Leaves caution behind

This 11MW solar thermal power station in Seville, Spain, is being expanded to 300MW of capacity. Pic: Flickr – Chausinho

A solar thermal plant being developed in Seville, Spain, will produce 300MW of power at a projected cost of E1,200bn, or R11,6 billion. That’s an installed cost of R4-billion per 100MW. A prototype 11MW plant is already up and running; it’s almost a thing of beauty – take a look here or here. (The rays you see in the atmosphere have not been added to the photograph – they’re not illustrated but real, created by the intense illumination of the solar array hitting atmospheric dust and moisture.)

Eskom’s (our parastatal national electricity provider) prototype Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) is likely to cost R25 billion. The projected output is 120MW. By my admittedly rough calculations, that makes the cost of building the PMBR approximately FIVE times more expensive than solar thermal. Even using the figures Eskom prefers to use, which are of course far lower than R25-billion, the PBMR remains much expensive than solar thermal. (The PBMR has also been judged an economic non-starter for South Africa, by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, according to documents Eskom accidentally sent to Earthlife Africa.) Read the rest of this entry »

What secular fundamentalists don’t really seem to get is that religions are just systems of thought — like political ideologies and scientific rationalism. Although the claims of scientific rationalism to objectivity seem overwhelmingly convincing for those of us steeped in this milieu, so too did the claims of Catholicism for people in 1400, of Calvinism in 17th century Geneva, etc.

William Blake’s Ancient of Days, an image that somehow fuses the divine and the rational. (Was Blake just a good illustrator?)

We might redefine religion as a system of thought that dominates the worldview of an individual or community.

So, for example, the renowned British historian Arnold Toynbee described the three great religions of the 20th century as being communism, nationalism and the belief in the inevitability of progress through the application of technology. Note that he did not list even one of the theistic faiths that pre-occupy our newly energised atheists.

It’s when we forget that all these paradigms are simply metaphors, or systems of metaphors, that we seem to get confused or confrontational. In some ways, Richard Dawkins and his allies are re-running a debate that for some was settled over a hundred years ago. Many Victorian scientists, like many (rather quiet) contemporary scientists, concluded that Darwin’s theory best explained the evolution of species, but continued to find great meaning in Christianity — because it does hold great meaning. They were broad-minded enough to find ways of reconciling the differences, broad-minded in ways that seem to escape participants in our renewed debates on the matter. Read the rest of this entry »