Renewable energy sources are attractive but in a sense, powerless. Maybe, someday we'll all live in houses with photovoltaic roof tiles but in the real world, a 1GW of solar plant will require 60 square miles of solar panels. When the demand increases, you can fire up more coal, but how will you cause the wind to blow and the sun to shine 24x7? The earth is already so disabled...
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The dream that failed
-The Economist Nuclear power will not go away, but its role may never be more than marginal, says Oliver Morton THE LIGHTS ARE not going off all over Japan, but the Nuclear power plants are. Of the 54 reactors in those plants, with a combined capacity of 47.5 gigawatts (GW, a thousand megawatts), only two are operating today. A good dozen are unlikely ever to reopen: six at Fukushima Dai-ichi, which suffered...
More »Stop harassing community, state’s bishops tell PM
-The Times of India The Tamil Nadu Bishop Council on Thursday flayed the Centre for targeting the Christian community for the protests against the Kudankulam Nuclear power Project and requested Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to stop the "harassment". The bishops are pained by the witch hunt, said Archbishop A M Chinnappa. Speaking to reporters here, the council authorities, including Chinnappa and Tuticorin Archbishop Yvon Ambroise, said no one could stop them from...
More »The dream that failed
-The Economist A year after Fukushima, the future for Nuclear power is not bright—for reasons of cost as much as safety THE enormous power tucked away in the atomic nucleus, the chemist Frederick Soddy rhapsodised in 1908, could “transform a desert continent, thaw the frozen poles, and make the whole world one smiling Garden of Eden.” Militarily, that power has threatened the opposite, with its ability to make deserts out of gardens...
More »How Fukushima is relevant to Kudankulam by TN Srinivasan, TS Gopi Rethinaraj and Surya Sethi
The disaster in Japan revealed many risks that were earlier unknown; it is important to assess the risks in India in a transparent manner and explain which are worth taking. The nuclear plant accident at Fukushima, Japan, in March 2011 exemplifies the prescient remark of nuclear reactor pioneer, the late Alvin Weinberg, that “a nuclear accident somewhere is a nuclear accident everywhere.” After Fukushima, many countries initiated a reconsideration of the...
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