Slashdot Mirror
China To UK: 'Golden' Ties At Crucial Juncture Over Nuclear Delay (reuters.com)
mdsolar quotes a report from Reuters: China has cautioned Britain against closing the door to Chinese money and said relations were at a crucial juncture after Prime Minister Theresa May delayed signing off on a $24 billion nuclear power project. In China's sternest warning to date over May's surprise decision to review the building of Britain's first nuclear plant in decades, Beijing's ambassador to London said that Britain could face power shortages unless May approved the Franco-Chinese deal. "The China-UK relationship is at a crucial historical juncture. Mutual trust should be treasured even more," Liu Xiaoming wrote in the Financial Times. "I hope the UK will keep its door open to China and that the British government will continue to support Hinkley Point -- and come to a decision as soon as possible so that the project can proceed smoothly." The comments signal deep frustration in Beijing at May's move to delay, her most striking corporate intervention since winning power in the political turmoil which followed Britain's June 23 referendum to leave the European Union.
> The UK is mostly in a poor region for solar
Sure, but with utility installs at $1/Wp, that's actually a moot point. At this point a larger concern is lack of land.
> wind performance isn't exactly spectacular
The UK's average wind CF is 32% in 2014, which is slightly better than average. That is up significantly from previous years, due to the installation of newer (larger) turbines. It is also installing wind second only to Germany in Europe.
> They would have to install massive amounts of offshore wind overcapacity
Given that a wind turbine costs $1.50/Wp and a nuclear reactor $8.25/Wp, you can install 5.5 W of turbines for every W of reactor. With a CF of 32% vs. 72% for nuclear (old plants are terrible) that means the effective CAPEX cost is:
wind: $1.50 / .32 = $4.70 / Wc .80 = $10.30 / Wc
nuclear: $8.25 /
So wind costs less than half as much to build the same capacity. Moreover, in the last 25 years wind has decreased about three times in cost while nuclear has doubled. So, given a 10 year construction time for Hinkley C, these numbers will only get worse for nuclear. The decision is quite clear.
so far they've pursued their irresponsible dreams responsibly, that could change at any time
Mostly, from our point, yes. But probably many in in occupied Tibet or of the Uyghurs (and many other ethnical minorities) beg to differ.
We have to hope that is the case, but things can go from "let them have their pissing contest over some trash piles", to a complete war in a very short time. World War I is a good example of this, with "The Guns of August" being good documentation about how Europe went from the same family ruling every major country to pure chaos.
Plus, with the leadership we have in the US and Europe (think Chamberlain and appeasement updated for the 21st century, where if Iran mined the strait of Hormuz, Merkel, Obama, and other leaders would apologize to the Supreme Leader and pay Iran for the mines their ships got destroyed by), it is very easy for a belligerent power to run without any pushback whatsoever from the West. With the changing of the guard happening next January in the US, either candidate is going to continue the same foreign policies.
Time will tell. I hope it is just "OK, you guys are cool, we get that", and remains that way. However, it doesn't take much with all the global tensions for something relatively minor to catalyze a global conflict.
BS: China was hegemony in S. E. Asia to tell others what to do. It wants Taiwan. It wants all of the S. China Sea. It wants the U.S. far, far away and unable to protect S. Korea and Japan from Chinese military adventures. If it needs to go to war to get that and its Communist oiks still running the show, then it will do that. There will be no public opinion to oppose it since public opinion is not allowed in their kingdom.
Want to see what their view of S. E. Asia is? Look at Tibet and what they did to its people.
"But Nick Timothy, May's influential joint chief of staff, also said last year that security experts were worried the state-owned Chinese group would have access to computer systems that could allow it to shut down Britain's energy production.
"Rational concerns about national security are being swept to one side because of the desperate desire for Chinese trade and investment," Timothy wrote in October 2015 in a column for a conservative news and comment website. " http://www.reuters.com/article...
Sorry China not everyone's your bitch....