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Nuclear Energy Policy: China's ticket to Global Hegemony

Erik Townsend

Dec 19

 

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Executive summary

Global dominance/hegemony derives from military invincibility, which derives from economic dominance, which in turn derives from Energy Dominance. Net result: the nation that has the best energy strategy, policy, and resources ultimately rules the world. China’s far-superior nuclear energy policy initiatives are set to enable China to displace USA as global hegemon within two decades. The reasons are nuanced and require considerable elaboration (below, in this post).

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What determines Global Hegemony

War is a barbaric practice we humans are sadly prone to as a result of evolving from lower primates. We perceive that to dominate the world in terms of power, the way to get there is to have a stronger military and “kick ass” on the battlefield. But any sane analysis of history and macroeconomics yields a very different set of conclusions.

Global dominance is indeed determined by military dominance in the sense of a nation becoming “militarily invincible”. That’s true, like it or not. But war itself is unnecessary if one nation is truly invincible to the point nobody dares mess with them. USA enjoyed that status for decades, leading to the current environment of extreme complacency.

Most Americans assume that “USA is #1, and nobody can touch us because our military will kick their ass!”. But even top U.S. military officials have publicly stated the exact opposite: China and Russia have already leapfrogged U.S. military dominance with superior hypersonic weapons systems and first-strike capabilities that defeat the design of U.S. missile defenses.

Cause & Effect: How is invincibility achieved?

The essential point to understand is, how does a nation achieve military invincibility? The answer is that it costs a shitload of money, so you have to first achieve economic dominance in order to achieve military dominance. And without a doubt, the reason USA was militarily dominant for decades (before being leapfrogged by China and Russia’s superior hypersonic weapons) centers entirely on USA’s historic economic dominance.

The next important question becomes How does a nation achieve economic dominance? To be sure, U.S. entrepreneurship and the legal system and capital formation system that enabled it had a lot to do with American economic exceptionalism in the 20th century. But the much more important contributor was Energy Dominance. U.S. ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and capital formation all contributed to the discovery of rock oil (petroleum) and the means to refine it into liquid fuels first being discovered and exploited in USA. That’s the “big win” that made the U.S. the most powerful nation both economically and militarily for decades.

My biggest prediction

The nation that makes the best and most efficient use of nuclear energy will dominate the rest of the world as global hegemon for centuries to come. USA was set to win this title, having invented nuclear energy and then having developed a brilliant nuclear energy strategy (on a technical level) in the 1950s and 1960s. But horrendous policy errors in the 1970s forfeited U.S. global dominance to whomever picked up USA’s botched nuclear energy program and continued with the simple steps of implementing the plan that U.S. nuclear scientists already had figured out by 1970.

That this scenario would take decades to play out should come as no surprise at all. While US nuclear scientists had all the technical details sorted out by 1970, a full-scale implementation of a breeder-reactor centric nuclear strategy was fully understood to require several decades of investment and financial subsidy. Nothing unexpected about that part.

But that USA would completely and totally botch nuclear energy from a policy perspective and effectively hand the entitlement of global hegemony to whichever nation was first to pick up the pieces of USA’s botched nuclear energy program and build it out themselves is something that only President Jimmy Carter could screw up as badly as he did. And boy, did he ever...

China’s Global Dominance won’t come from novel invention; sane policy alone will suffice

China began picking up the pieces of USA’s botched nuclear energy program decades ago, and is well along the way to achieving global energy dominance. Once they achieve energy dominance, economic outperformance and then military invincibility will soon follow. (By ‘soon’ in this context I mean within a decade or two).

China has more conventional nuclear reactors planned or under construction than the entire U.S. nuclear fleet. And they’re building U.S.-designed reactors for a small fraction of what it costs Americans to build our own designs. Yet American policymakers hardly take notice!

On the advanced nuclear front, China is WAY ahead. Their TMSR-LF1 molten salt Thorium reactor is still only at prototype stage, but a Thorium-based breeder reactor economy is exactly what could fast-forward China to global energy dominance, soon to be followed by economic and then military dominance over the entire planet.

Frequently quoted statements that China has enough Thorium under its soil that it could mine to power the entire planet for thousands of years are accurate, but miss the real point: China doesn’t need to mine any Thorium. They have enough thorium in the tailings ponds of their existing rare earth elements mines to power China for the next 100+ years, making it global hegemon in the process. They literally don’t need to build a single mine to source enough Thorium nuclear fuel to do this.

Where will the technology innovation needed to pull off this monumental achievement come from? Simple: China needed only to pick up the Thorium breeder reactor development strategy that USA abandoned for stupid political reasons in the early 1970s. All they needed to do was pick up the abandoned reactor designs of Dr. Alvin Weinberg (U.S. Oak Ridge National Laboratory chief in the 1960s), and commercialize what was already designed in Oak Ridge, TN before I was even born. And I’m 60 years old!

The Fix is In

And that’s precisely what China is doing right now. They’ve already announced plans to build a fleet of container ships powered by Thorium Molten Salt Reactors. They even said “This has consequences well beyond commercial shipping”. What they meant was that the same reactors will also power their next generation of aircraft carriers and battleships.

Energy policy matters far more than almost anyone appreciates, and China’s strategic vision completely trumps everyone else’s, including USA’s. They’re not even “stealing our IP” to do this. They’re just picking up publicly available designs that USA abandoned in the early 1970s for the stupidest political reasons.

China is well on its way to achieving the global energy dominance that will lead to Chinese economic dominance, which in turn will lead to China becoming the 21st century equivalent to what USA was for the latter half of the 20th century: The indisputable global military hegemon.

All because we handed them the keys to the kingdom (breeder reactor technology) on a silver platter, whilst not developing it ourselves due to our own stupidity. We have only ourselves to blame.

The only hope we have (that I can see) is that U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright is the first Energy Secretary in my lifetime to be smart enough to “get” all of this, and I’m convinced he already does. But China has a huge lead already, and we have a lot of catching up to do.