A Global military/consumer product "RDA" forming between China and GM?

[Exoblade]

Originally Posted by Niri Te

What if in exchange for them PROMISING in a "Treaty" of sorts, to NOT cash in the bonds for fifty years, we would help them bring up their nuclear power safety systems to state of the art levels, and help them build the safety systems of any plant that they chose to build, how ever many they chose to build for the next twenty years.

This wouldn't really work. Not only would it undermine the point of treasury bonds, it might reduce sales of them, hitting the american government ablity to fund itself. If you can't make a profit from the bonds why buy more.

Also the Chinese wants to be self-sufficent technolgically and so want their own scientists/companies to build their reactors. Letting foreign companies build the reactors would undermine this desire since it suggests that china is less advanced than the west.

Also reactor building would not really boast the growth of the middle class since it would be undertaken by a small number of constuction workers using machinery and the reactor itself would be built by highly specialised people who are already highly paid.

In deed a move away from coal for power genoration may have a negative effect for peoples standard of living since so many people are employed in mining and transporting coal for the powerstations. If the power stations go nuclear these people would have to find new jobs, some may actually suffer structural unemployment as the number of mining jobs can't not meet supply as china transfers its mining operations around the world. For this reason you could argue that the government has a reason to keep using coal to keep the workforce employed.