Last evening there was a power outage at about 6.00PM, thinking this is probably just within the area, we just lightly ignored it and went on with our own business. When I logged onto twitter from my mobile to catchup with my tweets, I was taken by surprised as how my fellow tweeps from all over the country were complaining about not having any power.

Thinking back on an argument held with some of the tweeps I follow, more specifically @jellyfish78 & @coldtusker in regards to getting nuclear power, question I still put across is, are we capable of handling nuclear power?

It took KPLC a good 4+ Hours to restore power to the country, with nuclear power, you need to be alot faster than that if things started falling apart. I would like @jellyfish78 on this, his support for going nuclear is almost extremist. Not that I do not support him at all, just that I have far to many questions on the ability of running it:-

• Expertise – Who will handle the nuclear power plant?
• Security – How would nuclear material be handled? How would the location be secured?
• Water – Nuclear turbines require alot of water. To give you an idea, take for example At Sellafield, which is no longer producing electricity, a maximum of 18,184.4 m³ a day (over 4 million gallons) and 6,637,306 m³ a year (figures from the Environment Agency) of fresh water from Wast Water is still abstracted to use on site for various processes. Take note FRESH WATER. We cannot provide half of Kenya’s population with fresh water.
• Radioactive waste – Where will the radio active waste be disposed and how will the costs of this be met? Part of the process of radioactive waste “After about 5 years in a cooling pond, the spent fuel is radioactively and thermally cool enough to handle, and it can be moved to dry storage casks or reprocessed.”

At the moment the government has stated they cannot even get a new switchboard for the national grid that would cost around 3billion kenya shillings ($40million), so how will they even maintain nuclear?

By the way I have not even been able to access http://www.kplc.co.ke/ for further info on last nights happenings.

Please share your views and comments.