Yes, why use simple cheap solar panels that can easily be replaced if we can over engineer everything to the nth degree? Thank you for illuminating the core difficulty of too much centralisation: mounting problems and mounting costs.

Looking at Fukushima, it is not the terrorists and the meteors that frighten me the most. It is the simple combination of the everyday events like earthquakes, with corruption, inefficiency, cost-cutting and the culture of secrecy that fosters and supports it all. These are the real but invisible dangers that you cannot shoot down from your robotic space platforms.