There are legal justifications to USA sanctions against China.
China is just doing what it wants, regardless of the legality of it.
China doesn't care about international law.
China wants the wild wild west of international relations.
USA wants international law respected.
The problem isn't USA. The problem is China.
China bullies everybody. Tries to bully even the USA and European Union countries. Except USA and EU pushes back.
If you don't care about international law. It most likely due to your ignorance on the matter. It's highly beneficial to all that don't want the strong man crushing the little man.

Nuclear power as it really couldn't compete with natural gas at $3-$4/million BTU as it was 10 years ago. But with natural gas today at $9/million BTU nuclear can compete with natural gas anywhere in the world (US NG prices is rather cheap compared with Europe or Japan).
Most of the cost of nuclear power is building the reactors in first place and satisfying the paranoid lest choke the golden goose nuclear regulations created by the NRC and friends after Fukushima.

Materials Shortage, let's dissect that instead of taking superficial click baity articles.
Materials to make batteries are:
Lithium
Nickel
Cobalt
Aluminium
Iron
Phosphate
The most popular BEV battery chemistry is NCO (Lithium, Nickel, Cobalt plus Aluminium for the structure of the cells).
But if we want to go all it, we really should move to LiFePO4 (Lithium Iron Phosphate). We already have 250 mile BEVs that use LiFePO4 cells.
This eliminates all hard to get materials (Cobalt specially, Nickel secondarily).
Lithium mining today is done in a super inefficient manner. Evaporation pond method wastes 80% of the Lithium and take 18 months to get the material into a dry powder.
There are Lithim extraction methods that have been already demonstrated in real world conditions that extract Lithium in less than a month and get over 90% of the lithium in the source liquid. Its a few short years from full scale commercial production and its cheaper than the slow inefficient method.
There will never be a shortage of Iron or Phosphate.
13 years is a very doable goal. Specially since its not a nation wide mandate, but just for California. The world is already building BEVs+Plugin EVs (PHEVs) at 10 million vehicles a year (2021 was 7.7 million growing really fast so even the rolling last 12 month total must already be over 10 million). Within 10 years the world should already be at 80% vehicle production being BEV/FCV/PHEVs.
We need to get this done. We can't reward Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and gang for bad behavior.
The real issue will be Brazil and India where a Corolla is an upper middle class car. At current BEV prices they are simply too expensive for 95% of the car owning population. California will be a done deal.

Solar without batteries = you also get blackouts. And batteries ain't cheap. They make sense if you have super cheap overnight electricity prices as you can charge the batteries off ultra cheap electricity prices and just keep them topped off during the day for the peak demand times.

Lithium pond based refining methods waste over 75% of available Lithium in the salt.
Lithium pond based refining take 18 months to dry the liquid.
The issue isn't enough raw Lithium, its improved refining methods.
There are multiple startups working on better refining methods that extract over 90% of the raw lithium in the ore and do it in a matter of weeks.
Whenever the subject is mining remember those are ultra conservative industries know to be ultra slow to improve methods.
Lookup youtube video: EnergyX "Basically Minting Money"? | In Depth

With the current largest battery Teslas one can do 15 minute stops and recover close to 200 miles worth of driving range (assuming you're not driving at 80mph).
Within a few years we'll have 800 mile batteries which will allow sub 30 minute stop to recover 400+ miles worth of driving.
You do have a bladder, don't you ?
The real challenge with batteries is you can't quickly charge once above 75% state of charge (SOC).
But with a large enough battery one can come in at 10% SOC and get to 65% fairly quickly with the latest chargers.

You think 12 hour shifts are bad ?
Here in Brazil most doctors and nurses work on 24h shifts.
If you work 12h shifts you'll likely work just 2 or 3 days a week.
Most doctors work a single 24h shift/week plus 3 half days at an office.

No, not long term bad.
Long term bad is allowing billions of tons of coal ash to be produced and released into the environment. NOT STORED. RELEASED.
The world burns several billion tons of coal per year.
Over a decade that's at least a billion tons of coal ash produced.

Compared to that nuclear produces a tiny volume/mass of waste which is carefully stored.

If the priorities were sane, coal would be all retired, while nuclear would be kept running until renewables can actually take over (decades into the future).

Meanwhile energy prices are sky high because fossil fuel companies are holding the world hostage, speculating prices are going up. Likely in punishment for the world's decision to apparently actually put them on notice.

Just the billion tons of CO2 which will be replaced in the remaining lifetime of prematurely retired nuclear reactors is reason enough to keep those running.

Yeap, newly designed nuclear reactors are very late in US/European countries, while China is building them at much much lower delays. Because China skipped on the insane red tape created after TMI and Chernobyl. TMI (three mile island) was the accident that killed nobody and gave zero people cancer, but still paranoia ensued. Chernobyl was a massive fuck up by USSR which cared more about saving a few bucks than keeping their reactors running safely.

