The USA is large enough that it doesn't have a singular power grid. There's three large grids and many many more small grids. There can be a shortage of production out on the east coast and a shortage of infrastructure out on the left coast. As I recall there's been a number of power plants built in Arizona and Nevada with the intent to sell excess generating capacity to California. I understand the problem as getting that power into California given a shortage of interstate power lines, and a shortage of capacity on power lines inside California. There's been quite a bit of NIMBY-ism making it difficult to get new power lines inside California. I don't know what is holding up interstate power lines into California but I can guess that there's been some resistance to new interstate power lines from the federal government.

I suspect that the shortage of electricity production in California remains but with some new power lines they could perhaps at least limp along with what they have in generating capacity until there's more power plants built. Maybe if PG&E hadn't invested so much into unproven solar thermal power, such as the facility at Ivanpah, then California might not be in such a tight spot on energy: https://www.climatedepot.com/2...

The claim made to justify the closure of Ivanpah is that solar PV and battery storage has advanced more quickly than expected which has made solar thermal power at Ivanpah no longer economically viable. I'll be more likely to believe that if Ivanpah returns to producing energy with solar PV panels and batteries. They originally planned for the plant to run until 2039 which means they should have leases and such that run until at least then, would it be too much to expect the existing land and infrastructure to host solar PV for the next 15 years until the lease runs out? I assume that the lease can be extended after that. They'll need people out there for decommissioning anyway, would this interfere with people out there at the same time for putting up solar PV?

China disagrees.
https://asiatimes.com/2025/11/...

If you are referring to the reactor I believe you are then that was a reactor meant to prove the first steps in operating a thorium breeder reactor than prove a prototype commercial reactor. They could have attached a boiler and steam turbine generator but that would have been added expense with no added information. Once they knew they could get heat from it then it would have been a trivial matter to prove it could produce steam for power. In the progression of crawl, walk, run on getting a commercially viable thorium reactor this ORNL reactor was somewhere between crawl and walk. The next step would be some kind of prototype, and China did that recently. Next step is to produce perhaps not fully developed reactors but some early commercial prototypes from which mass produced designs could be made.

It appears that the next thorium reactors China intends to build would be used for producing electricity in a commercial capacity, or to be the power plants on some kind of ship, perhaps a large cargo ship or a heavy icebreaker. It may be true that thorium reactors have not been proven commercially but that's not likely all that far away now. What's the excuse to not try to build a commercial thorium power plant right now? That it hasn't been done yet? Someone needs to go first. We can wait another year or three for the Chinese to do it, after that would it then be okay to try in the USA?

What are we waiting for to build thorium reactors in the USA? That China beats us to it? I can expect some new excuse to come up then, some reason to claim the technology is out of our reach yet. What if we see commercial thorium reactors in Canada and UK? Those are friendly nations that would be willing to share their technology in exchange for some of our own technology, or for wheat, or beef, or weapons, or cars, or cotton, or so much else.

We have the technology to build thorium reactors. All we have to do to prove this commercially is to decide to try. Or is there something I'm missing?

If "slow steaming" catches on for saving on fuel then maybe 11 knots by wind would not look so bad, with a ship going slow to save on fuel they can be moving as slow as 12 knots. Slow steaming has benefits on fuel savings but if the ship isn't built for it then there can be problems. Here's an article I could find with a quick search that seems to do well enough to spell out the problems: https://www.container-xchange....

If the issue is the turbochargers are fouling up then maybe switch to superchargers. The distinction is a turbocharger is powered by the escaping exhaust gases while a supercharger would be powered by a belt, gear, or electric motor. I was under the impression nearly all ships used electric superchargers since that offered some ability to "pre-compress" the incoming air as desired under any shaft speed.

