41–50 of 141 posts
I don't understand why the West hesitates with nuclear power.
About one third of China's politburo, including Xi Jinping, have degrees in Engineering. The West's leadership is all attorneys or finance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In China it takes 5-7 years. What would we have to give up to be able to do that?
No need to give up anything, except a poorly designed regulatory environment : https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No need to give up anything, except a poorly designed regulatory environment : https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...
Now for the real reason, voters dont want to.
The latter is largely due to the anti nuclear movement, as sponsored by the petroleum industry. This will go down in history as one of the biggest self-owns in trying to protect the environment.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
About one third of China's politburo, including Xi Jinping, have degrees in Engineering. The West's leadership is all attorneys or finance.
In the case of the US, the latest president is a failed businessman who is more concerned about trans people, abortion, and immigrants than progress. According to media I’m supposed to hate China but I don’t hear Xi Jinping spouting nonsense like that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nuclear-dead-end-i... It is just not economically feasible. Money makes the world go 'round and that's often a good thing. I wish you luck convincing a bank to give you a loan for a nuclear plant. They know the math.
The economics of nuclear power is dominated by a poorly designed regulatory environment (which can be changed if regulators are suitablely motivated). https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...
This does not mean the economics of nuclear power is an unsolvable problem. It is an engineering problem, and it is very solvable. But it can't be solved if one does not try. No problem in this world can be solved if everyone is convinced it's unsolvable and nobody is willing to try to solve it.
Who is then supposed to solve this problem. It's an extremely capital intensive problem. A guy like Musk could do it, but Musk himself is uninterested in nuclear power (he likes to tell the fairly lame joke that we have a giant fusion reactor in the sky). Bill Gates has invested a lot of his money into nuclear power R&D, and this is good. But what Gates did not invest is his drive. Musk showed us that an extremely driven and competent manager can lower production costs by factors of 10 or 50. But just pouring money at a problem does not solve it, see Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin.
Fortunately, governments have much deeper pockets than even Gates, Bezos or Musk. China is a leader in this area, and Russia is very advanced too. It looks like the US Government finally got the message, so there is a pretty good chance to see real progress on this front in the next 10 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
About one third of China's politburo, including Xi Jinping, have degrees in Engineering. The West's leadership is all attorneys or finance.
Is this why China is such a great and technically advanced country?
Law is a weird one and maybe I am wrong but I think law leadership is the worst of all. They have no understanding of neither engineering or economics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
About one third of China's politburo, including Xi Jinping, have degrees in Engineering. The West's leadership is all attorneys or finance.
The US could probably use a few engineers, but on the other hand I think the CCP could use a few finance people.
The contribution that the finance people in the US made was to - accurately - identify that if they moved all the investment overseas then the US wouldn't need to work as hard. They were correct. The result has been massive leaps and bounds in Asian prosperity and living standards. Which is good for the world, but probably not the sort of strategy that the US wanted to adopt. Typically countries are supposed to promote the interests of the people living inside the borders instead of build up competitors. I dunno, maybe it was intentional but it'd have been cleverer to invest more in the US.
There is a pretty good chance that China implodes because of the authoritarian and bureaucratic streak their government has. But the US's financiers are, if anything, one of the key ingredients helping it revert to the mean from an economically dominant position.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. But I suspect it's beyond learning. The Chinese may understand nuclear power better than almost anyone else, France not withstanding. I could believe this is a strategic move, to diversify power input sources as well. Look I am not knocking learning, but I don't think thats the key drive here.
I believe this is mainly due to China's strong sense of crisis regarding energy supply. If it had as abundant fossil fuel resources as the United States and Russia, it likely wouldn't have invested so heavily in diversifying its energy sources. The development and support of new energy vehicles can also be largely attributed to this.
Given the ~50% of their energy mix that's coal [0], that becomes a fix-it-ASAP problem for their economy.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-energy-source-sub?c...