A disconcerting article in the Washington Post, Sunday, March 9, 2008, raises the alarm about polysilicon manufacturers cutting corners and polluting the environment that their product is designed to save.
The article visits a poor farming village that rejoiced upon hearing that a factory would be built in their neighbourhood, enabling them to finally catch up with the economic boom; the prospect of incomes rising from $200 a year to $200 a month must have been very tantalizing.
Alas, once the factory was up and running, it appears that the haste to produce exceeded the capacity or will to deal with a nasty by-product - silicon tetrachloride. According to the report, this by-product is very toxic and has led to crop failure and rising health complaints. Some concerned villagers have raised the issue with the local environmental authorities but claim to have been ignored.
I hope that this incident is an isolated one, and that the Chinese government will take quick action to ensure that manufacturers handle their waste responsibly. In developed nations, the processes are closely monitored, and producers have to recycle or scrub the waste, even though the result is that their price per ton of pure silicon is unable to compete with the Chinese prices.
China has been at the forefront of an enviable green revolution in the developing world. By sheer determination and hard work, the country has now attained a supreme position in the global PV market. Former competitors now place orders from China and are proud to be associated with Chines partners.
China can maintain the ambitious economic trajectory while also posing as a leader in responsible manufacturing. The green revolution cannot afford to be the target of environmental sceptics who, though they cannot tell us where we will be when the oil runs out, never ignore a chance to shoot down any new alternatives.
It is a great ambition for a country that has yet to develop a decent national electricity grid. But Kenya’s PM and former Minister of Energy is an ambitious man. It is not the first time that the subject has been broached, and it emerges that Kenya has been courting western partners for more than a year:
1 billion USD translates into 73-75 billion Kenya shillings, and it is not unusual in Kenya that the initial costs of a project are drastically revised upwards after inception. In this case, Kenya’s own lack of knowledge on the subject would make such a project a blank cheque for the experts.
Common people like me have a hard time visualising a landscape dotted with high-security nuclear facilites, white plumes of steam rising out of cooling towers, and gleaming pylons joined by wires buzzing with power. I have not even set eyes on such a facility here in Europe!
Why should France pick Kenya, of all other possible candidates, to be the recipient of this “assistance”?
Some digging reveals that this is part of a French-Britain (Brown- Sarkozy) pact to bring nuclear energy to the world.
It surely cannot be because we have exhausted all our options. I’m certain that it is not because our grid is complete and we have already connected every citizen but our generating capacity is unable to feed the needs of our population.
Nuclear power is not a joke. Those who experienced Chernobyl know that the risks of plant failure are very high. In fact, such is the scare that Chernobyl caused, that some countries in Western Europe are busy decommissioning nuclear power plants, except…..France.
Frequently, we see harrowing pictures of the charred remains of Kenyans who swarm around an overturned petrol tanker, collecting the volatile stuff, until somone lights a cigarette or shorts the battery, incinerating all in the vicinity in a exploding fireball. Would a people so poorly informed about the dangers of petroleum understand the danger inherent in barrels of radiocative waste?
I hope that France is not serious about setting up anything nuclear in Kenya, because they have not solved their own nuclear riddles adequately to be exporting their technology to a third-world country.
According to Greenpeace, there are tons of nuclear waste in France waiting to cause a disaster inside France, either through human error or as a result of sabotage by terrorists. Greenpeace goes on to question France’s claims of success in the nuclear field.
Greenpeace’s stance is not the only one. There are also people in the opposite camp who fully support the French nuclear programme and cite very favourable figures when compared to other sources.
One ommission in the pro-nuclear camp is the biggest question of nuclear energy: what do we do with the waste?
Solutions mentioned in pro-nuclear publications, including Jerome’s blog, are never definitive. They revolve around ‘parking’ or ‘hiding’ the waste until a day in the future when it can be processed. This is Greenpeace’s major gripe and it also negates whatever positive CO2 benefits nuclear energy boasts.
What if the French, under the guise of helping Kenya, exported their waste into our country?
Any well-informed person does not have to wrack their memory to recall the Mururoa Atoll. Despite opposition from her allies and inhabitants of the Polynesian Islands, the French went ahead and detonated nuclear devices repeatedly in the area.