Slow steaming has been catching on well enough that ships are being built, or rebuilt, for operating at these lower speeds. That means a smaller engine, and optimized for 12 to 18 knots (or however they define "slow steaming") than a more typical 20 to 30 knots. From what I've picked up it's rare to see a large ship going faster than 30 knots unless its got nuclear power. Not that I'm some expert on ships, I just read a lot of random stuff. Since power consumed for moving a ship goes up with the square of the speed (at least roughly) then expect cargo ships to limit themselves to about 30 knots unless or until they start to adopt nuclear power like the US Navy has done on their big ships. The maximum speed of a Ford-class aircraft carrier is kept secret but people will speculate it can get fast enough to gain on most anything operated by any potential adversary navy.

I have my doubts on how improved weather forecasting will help much.

The sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald had many contributing factors beyond just the original weather forecast being inaccurate. A big one was losing their radar that they could use to pick out the weather and landmarks for navigation. Perhaps a modern ship with GPS and a digital radio for picking up weather satellite images would mitigate that today. Maybe not because this was an unusual storm that didn't "follow the rules" on expected storm progression, and if the radar could have failed then so could something else on a modern ship. It seems to me that the issue was a single point of failure than anything else. Maybe if the Edmund Fitzgerald had something to backup the radar to keep pointing in the right direction they would have been fine. There was supposed to be a radio navigation beacon to safe harbor but that was down at the time. There's a potential that if the beacon was working they'd have been able to make it to port safely.

These proposed cargo ships would not be purely wind powered and so aren't likely to get right of way. They'd have a diesel engine in order to safely navigate canals and harbors. If there's a 15,000 ton Neoline wind assisted ship up against a 200,000 ton tanker or container ship then I have doubts that the Neoline ship would get the right of way, they'd be expected to fire up their diesel than force the much larger ship to burn even more diesel to change course.

I can imagine ships like this Neoline working out a lot like Greta Thunberg's "sailing" across the Atlantic. Greta would refuse to fly because of the carbon emissions and so would instead charter sailboats. On more than one such trip the carbon savings was clearly not present. In one case a member of the crew had to be flown in from Europe for safely traversing the sea, which meant there was as much CO2 emitted as if Greta had simply flown home. Then was a case of Greta reaching port well ahead of the expected time to sail as the winds were blowing the wrong way for that trip, meaning they spent all or most of their time at sea under diesel power.

That's not to say that every transoceanic trip Greta took was a failure in reducing her CO2 emissions over flying, only that she's failed so regularly and publicly that I have doubts on commercial shipping doing much better. There will be a diesel engine on these ships. It would be awfully tempting to fire that up if the winds aren't just right in order to stay on schedule, much like what likely happened with Greta. Maybe the crew on the ship didn't "get the memo" that the goal was to travel under sail. Maybe there was a mechanical failure or something that forced them to travel under diesel power that was not made public. I can be charitable to Greta since at the time she was a minor and so would have limited authority to dictate the terms of how the ship operated. If there's a commercial ship that is seeking to operate under wind power, but finds itself operating under terms dictated by someone else, then it's burn fuel or lose money. Just how often is a cargo ship like those proposed going to be able to operate under wind power once put under the constraints of right-of-way in tight places, keeping a schedule, mechanical failures (such as shown in the fine article), and so forth?

Just how much in technology would have changed since the 1950s and today that could make moving cargo by ship something commercially viable? Cargo ships have become much larger since. There's a practical maximum size for a wind powered ship, and while I don't know for certain what that is I'm guessing it would be difficult to get a 120,000 ton ship, about the size of New Panamax, to move by wind power alone. With no sailing ship getting above 12000 tons that may be the limit, and how much profit is there in operating 10 sailing ships than a single New Panamax ship?

Wind is not the obvious choice. Plenty of experience was gained from the last "windjammers" from the 1920s to 1950s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I can guess that someone might try to argue that we've learned plenty more in wind powered ships in the last 100 years to somehow optimize wind power further. I'd like to know specifics on what those new technologies might be. The images from the fine article appear to be of a pretty typical sailing ship, not likely all that different in the parts that matter from what was used in the last days of wind powered sailing ships from the 1950s. The fine article mentions an 80 to 90 percent reduction in emissions, than 100 percent, because the ship will still need diesel power in and near port because moving a sailing ship with precision in the proximity of land and other ships will be difficult and potentially dangerous. Then consider, much like similar ships from the 1950s, there will be a diesel engine on board to provide lights, HVAC, radio communications, and so on for crew safety and comfort.

