Or is this like asking, “Is China ahead of the US in Kitty Cat consumption?”.
Above, CBS News interviews a nuclear proponent.
As a counterpoint, the interviewer above mentioned his recent interview with MIT futurist Ray Kurzweil, who is not worried about the “nuclear gap” – and believes an all-renewable world is in the near future. (3:48 if you’re in a rush)
China is ahead of US in just about everything right now, and I don’t see us catching up anytime soon.
We did it to ourselves, bickering over whose imaginary dog has the bigger red-rocket …
The 15th century belonged to the Portuguese; the 16th to Spain; the 17th to the Dutch; the 18th to France; the 19th to Britain; and the 20th to the USA. It seems likely to many that the 21st century will belong to China.
That’s been my feeling since before the turn of the century
lately, China has been regressing back to a totalitarian dictatorship. This is not conducive to progress. As an example, they just had a new subway collapse:
Andrew Dessler, at least, has a more practical view of the nonlinearity of the transition (e.g., the last 10 percent of fossil fuel use will be the most expensive to displace), compared to people like Kurzweil who answers a question about practical infrastructure by describing the amount of energy from the sun. Meanwhile, the public policy professor talked about accelerating the regulatory component, and that he expects one within the next 10 years, but Vogtle’s delays weren’t primarily due to regulatory bureaucracy but to new technology.
Bill Gates and TerraPower have started construction on a 345MW power plant (to be completed and supplied with sufficient HALEU “this decade”). I’m sure all of the other nuclear projects started with the same optimism.
Vogtle plant nuclear reactor timeline:
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Good. Lets have a race.