-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...
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PM sets record straight; here's food for thought, Mr. Gadkari by Smita Gupta
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh can be devastatingly polite: when Bharatiya Janata Party president Nitin Gadkari, who has a commercial interest in agriculture, wrote him a doomsday letter on the dire state of agriculture under UPA rule, Dr. Singh took a month to reply, but when he did, it was to tell the BJP president in excruciating detail about the rise in agricultural production during his tenure in office, which compares...
More »Is nuclear power the demon it's made out to be? by Susan Davis
The water used to cool the Rawatbhata reactor was pumped back into Chambal river. Before and during my pregnancy, I drank the tap water supplied to us from the same river. I didn't go even so far as to boil this water. Nothing went wrong. Kudankulam has been in the news and how! Little did I imagine in 2002 that this remote area of southern Tamil Nadu where there are more...
More »Let's face it... the alternatives are attractive, but not feasible by Ipshit Tarun
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...
More »‘India's Maoists are misusing Mao's name'-Ananth Krishnan
Mao Zedong's only living grandson has suggested that the ideas of China's Great Helmsman were being misused by groups such as the Maoists in India, who were invoking his image to wage violence against the state. The greater relevance of Mao's philosophy in today's world was “to help maintain peace, stability and development” and create a more equitable global order, he said, suggesting that the former Chairman's ideas of “people's war”...
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