I don’t worry about Chinese manufacturing capabilities… they’re doing great.
I do worry greatly about the Chinese political system causing preventable (nuclear) accidents through lack of transparency and accountability.
If their reaction to the COVID breakout is symptomatic of systemic issues (I firmly believe it is), then I don’t see how anyone can trust the Chinese government to act in the interest of safety.
Those micro-cracks and corrosion issues that caused months of downtime on Belgian and French reactors respectively, that would have caused rolling blackouts in both instances if those winters had been cold? Pretty sure in China that’d be “carry on comrade”.
EDIT: Oh and I forgot about the 3 gorges dam. In case anyone still doubts that the Chinese government does not factor in safety, at all.
Mainland China still struggles with ultra-high precision engineering to this day. They still can’t make a turbofan engine that matches the efficiency and power/weight ratio of either Russian or Western designs, despite the fact that many of their “indigenous” designs are simply reverse-engineered copies. Hell, they only recently started successfully mass-producing good-quality ballpoint pens (which are actually deceptively difficult to manufacture at scale).
Edit: Not to mention, trying to capture and use at least some of Taiwan’s semiconductor foundries is very definitely one of the unstated justifications they have for claiming sovereignty over Taiwan, and for making plans to invade and fully subjugate the island.
Considering that the CCP seems to lean HARD into the Soviet idea of saving face at all costs just to try to look good, I would not be terribly surprised if some sort of Chernobyl- thing happens at some point, because that’s the exact mentality that led to Chernobyl and the RBMK reactor design becoming a problem in the first place.
I don’t worry about Chinese manufacturing capabilities… they’re doing great.
I do worry greatly about the Chinese political system causing preventable (nuclear) accidents through lack of transparency and accountability.
If their reaction to the COVID breakout is symptomatic of systemic issues (I firmly believe it is), then I don’t see how anyone can trust the Chinese government to act in the interest of safety.
Those micro-cracks and corrosion issues that caused months of downtime on Belgian and French reactors respectively, that would have caused rolling blackouts in both instances if those winters had been cold? Pretty sure in China that’d be “carry on comrade”.
EDIT: Oh and I forgot about the 3 gorges dam. In case anyone still doubts that the Chinese government does not factor in safety, at all.
Mainland China still struggles with ultra-high precision engineering to this day. They still can’t make a turbofan engine that matches the efficiency and power/weight ratio of either Russian or Western designs, despite the fact that many of their “indigenous” designs are simply reverse-engineered copies. Hell, they only recently started successfully mass-producing good-quality ballpoint pens (which are actually deceptively difficult to manufacture at scale).
Edit: Not to mention, trying to capture and use at least some of Taiwan’s semiconductor foundries is very definitely one of the unstated justifications they have for claiming sovereignty over Taiwan, and for making plans to invade and fully subjugate the island.
Considering that the CCP seems to lean HARD into the Soviet idea of saving face at all costs just to try to look good, I would not be terribly surprised if some sort of Chernobyl- thing happens at some point, because that’s the exact mentality that led to Chernobyl and the RBMK reactor design becoming a problem in the first place.