Hopefully leading the way for us to catch up in the race for clean energy able to power first world economies, which nuclear does better than anything else, as France has shown us.
Stanley Crouch: Nuclear power to the people
By Stanley Crouch -
Published 12:00 am PST Saturday, December 29, 2007
China has just made a deal with Areva, a French nuclear-power company, and will pay it nearly $12 billion for two supposedly advanced nuclear reactors for an electrical utility.
The world significance of this could prove to not only be extraordinary, but good on fronts as apparently unconnected as the ecology of the world and the genocide in Darfur.
Outside of the arts, most of the thought that comes out of France is largely insipid. It has great style and a reputation for high fashion and good food, but its political thinking is given to pretending that it is still a world power, which it is not.
What France is, however, is forward-thinking. Quicker than any other Western nation, France realized the game set up by the world's oil barons had changed and that there were new bosses at the head of the game.
When France realized which way the oil was dripping and who was in charge of the faucet, the nation switched over from "black gold" to nuclear power. It was a move so brilliant that it is hard to believe that the French actually made it. But make it they did and went straight to the head of the post-petroleum class.
Nuclear power now accounts for 78 percent of what keeps the lights on and most of the nation's machinery running. Unlike Russia, France has not experienced a disaster like Chernobyl, which we could see in China because totalitarian leaderships are notoriously sloppy when it comes to looking out for their citizenry.
