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"
"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...
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.
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.
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.
but how many nuclear accidents have we had because of this "safe" design?
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.
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...
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.
(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...
https://www.quandl.com/data/EIA/COAL-US-Coal-Prices-by-Regio...
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.