Well, they've had a few accidents, but nothing really serious. The cost though... They did it thinking it would be cheap, and it turned out to be the opposite. And then they screwed up their environmental goals by promoting diesel cars, again not knowing that they were so bad when the decision was made.

In 2026 it's not just renewables that have changed the landscape, it's the EU. Energy independence isn't a big deal at the member level. Although arguably it never was for France, because if you recall the EU was formed out of coal agreements with Germany, that were designed to make the two countries so dependent on each other that war would be impossible.

No, you don't have to decide if you want access to electrical power or not. I was there when it happened, the lights did not go out. Japan shut down all nuclear reactors, unplanned, and the electricity stayed on. The electric trains kept running. The price went up and people were asked to save energy, but it proved beyond any doubt that nuclear was absolutely not necessary for Japan to keep power on.

These days we don't need nuclear at all, we have much better and cheaper alternatives. We can install them at scale too. China generated, not installed nameplate, not counting wasted energy because capacity was already met, actually generated and fed into the grid as much new renewable electricity in 2025 as the whole of Germany consumed in total. On top of what they already had. And they are on track to install even more new capacity this year, and the storage to go with it.

Most countries don't have nuclear weapons and seem to be doing okay.

Ukraine, for example. A nuclear state attacked them, and Ukraine is winning. Of course Russia didn't nuke Ukraine, because that would be suicide. Similarly, if Ukraine had kept and maintained its nuclear weapons, it wouldn't have used them, because that would have been suicide.

One of the things they usually fail to mention with SMRs is that you still need a containment building that can survive hydrogen explosions, like the ones that destroyed the Fukushima containment buildings.

There is a parallel there. The Soviets decided that they could save money because the probability of those reactors failing was very small. The Japanese built to international standards, which were also set far too low to contain those explosions, because containing them would have cost a lot more money and the risk of meltdown was judged to be extremely low.

In both cases, the risks were known, and in both cases they were downplayed by the people making the decisions. Soviet or democratic, both systems failed.

No it hasn't. People come and go all the time. Notice how the claim is that many are going to Florida... Because they are retiring.

The same claim was made about the UK, but turned out to be based on two (2) LinkedIn posts by people claiming to be millionaires and claiming to be leaving the UK because of the tax burden, extrapolated out to tens of thousands through some of the most bullshit maths you have ever seen.

You are being very selective with your figures there. The French nuclear industry produces 13,000 m2 of radioactive waste every year (from your own Wikipedia link), and while most of it is not high level, much of it is intermediate level, and it all needs to be stored carefully for the long term. It's not cost effective to separate it out and clean it up individually either.

The proposed storage site is 600 hectares, considerably larger than a modest single story house. It's a major industrial site.

It may be well designed and safe, but it's certainly not small or economically competitive.

Chernobyl demonstrated the fundamental problem with nuclear power: Trust.

You have to trust the designers, the people checking the design, the plant operator. They have all been shown to do a poor job more than once. No country has figured out how to fix that.

Of course the same is true for everything else, except that the consequences of a catastrophic wind turbine failure are a lot less severe than a catastrophic nuclear accident. Don't take my word for it, ask why insurance companies are unwilling to insure it. Fukushima is on course for half a trillion Euros to clean up, not counting he economic cost, and Japan is supposed to be a modern, well regulated, highly skilled country that should be able to do this sort of thing safely.

It's irrelevant now anyway, because unless a country needs nuclear for some other reason (primarily to keep nuclear weapons and naval vessels around), the economics of it compared to the alternatives has doomed it.

Playing Devil's advocate for a minute, I suppose Apple does also provide on-going monitoring of apps for security issues. They do find apps stealing data or doing other malicious stuff from time to time.

5% is way too much though. Maybe 0.5%.

In Japan they can temporarily suspend business operations for corporations found guilty of crimes. Staff must still be paid, but they can't do any work. It's an interesting sanction because it obviously hurts financially, but it also makes it very clear to every other company doing business with them that they did wrong, and gives competitors an opportunity.

Your numbers are way off. Anthropic is worth nearly $1t, or rather its stock is. So 50% of that goes to the sovereign wealth fund, $500bn. So it would be 14 Anthropic sized companies to reach $7t, and that's a long term goal, not day one.

$7 trillion with a 5% return would be about $20k per US citizen.

They always threaten to do that, but then don't. If you look at places with billionaire taxes, if anything they end up with more wealthy people because they become nicer places to live.

Unrealized wealth is the other big scam they use. They can access and leverage that money, but you can't tax it because it's not "real". Meanwhile plebs like you get to pay full rate.

It probably won't happen anyway. RR are getting a lot of money for R&D, but nobody (including RR) has figured out how to make these things viable. Too expensive, worse fuel and waste problems than traditional reactors, and they still need most of the same infrastructure.

Even if they do somehow overcome all the issues, by the time they are ready to start delivering they will be completely irrelevant anyway. The share rate at which renewables and storage are advancing means nothing else has much of a future, beyond niche applications.

Made in Sunderland, batteries made in the UK too. EV tech developed jointly with Renault.

Most of the R&D in China is done with private money. The government does contribute, but it's more long term guarantees than it is cash.

In a democracy, policy can change ever 4-5 years. Look at the US, it's been alternating between pushing renewables to banning them to pushing them to banning them again, over the last 4 administrations. If you were a company developing renewable technology, would you have faith that your investment in R&D wouldn't be banned by the time it reaches market? Doesn't even have to be a ban, just an administration that is hostile to your business, and an electorate that would rather roll coal than see a wind turbine 20km off-shore.

The Chinese government said that EVs were the future and it would ensure that future came quickly and stuck around. It made sure the infrastructure was installed, and promoted them to consumers as a way to reduce pollution. Loans for development were made available. And it stuck to that for the long term, not just the next 4-5 years.

Democracy can do that too, but not in a two party system. Look at European democracies where coalition governments are the norm, where the system is designed to prevent any one party gaining complete power. Planning is longer term, and there is more certainty in future policy direction.

From Europe we look at Americans that way too. Long hours, ridiculously little holiday entitlement (I just booked flights for my six week break over the new year, and I've still got time off to spare), and a billionaire-Epstien ruling class who live in luxury. Only they also get pollution, mass deportations, bankrupted by healthcare costs, school shootings, and so on.

China is far from perfect, but it also doesn't compare that badly.