China has been run by technocrats for the last couple decades. Most of the current leadership has more of a political background, but president Xi Jinping has a chemical engineering degree.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/211...

"from 1997 to 2007, all of the top leaders sitting on the innermost Standing Committee shared an engineering background"

Xi Jinping never practiced as a chemical engineer, however, being an anointed princeling destined for officialdom (and of course, he had to delay his education because of the CR). Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin are better examples, actually having worked as engineers for a number of years before becoming politicians.

Hard to use princeling in the sense to convey privilege here. His father was sentenced to labor camp during the Cultural Revolution and he himself worked in forced labor for seven years:

"The father was detained and imprisoned and spent 16 years in a labor camp, plunging the family into poverty. During the Cultural Revolution, a 15-year-old Mr. Xi was banished to a poverty-stricken village in northern China where, for seven years, he labored with peasants, eating corn chaff bread and sleeping in a flea-infested bed."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/opinion/chinas-heir-appare...

Yes, but he was quickly rehabilitated after Mao’s death, and anyways, everyone was in the same boat.

Xi is the canonical example of his so named “lost generation:” forced to leave high school early, sent down to the country side, rehabilitated and given basically an cursory education as a legacy admit to Tsinghua. He is the first Chinese leader since Mao who can’t speak a word of English, less educated than his predecessors, more autocratic (vs. Hu), less outspoken (vs. Jiang) and more on ideological message.

China is run by politicians not technocrats, but they are measured on success more than populist vote which has some interesting trade-offs.

They must have degrees in grafting because that seems to be the only real engineering going on in the upper circles.

They have a different perception towards the human life. There's no way anyone would allow this in America because of the potential for catastrophic failures outweigh the benefits.

You have to understand the fundamental difference between the two countries on a cultural and government level. Chinese people are more than happy to submit to the government as in the neo-confucian sense, the state is the provider, the father, the protector. This is what most Koreans thought too during the early days of dictatorship era that brought tremendous economic uplift.

So it's obvious that China would be more daring in areas where the US would not but because they view the cost of human lives differently.

For instance, the leave no man behind, is not unique to the US military but seldom executed because of the sheer logistical and cost-benefit analysis. In any case, you hear routinely hear Russian soldiers being left to die in Chechnya, Crimea, and now Syria.

I'm sure the Chinese government doesn't care about human lives that much, but it's irrelevant when talking about nuclear power. The total radiation-related death by Fukushima disaster is estimated to be ~130[1]. For comparison, "A 2013 study by MIT indicates that 53,000 early deaths occur per year in the United States alone because of vehicle emissions."[2]

Most likely, using these reactors and having a nuclear accident will still kill less people than using fossil fuels to heat the same homes and not having any accident.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaust_gas

When a government doesn't care about their citizens because there's "too many of them" you get stuff like this (http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/23/asia/china-organ-harvesting/in...). So, of course they are going to be more willing to ignore basic human rights to achieve their goals. I'm not saying the US is innocent either, privatized prisons targeting African and Latin Americans to benefit shareholders of those private companies is legalized genocide (how many fatherless black children growing up in the ghetto are equipped to adjust to mainstream society)?

There is a lot of misinformation regarding the Fukushima disaster if you dig around and the long term effect on the population near that region is not being addressed and being covered up. Their exposure to the radiation will not show immediately as in most nuclear disasters but at a delayed rate after it takes a toll on their bodies. This type of silence is typical of the Japanese where they will hide mistakes for as long as it's tolerated (ex. Kobe Steel etc).

I don't think it's safe to look at Fukushima and say "oh only 100 ppl died its safe" to justify proliferation of nuclear reactors because the damages are not limited to those loss of life. Germany understands this and lot of European countries are moving away from Nuclear power altogether.