Maybe there's a place in the world for wind powered cargo ships but they are not likely to be economical, and/or see much in reduced emissions, along many routes. Moving through any kind of canal, lock and dam, or so many other routes that require maintaining a consistent speed will be a problem when there's wind power that can vary. I'm guessing this wasn't near the problem when wind powered ships dominated because ships weren't as big, there were not as many ships at sea, and every other ship was wind powered and so equally restricted in speed which would limit the potential for any speed difference.

With what appears to be Cold War 2.0 in progress, this time with China as the "big bad", there will be some interest in what China is doing to free itself from the need to import petroleum for shipping. China is experimenting with nuclear powered cargo ships as discussed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And here: https://interestingengineering...

China isn't alone in this. There's likely better sources to make my point but here's a couple articles to point out that many nations are considering nuclear power: https://www.hoganlovells.com/e...
https://maritimetechnologyrevi...

An interesting point being made about having nuclear power reactors rated for use at sea is that they can do more than provide propulsion power. A nuclear reactor on a ship is certainly a military advantage as it means being able to travel at sea for months at a time without need to stop for resupply, potentially longer if the crew can remain healthy and motivated beyond that. Nuclear powered cargo vessels would be able to move faster, without needing to stop for fuel for years, have excess power for refrigeration or whatever to maintain safety and quality of the cargo, and so much else. Then is the option for floating power plants that can be built assembly line style in a shipyard and then floated out to any of a number of population centers accessible by sea. With so much power available we could see floating factories where instead of being largely idle in transit the ships are producing some commodity for sale once it reaches port.

Use of wind power for moving cargo died in the 1950s. We learned quite a deal about how to build large and efficient ships during WW2. Once WW2 was over there was a flood of low cost and relative high quality cargo ships to the merchant fleets of the world. They were larger than any sailing ship, and not restricted to routes with favorable winds. This was also when nuclear powered ships were starting to gain steam and so it was likely that many ship builders though that even oil power was going to be largely obsolete soon.

Plenty of nations are seeking alternatives to diesel power at sea. I doubt wind power is going to win out. Maybe we could see a rebirth of the "windjammers" like those seen in the 1950s, but they'd be on limited routes in the future as they were in the past because of how the wind blows.

New technology is opening up new routes, such as through the Arctic. I know people will blame global warming for making an Arctic rout possible but this is either not relevant or a minimal factor. What is making shipping through the Arctic viable is we can build ships big enough, powerful enough, strong enough, and do this at low enough cost, that dealing with some ice bouncing off the hull isn't such a big deal. Can wind power compete with that? Especially if the ship is powered by nuclear fission?

Commercially viable wind powered cargo shipping died about 100 years ago. We saw some wind powered cargo ships in the 1950s but I suspect that was just people doing the best they could to pick up the pieces from WW2 with what they had. By 1955 there would have been new ships built, navies around the world wanting to scale back and sell off war surplus, and nuclear fission seen as a real alternative. Clearly nuclear powered shipping didn't hold up to every promise, but it appears to be coming back after some time to deal with the issues raised then.

It seems to me that the phrase "to serve man" carries a hint of sexism, and too much association with The Twilight Zone, to be used seriously today. Even so there's going to be people mocking the use of anything similar to "to serve man" because of how deeply that trope is woven into our culture. It would be similar to seeing anyone mention anything close to "peace in our time" because of the epic failure of seeing peace after those words were so publicly uttered by Chamberlain. I can recall "peace in our time" uttered by Tony Stark in one MCU film or another and immediately thought that was a hint on things going terribly wrong soon. Didn't Tony Stark know what those words meant? He's supposedly an educated person in this alternate universe that was shown on the screen. But then maybe in his timeline those words were not used. Maybe Stark was so caught up in engineering he didn't remember that line, or perhaps didn't remember the implications/context of the line, from his history lessons while at university.

