I know you're being sarcastic, but the first time I read this I was horrified.

https://cepr.net/newsroom/new-...

A new study published in the British medical journal The Lancet Global Health finds that unilateral economic sanctions lead to about 564,000 excess deaths around the world each year. The findings, by economists Mark Weisbrot, Francisco Rodríguez, and Silvio Rendón, show that this human toll is roughly equivalent to total deaths from wars, including civilian casualties, and is more than the annual number of battle-related casualties.

Most of the sanctions-related deaths in the five decades after 1970 were children under the age of five.

https://kdwalmsley.substack.co...

Exports of Western nuclear technology and equipment to China are under heavy sanction by Western governments.

The Chinese nuclear industry responded by building an ecosystem and supply chain that is almost entirely domestic, and self-sufficient.

This was shocking even to top Western experts, who now concede that China's nuclear programs are best in class, while the industry is stagnating in North America and Europe.

Consequently, China's universities for nuclear engineering now lead the world.

China also seems to have broken the "Cost Escalation Curse" that typifies power projects elsewhere. Chinese firms build new plants far more quickly, and at far lower price points, than were believed possible.

China is now exporting reactors, technology, and talent to friendly countries, while Western regulators are closing off its access to more affordable and faster Chinese tech.

I've noticed in the past that you seem consistently to denigrate anything that points at China having advanced at all since the 1980s, I'd encourage you to check out Kevin Wamsley's Substack page. Yes, he's exceedingly optimistic but his articles are backed by voluminous documentation. This one is pertinent to the current discussion.

https://kdwalmsley.substack.co...

Well don't worry because right now you're only dumb. A human brain cannot be conscious without a LOT of biological resources that ensure most of it is functioning and both electrically and chemically active, both things that these brains don't have. Your concerns are about as warranted as concerns that you might wake up as an LLM because an LLM was trained on your slashdot posts.

Nuclear won't be economically viable IN THE US, ever

FTFY

In China they're seen as such a good investment that they're building more right now than the rest of the world combined has since the 1970s, and exporting them. The primary issue building them in the US is lawyers.

This has been done for years around the world. It's only new to the US because our government health protection programs are almost nonexistent.

Sucking blood and causing the death of millions? Politicians are their primary competitor.

Then you don't know the US healthcare system very well, something inexpensive, effective, and easy to implement is anathema to the insurance cartels which control it.

The ones they know about . . .

Your ignorance is rather impressive in a way. If you'd like to educate yourself as to the actual technological progress in he world the journal of the International Electronics and Electrical Engineers Association is a good place to start:

spectrum.ieee.org

So you're happy to just ignore the fact that millions of people around the world are happily making this work already and instead pretend that your objections are somehow going to stop deployment of renewable energy in the Third World. That's a, well, "unique" attitude.

All of your pseudo-'concerns' are being dealt with, by whatever method is most appropriate for the locality.

As far as solar panels in Tornado Alley, go ask the operators of the giant solar and wind farms being constructed in Texas. Besides, there's nowhere in Africa which gets tornadoes or hurricanes like the southern US anyway.

One of the issues with integrating renewable energy into the North American grid is the 'sunk cost' of all that cruft of installed hardware. Another is the accounting/tax requirements, and yet another is the organizational structures of the US energy system. Transformers are expected to last 20+ years for example, no executive is going to forgo their quarterly bonus by replacing "dumb" transformers that haven't been fully depreciated for "smart" ones that can deal with variable energy flows.

There aren't any of those obstructions in Africa. Much of the continent is essentially "green fields" construction, which is always an order of magnitude easier to deal with.

This is a very cool and worthy project but damn if they didn't build this thing terribly because it's 179 gigabytes. I would love to tell you why exactly it's bloated as hell (I have some good guesses) but I can't even view the contents because you have to download it as a 127GiB zip file! To be honest, I'm pretty sure about 5GiB is actual OS data while the rest is an ungodly amount of packaging.

I have no doubt there is a better way to accomplish this task because this is obscene.