Oh yes, people surely love to claim Fukushima is being covered up, and I'm sure many Japanese politicians and businesspeople are being dishonest and trying to cover up their asses, but let's be real. Japan is a dense and well-connected country, and it's been six years. If the deaths and destruction predicted by doomsayers have any basis in reality, we should have seen a glimpse of it by now.

(But the very fact that no such thing is happening is of course considered an evidence of cover-up. How you are going to cover up a thousand leukemia deaths in Japan is left as exercise for the reader.)

Sadly, I do believe many Fukushima residents will suffer long-term health effects, which is inevitable when you've been told a hundred times how your body was irradiated by death rays and you will have cancer as a result. It was a major issue following Chernobyl as well[1]:

> A number of adolescents and young adults who have been exposed to modest or small amounts of radiation feel that they are somehow fatally flawed and there is no downside to using illicit drugs or having unprotected sex. To reverse such attitudes and behaviours will likely take years (...)

I hold those anti-nuclear activists at the same level of contempt as peddlers of homeopathy and other natural woo. These activists likely caused greater harm to children of Fukushima prefecture than the accident itself, by making them believe they are irrevocably harmed and their lives will be stunted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Other_healt...

Thank you for writing that. We need more people like you to help the human species mitigate this race to the bottom (no technology, no healthcare, no compassion/humanity in activism).

> There's no way anyone would allow this in America because of the potential for catastrophic failures outweigh the benefits.

The perception of the potential for catastrophic failure outweighs the benefits.

Given it’s an unpressurised rector that doesn’t boil the working fluid the potential for a serious accident is very low compared to a high pressure reactor. It can easily be passively cooled and shutdown heat decay can be handled without much fuss. That’s why most research reactors are of this type.

The problem with nuclear power, and in this case heating, is humans are extraordinarily bad at estimating risk.

> That’s why most research reactors are of this type.

but how many nuclear accidents have we had because of this "safe" design?

Because of the design? None. In fact the Canadian-designed SLOWPOKE reactor (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLOWPOKE_reactor) is licensed to run unattended overnight - it is only passively cooled and increased temperature results in a negative feedback loop.

An unpressurised light water reactor is an inherently safe design. The rate of reaction depends on liquid water being present, steam will stop the reaction.

Nuclear power doesn't have to be dangerous, and even now more people die due to coal power (including mining and pollution effects) each year than ever have due to nuclear power.

If you compare US an Chinese total coal usage, the US is actually down significantly more than China. This is despite the US price being cut in half since 2008 peak.

https://www.quandl.com/data/EIA/COAL-US-Coal-Prices-by-Regio...

Yeah, it certainly wags its tongue suggestively towards the old idea of a benevolent & competent dictatorship as the most effective form of government.

>> Stuff like this makes me feel western countries really underestimate Chinese tech chops.

The west largely underestimates Chinese tech chops b/c they steal so much of our IP...

Their ability is evident in the number of Ph.D's they turn out, so why don't they invest in developing their own technology instead of stealing everyone else's? "Catching up" is not an acceptable answer with how much intellectual firepower they have.

Because it's easier to 'steal'? Their laws are different so they don't see it as stealing and have no problem with it. Each country is unique and I'm happy US can't force their IP laws to everyone around the world.

You know that exactly the same argument was made against the US, Germany, and Japan at different points in time, right?

It's coined "piggyback economy" where the first move innovator ends up absorbing all the risks in developing the product and getting it to the market. The second mover then simply improves on the original product likely with ton of issues as they have to distribute their resources throughout the full journey the product makes it from the drawing board to the consumer. The market is there and the second mover is able to "catch up" when the product is as good if not better in quality which finally leads to the exit of the first innovator signaling new entrants that will put pressures on the second innovators margins.

Lots of original research in the US is done by Chinese PhDs. Have you not done your research? So is it really stealing? Or the US is taking advantage of the best and brightest from China?

Because its not efficient, why reinventing the wheel ?

Problem is that they've already caught up. Now they are competing and passing in some areas.