I'd avoid anything similar to "to serve man" if I could, especially in the context of any technology that had any kind of controversy attached to it, precisely because of that famous episode from The Twilight Zone.

You beat me to it by *that* much. If nobody else made the reference then I would have.

The problem with AI is it is often a solution in search of a problem. It can be fun to use generative AI to produce images and short videos to entertain or make some point but that's something that could likely already be had on the cheap with some part-time actors, photographers, cartoonists, or so forth if done in the "gig economy" style of Uber and Lyft. There's so many photos available for people to use for this and that to where it is unlikely that what most people are looking for from AI already exist, and they'd be lacking the "hallucinations" and "uncanny valley" of AI. What I would like is a better built search engine to find an existing image that lacks the AI creepiness than an AI to make a new, and creepy, image. Get AI to work on creating a better search engine, that should go a long way to prevent "hallucinations" created from a mix-n-match of what exists to come up with something new and wrong.

Where I'd hope AI would go is in solving real problems, and in producing real science and technology. Medicine was mentioned as a possible application for new AI models and new AI data centers. Maybe we could get AI to look into patterns in medications to put things together in ways humans might not find otherwise, or at least not see for decades with thousands of people looking at the same data. Didn't we find a bunch of new planets and comets because people fed a bunch of decades old photos of the night sky into an AI to pick out anomalies and filter them out from flaws in the film? That's something useful, though perhaps only "AI" in the loosest definition of the term. But then "AI" has become what was called "big data" not so long ago, or so it seems to me.

The hallucinations from AI is killing it as something with any real utility. Anything AI produces will need educated, intelligent, and sane humans to check the work from AI for correctness. This goes double for anything that "serves humanity" than trivialities like thumbnail images for YouTube videos. If we can solve the problem of hallucinations from AI then it is not likely to come any time soon. That can mean the AI bubble pops, but then at least the hardware and experience built from this AI bubble could likely be repurposed for the more mundane "big data" that was all the rage before AI came about. We have a lot of "big data" problems that could be solved, and I'm doubtful that AI (as that term is being used now) will be all that helpful in solving.

We have the means to produce electricity directly from radiation, betavoltaics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Using this on large scales is apparently still a problem but we can use this for "nuclear batteries" such as those used on deep space probes, medical devices, remote navigation beacons, and other places we've used the similar RTG technology.

I can recall someone doing a TED Talk, or something similar, about a fusion power plant that would use some form of direct conversion of radiation to electrical power. I don't recall how it worked but apparently there's at least theoretical means to this end.

The deal with this Chinese TMSR, and similar technology elsewhere, is there is no steam cycle and the reactor will "eat" the existing nuclear waste as fuel. The early versions will likely still use steam because it's a known quantity but in the future that's likely to be replaced with "air breathing" turbines for electricity production and cooling. Because there's still useful fuel in the "spent" fuel rods from light water reactors we could see this waste "mined" for fuel used to feed these kinds of thorium molten salt reactors.

In other words, these reactors solve the problems that concern people the most about nuclear power. Once people figure that out then where's the reasons to oppose this technology?

You saw what happened to Iran once the rest of the world discovered they had facilities to produce nuclear weapons and learned where they are, did you not?

The goal for civil nuclear power is to separate that as far from being useful for weapons as possible because that makes power production a viable military target. That's a similar tactic to putting military offices in the basement of hospitals, and storing weapons in places of worship and people's homes. That's what a group does when they are seeking to put the most innocent people in harm's way so as to force their adversary to kill innocent people in order to wage war.

On the other hand, if a power plant is unambiguously a civilian facility, as in it produces power for the hospitals and homes than anything of military value, then attacking it is clearly a war crime. Any sane nation would want to keep the reactors that produce power very much separated from the reactors that produce weapons. Put them in the same place and once the reactors to make weapons are destroyed then that will leave everyone in the dark and cold. That's suicidal.

