Personal Dork Assistant

Wait, Are You Telling Me That This Sucker's Nuclear?

No no no, this sucker's electrical, but it requires a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need.

So we're having a hard enough time getting these folks to make one (give or take 300 million) LED without screwing it up, and now they want to build dozens of nuclear power plants?

In its anxiety to satisfy its seemingly bottomless demand for electricity, China plans to build reactors on a scale and pace comparable to the most ambitious nuclear energy programs the world has ever seen.

Yeah, the hazy air sucks, and we're here near the coast. The inland cities are supposedly unbearable with the coal pollution. Still, it's not as if China has a great track record for dealing with environmentally dangerous waste. Maybe the pebble-bed reactors that got the Slashdot geeks all hot and bothered will actually work. On the other hand, if they were any good at predictions the iPod would've been a massive flop. Besides, they probably think it would be cool to be a radioactive mutant.

One sure sign of the Chinese industry's self-assuredness is the promotion of the Daya Bay plants as a tourist attraction. For now - in a country where surging power demand has led major cities like Shanghai to force companies to stagger working hours, shut down during the week and operate on weekends - the public is likely to support anything that promises more electricity.

It's not as if we don't need the juice. Running our own generator once a week doesn't help the profit margin any. Hey, Daya Bay is only 50 miles from HK. Maybe I'll finally have something to do on the weekend.

Meanwhile, Bush continues to promise a strong dollar, even as reality interferes. What happened to the faith in the free market? Everyone hopes that a yuan revaluation would be the magic bullet, but the New York Times article outlines the reasons why it may not even matter. Even with a 25% rise in value (well beyond the most optimistic estimates), it would still be cheaper to do business in China, not just because the labor costs are that low, but also because the entire supply chain is in China now, and it's not that easy to move everything back. It wouldn't be coming back to the States, that's for sure. Maybe Mexico. The Chinese probably won't be buying American goods with their spiffed up yuans anyway, they'd be buying more raw materials, which are usually dollar-denominated anyway, and probably real estate. I can see how hordes of Chinese people buying up American land would go over real well at home. Those folks waiting for Bay Area home prices to drop may have to wait another decade or three if that comes to pass.