Japan Earthquake, Nuclear Energy and Reality

First off, my thoughts and prayers go out to all the Japanese people affected by Friday's massive earthquake.

Now, from the Twitter-sphere, I see that some Japanese people questioning the need for nuclear power.  We also see the Italians protesting against nuclear power in their own country.

Here's the reality: The current level of comfort that both the Japanese and Italians enjoy would not be possible without nuclear power.  Both countries have almost no indigenous sources of fossil fuel needed to generate the amount of energy consumed.  Renewable energy sources cannot scale up enough to meet those needs either.  Consider the fact that a generator powered by a wind-farm to provide base-load capacity would require either a coal or natgas-buring generator to work as a back-up due to the intermittent nature of winds.  Thus, without nuclear power, both countries would be dependent on the importation of fossil fuels to power their grid.  That, of course, is unacceptable to the Greenies with their claims of anthropogenic climate change due to CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

I guess a lot of people who complain against nuclear power do not have enough knowledge of electrical engineering to realise that their advocacy of alternative energy means a return to 17th century living standards.  There's absolutely nothing wrong in desiring a simpler, lower-energy existence.  But it is the height of lunacy to think that one can maintain modern levels of energy consumption without nuclear power or fossil fuels.  But I guess they won't realise this until Facebook or Twitter stops working due to the lack of power to run those massive server farms.

China as a rising power

Here in Singapore, the media (especially the Chinese language one) is basically very pro-government when it comes to covering news from China. In fact, listening to Mediacorp Capital Radio 95.8 FM's coverage of the recent Sino-Japanese diplomatic altercation gave me the impression that I was listening to the CCP Propaganda Department's press releases. Thankfully, Mediacorp's English language stations were slightly more balanced in their coverage.

Besides this, it appears to me that most Chinese Singaporeans accept the rise of China as a regional and potentially global power as an unalloyed positive thing, perhaps due to our cultural affinity and identification with our forefathers' homeland. Perhaps this is due to our failure to differentiate between China as a country and the Chinese Communist Party as a political power ruling the country.

In any case, the view of China even amongst our ASEAN allies is somewhat less sanguine than ours. Without the blinkers of cultural affinity, they are more likely to see objectively the threats that the CCP pose to regional security and stability, as evidenced by Vietnam building closer ties with the United States recently.

As such for alternative perspectives on China, I would like to share the following articles and blog posts:

The Nobel Prize and the CCP’s Ignoble Response

China's Playground Politics Bodes Ill for the Future

Is a rising China getting too big for its britches?

Perhaps it may also be useful to know that while the CCP has played hardball with the Japanese over the issue of China's 'territorial integrity', much to the pride of ethnic Chinese people everywhere, it had not advertised the fact that it had signed a treaty with Russia to renounce claims to 1.6 million square kilometres of land that once belonged to China up to the Qing Dynasty. Somewhat duplicitous, don't you think?

As Singaporeans, we would be well-served to remain prepared and vigilant about regional developments, and not to take regional stability for granted during this period of waning Western power and rising Chinese hegemony.