even start thinking of solving other people's problems one must first stop compounding his/her own nature of being a problem. Sort yourself mentally, spiritually and objective-wise and start to provide small solutions for yourself and then your village, your grandmother, fellow pedestrians, compatriots, the world, the wildlife etc
That is on an individual basis.
When everybody starts thinking along the lines of solving something this builds up into organized efforts within institutions and finally (not initially) also in the government. A country full of conscious problem solving entities becomes Japan and Germany. A country full of problem generating entities becomes Somalia and Greece. In between these there are countries stuck in the middle, balanced between solving and creating problems which I think is where Kenya and the US are hinging at the moment. (America is such a straggler these days . . . I think the ratio of cool, lazy people compared to workers, nerds and worrywarts has become lopsided and seriously detrimental).
Just the other day (a decade ago) Kenya awoke to the realization that all is not lost and the dream of becoming an industrialized state was still achievable. That is, the nation started thinking big again. Despite the unimaginable problems that came with globalization and liberalization Kenyan enterprises showed remarkable ability to not only survive, but also showed startling tenacity in terms of adaptation and innovation.
High five to the informal Jua Kali sector? (This term translates into 'hot sun' and there is no direct equivalent phrase in English, it refers to informal occupations that lie between being a small entrepreneur and a shady affluent hustler. More importantly it strongly signifies working tirelessly to put food on the table).
It must be remembered that few people thought there was hope, since in the span of two decades (in which the country was ruled with a man who walked at all times with a crude weapon, a knobkerrie) the country had stagnated and all sectors of the economy were in a desperate state of dereliction. Therefore it was with resignation that many people watched as the government (at the behest of the donors) went out to make matters worse by openning up the country to external competition. This as Kenya's battered industrial sector and economy in general lay prostrate and was ill prepared for globalization.
By and by the government noticed that despite it's best efforts it hadn't killed all enterprise; loe and behold some businesses even dared to thrive! That is how a befuddled public sector started listenning to and asking the private sector what it could do to help in creating jobs. Unanimously the private enterprises replied -- give us roads and cheap electricity . . . and the country will become a middle income country in no more than three decades. It seemed incredible, the part about becoming an industrialized middle-income country, so all sorts of surveys were done and the assertions turned out to have some firm basis.
After a series of processes between the governement and private sector a blueprint for the country began to emerge, and later on it was branded Vision 2030. To reach even the drunkards, idlers and pastoralists, Vision 2030 was formalized into a national policy for conscious development towards industrialization in all spheres in the country. (Perhaps this is the cause of some problems, people could be taking the thing too literally i.e. to live the Vision 2030 if you drink alcohol then drink in industrial scales if you idle then idle industrially etc). Currently there is a government body charged with specifically steering national efforts towards this goal. They have been expeditiously putting elaborate detail into the plan besides phasing and monitoring the implementation of the numerous discrete targets.
Now, what kept recurring over and over again in all the projected major phases of the plan from transport, to water supply and creation of industries was the problem of making available cheap energy. It is no more insightful than common sense that without large quantities of affordable energy industrialization in this competitive world can't go very far. It was also obvious all the trees in the remaining thickets and forests could not provide sufficient firewood for industrial development.
So the institutional problem solvers, formal big thinkers, started probing into this perennial and irksome problem given the increased interest and seriousness from the government. This was aided by many factors, not in the least increased public awareness and interest in energy matters by riotous mobs. The energy crisis was no longer a problem for a small urban elite. The country now very much depended on reliable power provision; anger and frustration from the masses was pushing everyone concerned to act and act quickly.
Conveniently, around this time the old bunch of venal managers and deadwood technocrats who sat at the then Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC), the parastatal that was tasked with both the generation and distribution of electric power were either retired or fired.
KPLC was broken into two separate entities and privatized. These were an independent power generating company (KenGen) and an independent power distribution company (KPLC now Kenya Power). Besides that in the last three years a powerful energy regulatory body the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) and a separate entity solely concerned with drilling geothermal wells the Geothermal Development Company (GDC) have come into existence.
The energy sector with regard to electricity has been transformed and is rapidly becoming one mean and efficient sector. All these bodies have been aggressively modernizing, stalled projects have been jump started, new mega projects are in the works and improved delivery of services has become the main focus.
Not so much can be said about reforms in the cartel throttled petroleum distribution industry in Kenya. The performance of the concerned parastatals is desperately wanting, these are the Kenya Pipeline Company (manages the pipeline and petroleum storage facilities), the government owned refinery (the only one in the country) and the National Oil Corporation (NOCK) a national distributor.
At some point the government and concerned parties became over-excited with the concept of thinking big; they desperately groped in the dark and started to attack with puny intellectual darts the energy problem. It was not long before they stumbled onto a big fat road. Someone it seems went alarmingly dim and through his/her efforts the country was exhorted onto the pretentious path of exploring nuclear energy -- it was a wonderfully eerie solution.