Bottom line is either we are serious about stopping climate change or not. If we are we need every single weapon we can use.

I don't actually support building new water cooled reactors. But the types I do support are very difficult to certify because nuclear regulators have become massive red tape organizations that seem to make their first priority killing nuclear power instead of allowing it to succeed.

All because nearly everybody that has an opinion about nuclear power has a negative one, but fails to provide any rational facts to support their opinion.
Its like people had are fearful of flying, regardless of the fact that only elevators are safer than aircraft (and probably some are still afraid of elevators).

The number of patients that were getting sicker and sicker and sicker without this drug, took it and now recovered is staggering.
The truth is this is dangerous, without medical supervision.
But it has already healed thousands.
So correlation isn't causation.
One can say that if the universe of treatments is a few hundred, maybe even a a couple thousand, but once it gets into much higher numbers and nobody dies after taking this drug, then its good enough to start mass treament.
Clinical trials are all great and good, and should be done, but start mass treatment NOW.
A lady age 92 survived COVID-19, taking Hydroxycloroquine. Humm that's good enough news.
And of course, I'm not a doctor. But I do understand the usefulness of the scientific method. Its awesome when there's time. But we don't have time.

Incorrect.
First as long as you run a reactor that has enough Plutonium isotopes other than the 239, you get reactor grade Plutonium. RG Pu is useless for nuclear weapons due to high risk of premature detonation and the weapon fizzling when used.
Second we don't need to use a breeder to use nuclear power in large scale.
We can run thermal spectrum molten salt reactors using Thorium+19.9% enriched Uranium that will always be denatured, aka the plutonium will be reactor grade all the time.
And the waste production will be an order of magnitude lower as the same fuel can be used for around 20 years.
And an MSR generates heat at around 600C vs 270C of water cooled reactors.
In the end we get around 10x more energy per ton of fuel fed to the reactor, aka 1/10th as much waste per TWh produced.
And 600C steam output is fundamental to offset fossil fuel consumption for process heat.
Every oil refinary, petrochemical plant, fertilizer plant, hydrogen making facility, ... Consumes a LOT of natural gas just to create heat for industrial processes. Using regular water cooled or even fast spectrum sodium reactors can't directly produce 600C heat (sodium can produce 350C heat).

Tesla Semi derived specs from announcement is 1000 kWh (one full megawatt hour).
Based on the announced prices Tesla either already has or expect soon to have much, much, much cheaper Lithium Ion packs compared with what is publicly speculated.
Tesla has been always ahead of that cost curve.
Time will tell but Elon Musk seems to always achieve what he promisses as long as you account for Elon time dilation.
Otherwise they couldn't promise a US$ 200k semi with a 1000kWh battery pack.

Your argument is nonsensical.
If energy is too expensive to do desal, than fresh water is far more valuable than energy.
Of course we could/should start doing indoors hydroponics to save on H2O consumption for farming but right now its only attractive for countries on desert land that must import most of its food production.
But it's tech that keeps getting cheaper.
Eventually we should make H2O more expensive in order to force the migration. It will give us food security.

Here in Brazil solar and wind is already cheaper than natural gas baseload. It only looses to old hydro plants.
Give it a few more years and new solar / new wind will be the cheapest way to add MWh to our grid.
Of course each grid is different. We have big hydro by the giga bucket to keep the grid stable.

You need an inverter that matches your production, not your demand. Its called grid tied net metering.
For instance, I need 3000-3500 kW PV production to meet my 600kWh/month demand. My peak demand is likely 4x as much, but I don't need a bigger inverter, unless I go off grid, which makes no sense right now.
Here in Brazil we must sell 100% of our grid tie production to the grid then buy it back as needed. So the Solar PV inverter has no job in consuming electricity at all.

No it won't max out. There's this thing called the PowerWall and PowerPack that fundamentally changes this whole debate. PowerWall 2.0 just came out, 14kWh storage, built in inverter, higher power. And the large scale PowerPack 2.0 now has 200kWh of storage at a lower $$$/kWh price.
No later than Q2 2017, the 3.0 versions will be announced which combined with either Tesla Solar Tiles or even cheaper solar PV will make living off grid almost as cheap as being connected to the grid.
American Samoa Ta'u now runs almost 100% on solar using the old Powerpack 1.0. Next comes Hawaii smaller islands. By 2020 a large chunk of tropical islands without grid connections to shore will be running on solar, its already cheaper to do solar than diesel.
I bet Hawaii will be 100% renewable before 2030. Not because solar is cute, but because it will be cheaper. That will also make solar cheaper to end consumers than being connected to the grid, including 2 days worth of battery storage.
PS: I'm also very much pro nuclear, but so far the nuclear industry is only humming in China/South Korea/India/Russia (mostly). It seems to be waiting for molten salt reactors and/or thorium.