If a nation believes that civil power production would become a target to an adversary not terribly concerned about the rules of war then which is easier to protect? Nuclear power plants? Solar panels? Or windmills? Then is the concern on which will produce power more reliably. We don't have wind powered warships any more, but we have a few nuclear powered ones.

If you believe thorium reactors are somehow a risk for proliferation of nuclear weapons then explain how that works, and how that would be a greater risk than just mining uranium and enriching it for mass production of Little Boy style nuclear bombs. Nobody needs a nuclear reactor to produce nuclear weapons, we proved that. Also proven in real world tests is how little utility there is in using thorium to make weapons. If nuclear weapons are a concern then this is exactly the kind of technology we'd want to see. Not only is it a terrible technology for making nuclear weapons these TMSR power plants consume plutonium for the "seed" fuel, they can destroy weapon grade materials.

People will still want this technology in 20 to 30 years. These reactors produce a lot of power, and in the process also produce radioactive isotopes useful in medicine, industry, and science. They are not all that useful in making weapons, and that will make them desirable.

There's plenty of buyers for hydrogen now, finding buyers for "green" hydrogen would not be a problem.

One big consumer of hydrogen is the petrochemical industry. The petrochemical industry also produces plenty of hydrogen but at the cost of consuming natural gas, and I'm guessing they'd rather sell that natural gas than consume it. Provide them a means to get hydrogen cheaper than steam methane reforming and you'll make a lot of money.

Another big buyer of hydrogen are producers of ammonia and other fertilizers. The hydrogen they use is often produced on site as hydrogen is not easy to store and transport. The hydrogen is often produced by steam methane reforming which makes this process a large producer of greenhouse gases. There's other buyers of hydrogen than petrochemicals and fertilizers but I get the impression this is where nearly all of it goes.

Because hydrogen is so difficult to transport it doesn't make much sense to convert a natural gas power plant to hydrogen. If there is a chicken and egg problem then it is not the supply of hydrogen but the transport. But then transport of hydrogen isn't of much concern since so much of hydrogen is produced where it is needed to avoid the transport issue. It's like the joke of building the Space Shuttle to bring people to the ISS, and then saying we need the ISS so the Space Shuttle has a place to go. Why move the hydrogen when it can be produced on site? Why convert a natural gas power plant to burn hydrogen when so much of the hydrogen we produce comes from natural gas?

Perhaps I recall incorrectly but I recall Germany converting power plants to hydrogen, then to get the hydrogen they bought ammonia from Canada and cracked off the hydrogen for fuel. Ammonia is a fuel too, why not just burn that? Why buy ammonia than liquid hydrogen? Because it is cheaper to move hydrogen as ammonia than liquefy the pure hydrogen for transport.

This appears to be a PR stunt to me. I'm suspecting that this power plant needed some major maintenance but they had problems finding money for it. So they cook up the idea of a hydrogen conversion to make it easier for loans, permits, and some government subsidy. The plant won't lose the ability to run off natural gas in this conversion, so it may never burn hydrogen beyond some testing and demonstrations before it is retired and scrapped.

The turbines are a sunk cost and so there's value in conversion than turning them to scrap and building fuel cells. At least that's an argument I'd expect from the people running the plant. Also, this is a conversion that adds fuel flexibility to run on natural gas, hydrogen, or some mix of the two while fuel cells can run only on hydrogen. There can be a plant that converts methane to hydrogen co-located with fuel cells to get that same fuel flexibility but it would come with a loss of efficiency, and again a scrapping of sunk costs.

What bothers me is the mention of using electrolysis for the production of hydrogen when there's better means available. I've seen the sulfur-iodine process mentioned before as an option: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

This S-I cycle can be run with heat from solar or nuclear fission, which makes it "green" and far more efficient than other means of hydrogen production. This is apparently a well understood process though made difficult by the high temperatures required. There's other thermal-chemical processes that could be experimented with before resorting to the quite inefficient process of electrolysis of water.

Then is the benefits of having spinning turbines on the grid to provide voltage and frequency stability, a major factor in the large electrical outage on the Iberian Peninsula recently. There's apparently better inverters now that could use the DC from fuel cells and provide this grid stability but, again, there's a sunk cost in these turbines and they can still do a lot of work for keeping lights on before going to fuel cells that are still experimental on this scale.