Abruptly, a commission under an IT specialist (and a nuclear quack), Shem Ochuodho, popped into existence and haphazardly started to run around picking potential sites for a nuclear power plant. Not much is known what informed their decisions only that they told us we need one big horrible nuclear power plant to solve all our energy problems.
The horror was not lessened by the fact that the proposed sites happened to either be around the Al Shaabab and pirate infested waters of the Indian Ocean and the inland fresh water lake, Lake Victoria. A lake which Kenya posses only a tiny portion (about 10%); what would Tanzania and Uganda make of this flagrant adventurism with a very critical international resource?
Ochuodho and his commission either did not know or did not care, for they never told us. In fact the only logic I can patch together is that Ochuodho had ingeniously connected the one acre slum-island of Migingo to his nuclear shenanigans. If we were not going to get Migingo and Ugingo in Lake Victoria back then we were going to spook off the Ugandans with nuclear waste.
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| dude Ochuodho |
In the 70s Uganda gave Kenya a couple of hundred square kilometers to be rid of the pesky, ungovernable Pokots. Now they are goading an embarrassed Kenyan government into a fight that has taken monumental jingoist proportions for one acre of a patchy rock! Crazy Ugandans. Perhaps they should make it worthwhile by stating that they want us out altogether from Lake Victoria. Then the mess will be really ugly and President Museveni will finally have his chance (one that he has been plainly itching for) to try out the 'weak' Kenyans in what will amount to a callous sibling war}.
To demonstrate how unnecessary this nuclear power plant was or is, let us explore what the renewable and clean sources of energy could provide in comparison. The proposed nuclear plant was to have been a modest one and it was expected that it would generate about 22,000 Megawatts when complete with maximum installed capacity. Currently Kenya produces about 1,520 Megawatts against the peak demand of about 1,300 Megawatts. This demand is expected to rise to a staggering 16,905 Megawatts by 2031.
At first glance it might seem we really do need a horrible nuclear power plant. And fast. It has taken us close to a hundred years to get to that 1,520 Megawatts how else other than building a nuclear plant can we increase this figure fourteen-fold to match the 22,000 MW from a nuclear plant (a multiple of 14!) in just two decades? Make nuclear Ochuodho the president? Are things really that bad? Fortunately they are not.
Now, Germany a country which is merely a fraction the size of Kenya, currently produces 8% of its electricity from wind power alone. The amount? 28,000 Megawatts -- from just wind! Imagine that, they are producing 18 times all that we are doing with the hydro plants, the thermal generation the geothermal and all the rest with only wind! {Okay, windpower is heavily subsidized in Germany -- the 28 000 MW as of now (2012) is produced by over 23,000 wind plants -- but the technology is getting cheaper and more efficient by the day}
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| The German Wind Fans in the North Sea |
If push comes to shove, we can make all the deserts in Northern Kenya a giant windfarm and make so much power that we would be spoilt for choice on where to export it to or even what to do with it. Every pastoralist can at last have a giant fan hovering his head wherever he goes, life will be a lot cooler in Northern Kenya. The small 300 Megawatts wind power project in Turkana (expected to be the biggest wind power project in Africa) to me seems in comparison to the events in Germany to be a semi-philanthrophic project we have been thrown to realize how silly Africans have been all along, in destroying forests for firewood.
Kenya is already running like a possessed madman towards wind power, there is another 150 Megawatts project at Ngong that will be undertaken by the giant American multinational General Electric (GE). (Add this 450 MW from wind to the 400 MW from the new geothermal well at Menengai and Kenya will have an extra 850 MW within the next four years. Clean renewable energy is proving to be a bounty and one hell of a scalable solution for Kenya).
Geothermal alone is conservatively thought to have exploitable capacity of between 7,000 and 10,000 Megawatts, perhaps even more no one knows for sure and this is taken as the bare minimum. Solar energy is the tricky one but if roofs in Kenya are replaced with modern super-efficient Solar panels. If they are professionally installed and high potential, efficient storage systems are used to store up the energy it would virtually provide unlimited capacity. Theoretically all homes can be powered by Solar energy and thus most of the power reserved for industry. By having as much as 30% percent of domestic users on Solar, a couple of hundred, even a thousand Megawatts can be easily factored off from the projected 16,905 Megawatts that we would need by 2031.
Add to this power from our local hydro power plants (we have a maximum potential of about 9,000 MW of Large Hydroelectric Potential of which only a measly 13% has been exploited by all those Kindarumas, Masingas, Turkwells etc in Kenya). Then the proposed plants that will be powered by burning waste, coal powered plants (we have coal) and then you are left with the question, why in the world would anyone want to jump onto the nuclear bandwagon in Kenya? We have barely explored the cleaner forms of energy available to us, the wind, solar geothermal, hydro before we even jump onto the less cleaner thermal sources powered by coal and burning garbage.
