We're talking about a Chinese thorium reactor, not the US political system here.
Yup, and also way safer since molten salt will solidify when the reactor turns off. Another huge benefit is that you don't need a large body of water near by for cooling, meaning these reactors can be deployed a lot more widely.
It seems like they fully expected China and India to fall in line fearing secondary sanctions, and yeah once that didn't happen it was gg well played. Also, completely agree that anybody with a functioning brain could've predicted this outcome.
I suspect that what we're seeing is the effect of creating really good propaganda and echo chambers. The people in charge in the west started drinking their own kool aid at some point.
Incidentally, China's already leading in LLMs :) https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/china-leads-world-adoption-generative-ai-survey-shows-2024-07-09/
That would indeed be the case, and agree that would be a huge development.
It's a massive increase from peace time, but it's a tiny percentage of the overall economy. The point here is that the overall economy in Russia is very obviously not driven by the military industry. The reality is that 6% of the economy is negligible in practice.
That's just copium from FT, the military industry is like 6% of the overall economy. The west keeps trying to frame it as if Russia has a war economy, but it's just not the case in practice.
My view is that preventing economic integration of Europe with Russia and China was one of the main motivations on the part of the US. However, I also think that they initially believed that Russian economy would collapse in a few months once they cut Russia out of the western financial system. This idea was premised on using nominal GDP to evaluate economies, which has become part of mainstream dogma in the west. Russia has always been dismissed as a gas station with nukes, and its economy was supposed to be comparable to that of Italy. This is basically why the Europeans got onboard with the project. The promise was that Russian economy collapses under sanctions, and then they'd get the repeat of the 90s where western companies would get to plunder Russia.
Obviously things haven't worked out that way, but I do think that US likely sees this as the least worst option. They're going to lose the war, but they got to plunder what's left of the European industry, and destroyed European economy for decades to come. This is basically US doing a scorched earth strategy as they retreat from the European theatre.
I would guess all of them
Right, China would be stupid not to do that given how things unfolded with Russia and US openly talking up war with China now.
Indeed, next decade should be pretty exciting for nuclear power.