I'm skeptical of hydrogen being useful as a fuel, even if produced on site as a means of energy storage as is often the case for many projects that involve using hydrogen to produce electricity to the grid. If there is a cheap source of hydrogen then it can be used to make ammonia or methane as a fuel, fuels that are much easier to handle than hydrogen and have established means of storage and transport. We'd likely need "green" ammonia at some point if the goal is to be rid of natural gas as a contributor to global warming, we can't quite be rid of ammonia as it's a useful fertilizer and industrial chemical. Burning ammonia as a fuel isn't new, this is something that's been done on farms and ranches to run pumps and generators as there's an established infrastructure for moving ammonia, it's the same ammonia in the same tanks used to fertilize the fields.

Hydrogen is such a difficult fuel to deal with that even rocket scientists aren't liking to use it, they are preferring liquid methane instead. Getting the hydrogen doesn't sound like the real problem, it is building the tanks and pipes to contain it safely. If the hydrogen that is produced is immediately fed into a process to produce ammonia or methane then that is still useful "green" fuel that doesn't require anything all that special for storage, transport, and use.

Nobody is asking for an abandonment of anything. You are making a strawman out of support for nuclear fission being the abandonment of all else. Remove that bullshit argument and then what do you have to oppose nuclear fission?

States can choose to follow the federal schedule of daylight saving time, or they can choose standard time, but what so many states want is to go to daylight saving time and stay there which is not an option the federal law allows.

I don't quite understand the distinction. If the goal is to not change the clocks twice per year then go to standard time and shift schedules on business hours or whatever to best match the schedule of the sun. Why get hung up on if the sun sets at 6:00 PM or 5:00 PM? Isn't the important part that the clocks aren't shifting twice per year?

Growing up in the Midwest USA I got used to the idea of the 5:00 PM TV news being from the big cities on the East coast and then the local news at 6:00 PM. This was because for both the Eastern and Central time zones had local news at 6:00 PM, only that there was enough viewers for news out of New York (or maybe somewhere else for other stations but it seemed always to be NYC to me) in the Midwest that many TV stations would carry their 6:00 news in the Central 5:00 PM time slot.

I don't normally watch the local TV news but apparently the local news is now at both 5:00 and 6:00 to meet the schedules of different viewers with some national news programming sandwiched between them at 5:30. So, maybe stick with that but just keep the state on Standard time and let people figure out if they like their day starting at 9:00 AM or 8:00 AM, and their local news at 6:00 PM or 5:00 PM. We are apparently halfway there already, just pick a lane.

I can understand that people might prefer more daylight time in the evenings but that can be had with Standard time and just getting up earlier as shown on the clock. If there is Daylight Saving Time all year then doesn't that just make it the new Standard time? I'm not following but then maybe I'm thinking too much about it, or not enough.

I agree. It would be interesting to see how the USA would respond to China attacking any American allied nations. I'm not sure we are discussing the same thing though. China simply cannot attack the continental USA, they don't have enough ships with long enough "legs" to get close to make a meaningful attack. If they did attempt such an attack then they'd be picked up well in advance, the US military will be waiting for them.

What China can do though is cause problems for US military bases in the region, and attack allies in the region as far out as Australia. If that happens and there's already a US Navy carrier strike group in the region then the battle with China could be as short as a long weekend. If there's no carrier strike group in the vicinity then it could be as short as a week. If China holds off longer to build more aircraft carriers then that also gives more time for Japan, Australia, and other American allies in the region to build their own naval forces. There's a number of small windows in the near future where China can attack that gives them the advantage, if they don't attack someone in the region in the next 3 years then they may never have an opportunity to take land by force for a very long time.

China ha been building landing craft to put heavy equipment on shore quickly. This is not exactly new, there's been evidence of this going back months.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/25...
https://asiatimes.com/2025/01/...