But this is basically only looking at Kenya and the solutions that can be found within our borders. They are limited yet more than sufficient to meet our energy needs. Outside our borders there are even far much bigger potential solutions if things are tackled from a regional perspective. Big, clean, renewable energy solutions.
Ethiopia our northern neighbour has more than 15,000 Megawatts of hydro-electric potential. We are destined to be one of the biggest customers. The over 3,300 MW project on the Omo River is near completion and we have signed a contract for 400 MW already. Promises in good faith for more in the happy prosperous future in East Africa.
There is an ongoing giant hydro power project on the Congo River, which has been on the papers for decades and which has been finally pushed onto the implementation phase by an acute power shortage in South Africa. Eskom, the South African power giant is leading and footing most of the bill for the 40,000 Megawatts Grand Inga Dam. The dam and hydro plant will be the biggest in the world, twice as big as the 3 Gorges Dams in China.
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| The proposed Grand Inga Dam on the Congo River would make Hoover Dam (above) seem like a miniature toy |
Most of this power will be going down south to South Africa and some to Egypt and Nigeria. East Africa is out on the cold. Damn those spiteful South Africans. But there is a lot of other sources around particularly Zambia from where Kenya will be linked via a grid through Tanzania in two or three years, initially 300 MW will be landing in Nairobi from Zambia. In fact Africa has a potential of nearly 100,000 Megawatts of which only 20% so far has been exploited. And this is only hydropower!! We are so ludicrously endowed that it is absolutely tragic how we conduct ourselves to further entrench poverty and misery.
The irony is that the whole of Africa has an installed capacity of about 21,000 Megawatts. Germany alone currently produces and uses 20 times this, at nearly 400,000 Megawatts installed capacity. It is shameful. Even tiny little broke Spain has more installed capacity than the whole continent of Africa. Shameful I say.
In the Great Lakes region there are so many gorges, rivers, rapids etc that exploiting all these under Small Hydroelectric Potential projects we can never be in want of energy for our respective development programs. Unfortunately this greatly depends on the restoration and preservation of the forests. No Congo forest, no mighty Congo River or the Zambezi . . . and the forests are vanishing fast.
All in all, thinking about nuclearization at this point is retrogressive and might not be helpful at all. Cleaner forms of energy have the added advantage of making us even more appreciative, connected and conscious of the need to protect our environment, as the enormous and disappearing potential of the Congo River above shows us. The big users of nuclear power at the moment are trapped by their dependency on nuclear power. They are as terrified and horrified by the effects and risks of nuclear energy as everybody else, and those who are able to do so are bailing out. Germany will completely have phased out nuclear power in twenty years.
There is no such thing as safe nuclear energy as was aptly demonstrated by the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in Japan. Add to that Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island. If we can't 'afford' such disasters why should we build a nuclear power plant?
M. Wycliff,
Nairobi.
{7th March 2012: Corrigendum -- (Really you need to read this)
There was an error in the figures with regard to the electricity that would be coming to Kenya from Zambia via Tanzania. It is actually 200 MW not 300 MW. Nonetheless in the future far much more is expected to be channeled northwards once more capacity is developed in Zambia and Tanzania; both of which have substantial but as of yet untapped hydroelectric potential.
The figures regarding Germany have been more controversial and therefore I have had to revisit the facts and here is how I arrived at them. First the estimates are based on 2009 figures. In 2009 Germany had 25,777 MW installed capacity from wind power which was 6.7% of it's total installed capacity. This means Germany had 384,731 MW installed capacity in 2009. Hence I rounded it off to 400,000 MW a dastard thing for sticklers for detail, but it was a rough comparison not an exactitude which is plain from what I wrote.
Now the controversy would rest there if it wasn't also pointed out that the 21,000 MW that I stated as the total amount of installed capacity in Africa was only from hydropower and infact I hadn't factored in other power sources. Which is utterly correct. Now in Africa Kenya is the leader in geothermal production accounting for over 80% of all installed geothermal capacity. In 2009 this contributed merely 3% to the installed capacity in Kenya (which was no more than 1,500 in 2009). That makes just 45 MW. Wind and solar were negligible in terms of installed capacity.
That only leaves thermal power i.e. diesel powered generators. It is substantial and my error easily comes to the fore. North Africa alone has a total installed capacity of about 22,000 MW installed capacity about 90% is generated from thermal sources i.e. diesel powered generators. If we add the rest of the regions in Africa particularly Nigeria, South Africa and the oil producing countries the total amount generated from thermal sources would be considerable. So Africa has more than the 21,000 MW of installed capacity I had put up. Since I have no reliable statistics as a basis I would hazard a guess of about 45,000-60,000 MW as the total installed capacity in Africa. Taking the higher figure Germany would have an installed capacity of about 6 times that of Africa.
The rest of the figures are okay, but I will leave these errors as they are, as a reminder never to be so flippant with figures again.}
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