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Trump's Tech Battle With China Roils Bill Gates Nuclear Venture (wsj.com)
Add Bill Gates to the list of executives whose businesses have been ensnared by the Trump administration's battle with China over technology and trade. From a report: The tech tycoon and philanthropist said in an essay posted late last week that a nuclear-energy project in China by a company he co-founded called TerraPower LLC is now unlikely to proceed because of recent changes in U.S. policy toward China [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. That leaves TerraPower, which had been working on the China project for more than three years, scrambling for a new partner and uncertain where it might be able to run a pilot of the nuclear reactor it has been developing, according to company officials.
Mr. Gates, TerraPower's chairman, helped start and fund the Bellevue, Wash., company, which incorporated in 2008, in a long-term bid to make nuclear reactors smaller, less expensive and safer than current nuclear energy sources. The company has been developing something called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses depleted uranium as fuel, something that TerraPower says can improve safety and reduce costs. Regulatory restrictions and limited federal funding made building the facility in the U.S. difficult and led TerraPower to look for partners abroad, Chief Executive Chris Levesque said in an interview.
Mr. Gates, TerraPower's chairman, helped start and fund the Bellevue, Wash., company, which incorporated in 2008, in a long-term bid to make nuclear reactors smaller, less expensive and safer than current nuclear energy sources. The company has been developing something called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses depleted uranium as fuel, something that TerraPower says can improve safety and reduce costs. Regulatory restrictions and limited federal funding made building the facility in the U.S. difficult and led TerraPower to look for partners abroad, Chief Executive Chris Levesque said in an interview.
More people should appreciate Bill Gates. He brought us crippleware computers with perpetual spyware and adware and made the masses of low-IQ users love it by having his company lie about it.
Given how the chinese treat IP; isn't this a favor?
Basically they'd build the reactor in china, and within 2 weeks the plans and technical details would be 'appropriated' by the Chinese government.
Basically all that R&D wasted. Just because they aren't shooting at us (yet) doesn't make them an ally, or even a remotely-friendly country.
It's fundametally dangerous to transfer tech to an evil totalitarian coomunist regime that has a dictator-for-life and is trying to spread its influence globally.
These CEOs of western tech companies who have been giving China high tech as part of a trade for Chinese slave labor have been setting all the pieces in place that may eventually lead to another World War, just as businessmen both technology and materials with Japan and Germany prior to WWII provided those nations with what they needed to assert their expansionist dreams. The people who pay the price for this borderline treasonous behavior will be the middle class western workers who lost their jobs to the Chinese laborers, or the keds of the workers who paid the price.
Bill Gates got rich in America, selling products to Americans. If he had a shred of decency and loaylty, he would do his research in America with American workers.
Incidentally, if he had arisen in Canada or the UK, then I would say he should be doing his work there using those workers; my concern here is the safety and security of western civ versus fuelling the expansion of China's current evil (as opposed to a pure 'Murica! play).
Before Trump: Slashdot and Media: We're worried about China, they don't play fair , steal our tech, and they have horrible human rights and they destroy our jobs in exchange for cheap trinkets. We should restrict ties with them. After Trump: Slashdot and Media: I LOVE CHINA: UNLIMITED OPENNESS OF ALL OUR SECRETS AND EXCHANGE OF EVERYTHING 4EVA!
And someone needed a PC excuse to cut and run. Good business acumen. Laughs about it over drinks later. Amazing how many here don't have a clue how the world works for real. Downvoting begins now.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Statistics show that trains spill oil 34 times more than pipelines, resulting in 7 times the amount of oil spilled. Pipelines are safer you twit. All it will take is one train in the Thompson or Fraser Rivers and goodbye one big salmon ecosystem. Bitumen in trains is still diluted too, just not quite as much as for pipelines.
https://www.theglobeandmail.co...
There are too many idiots who are know it all environmentalists because they watch a radical Suzuki who only cries about the sky falling (so get rid of people's jobs) with no solutions. And if it's not them, it's paid American 'environmentalists' who come up to protest Canadian pipelines. Sometimes I wonder if the Koch brothers pay them to keep their American interests in front of the Canadian oil interests. The irony is that Canada won't be able to afford to develop green alternatives if it isn't making any money (selling oil).
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Who is better?
a) An anti nuclear nimby who nows nothing about it
b) A pro nuclear idiot who knows nothing about it
???
Both vote. Some guys in the b) bracket even get hired ... and there is the problem.
From a risk management point of view: b) is the bigger risk.
Obviously there are two other groups: ... if you would not write so much nonsense about nuclear, I perhaps had put you here)
c) Anti nuclear protagonists who actually know their stuff, like Merkel
d) Pro nuclear protagonists who know their stuff (don't know/remember one in that bracket
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.