China isn't going to make a clear and unambiguous statement on their intent to take Taiwan by force, that would be effectively a declaration of war. What we get are intelligence reports, and photos and videos of China practicing an amphibious landing. What else are we to take from that but an intent to take land by force? It might not be Taiwan, at least not at first, but this is sending a message that they intend to land heavy equipment on a beach that has no port. If there is a peaceful purpose for this then why would China work to keep this secret?

How is that relevant? Are you implying that China has some right or freedom to make attempts to sink foreign vessels in international waters because the USA does it? I'm not pleased when the USA does such things either. The USA should not be sinking drug carrying ships in the Caribbean Sea, instead the federal government should end the "war on (some) drugs" by setting rules like they do with alcohol and tobacco. They've already effectively given up on marijuana, I expect loosened rules on many other drugs. Legalizing cocaine is not likely in the cards but we could see cough syrup with codeine back on the shelves as over the counter. Well, there would likely be a rule on showing ID or something so children aren't buying it but then maybe that should be the rule generally, such as for Tylenol, vitamin supplements, or most anything more potent than throat lozenges.

China is clearly intending to start a war. Their manned space program is an excuse to develop heavy lift rockets that can be repurposed for ICBMs. They are building commercial roll-on/roll-off ships to military specifications, as in the deck is strong enough to hold vehicles as heavy as tanks. Many of these ships have a helicopter pad which is highly unusual for a commercial vehicle ferry but common on military vessels. This has been in the works since Taiwan declared itself independent from Communist China. It's that only now do we see China reach a point where they could reasonably have a chance to successfully take Taiwan.

I'm not watching an hour long video to get your point. You couldn't have found a clip from the video to link to? Or point to a few minutes in the video?

I doubt that the Chinese are seeking to go to the moon only to make a point to the rest of the world, they likely have plenty to prove to themselves and their own people also. This would be in parallel to the Apollo missions where a civilian mission to the moon was used as a means to get public support for research that would otherwise have been done anyway but under the guise of a military "mutually assured destruction" tactic with the Soviets. China will want this technology for military use but if they are building rockets to take people to the moon then they get the same excuse that the USA had with Apollo.

Maybe it is as simple as China wanting heavy lift rockets to carry large warheads to foreheads, and a science mission to the moon makes a good excuse to develop the technology. If it worked for Apollo then it will work for China. It can be a race for the USA since if China can put people on the moon and we can't then that can create a potential for some military and technology gap between the two nations. I don't know how or if the moon could prove to be a true advantage for China in some future efforts on Earth but if there is one then the USA would prefer to keep up than find out later then wish they responded sooner.

I doubt anything is "too far away" for a navy that has about a dozen nuclear powered aircraft carriers, another dozen or so "amphibious assault ships" that would be called an aircraft carrier in any other navy, and so much else in naval assets to bring many tons of hate and destruction upon anyone that threatens American interests and allies. The CCP seems quite intent on taking Taiwan by force soon, and if that happens then expect not just the USA to intervene but also Japan, South Korea, and other nations in the region not liking the idea of China expanding their reach.

China has clearly been the aggressor in the region. Have you not seen the videos where Chinese ships have been using water cannons in an attempt to flood ships from other nations? The excuse will be that it's "only" water but with the high volume being pumped out with these fire fighting hoses that can overwhelm the bilge pumps on smaller vessels and send to the ocean floor. Then are videos showing what is clearly an attempt to ram these ships.

This isn't new. China has a history of entering international water and international airspace to harass and intimidate. If China has been peaceful all this time then we'd not have seen a Chinese fighter jet ram an AWACS aircraft from the US Navy so many years ago. That was hardly "reactive" to any aggression from the US Navy, I'm fairly certain that aircraft had no weapons.

China has been putting the squeeze on rare earth metals long enough now that the USA is in talks with Australia on importing rare earth metals from there, as well as working on increasing domestic production.

Implying that China has been a largely peaceful nation for the last 3000 years is laughable. Weren't they intent on taking over the Korean peninsula only 75 years ago? There's certainly examples of attempts to take territory by force in the last 3000 years.