Before we all get excited by our PM’s latest foreign conquest and the promises he brought with him, we should ask ourselves whether the nuclear option is viable in Kenya, and whether we have examined all other vailable options.
Are we really ready for the nuclear option and could we live with the scrutiny and distrust surrounding the Iranian nuclear programme? Could Kenya be able to provide the security and safeguards that are necessary in these days of terrorist threats and rogue nations seeking illicit supplies of weapons-grade nuclear material.
I hope that nobody takes our PM seriously in his flirt with plutonium, and he ought to be solving our problems using means that are easily within reach, such as the abundant sunshine!
Dry weather in Kenya has not only affected the energy sector, but has also wrought untold misery on those whose livelihoods depend on good rains and moderate sunshine:
Nomadic pastoralists abhor the destruction of livestock.
In traditional society, a man’s wealth and stature was measured by the size of his herd. Today, cattle still occupy an important position in social transactions. The value of a wife equals the number of cattle turned over to the in-laws for her hand in marriage. Thus, cattle are the glue that holds families and clans together. To the owners, the surrender of their herds must have felt like a spear right through the rib-cage!
It is inevitable that questions arise at the sight of the last-minute buy-off of so many beasts, most of which were too weak to live and too unhealthy to be slaughtered..
Firstly, the government was aware that the climate had not been kind to the farmer or the herdsman. In June, there were herds of cattle grazing on the poor pickings next to busy highways, meaning that the usual grazing grounds were depleted.
Roaring business selling water in Nairobi.
Why was there nothing done then to relieve the cattle-holders? Then, the animals still had some meat on their bones and could have fetched a better price.
Secondly, the nomadic-pastoralist lifestyle and the eternal battles with the elements has been discussed in text-books and World Bank studies as long as I can recall. In most cases, the conclusion is that the free range lands for nomadic activities are virtually non-existent.
Collective ownership of land has gradually given way to titled, individual ownership.
Among the pastoralist communities, those who caught on to the benefits of private ownership now boast hundreds of hectares of fenced-off ranches. Those left landless have to trespass and engage in running battles with custodians of national parks, reserved for the tourist and the wild beasts.
"Illegal" Grazing In Nairobi National Park
It is clearly no longer realistic to have communities that depend wholly on herds of cattle if they do not have access to vast common land.
Now, about the sun. Left to its devices in 2008-2009, it has been a merciless enemy. It dries up the few common watering holes there are for the nomads, turns the savannah brown and burns it into a barren, black carpet. A superstitious being could easily believe that they have been cursed by their ancestors, their lands turned into a hell where their beasts perish in the dust…..
Need this be so, these cycles of bountiful lushness and stretches of misery in dust-bowls?
The same sun, if we have foresight and a willingness to invest and pre-empt disaster, could have saved those beasts and also given the herdsmen a more secure way of life. How?
In the Australian outback, which is just as harsh as the savannah, the use of photovoltaic panels to run water pumps is quite common. The water that they suck out of the earth (wells, rivers and lakes) is used to water livestock or to irrigate crops. With a raised water storage facility present to hold the water and deliver it by gravity to the troughs crops, no expensive storage batteries are needed.
The initial expenditure for such a system may seem daunting, but the benefits are evident and enduring.
If the Kenyan government is keen to avoid a repeat of the Kenya Meat Commission’s twelfth-hour “rescue” of dying beasts, it must help the Maasai, Samburu, Rendille, Boran and other pastoralist communities secure water supplies during drier periods. There is water in the ground, and the scrubland can be permanently green, if there is a will.
For their part, the nomadic-pastoralists may have to adjust to the economic realities of today’s Kenya. The community can remain cohesive if it collectively develops and manages a common pump-fed watering and irrigation facility. United by the blessed sun!
There are not many free range lands, and the movement of large herds over hundreds of kilometres is no longer viable. Perhaps it is time too to look at the quality of the herd instead of the quantity,…. for a proud father to accept one fat bull and 3 fertile cows for his daughter, instead of twenty scrawny specimens destined for the KMC graveyard.
