China did adopt nuclear. They are building 15 nuclear power plants right now, more than anyone else in the world, and almost a third of all the plants under construction. It's just their needs grow very, very fast, so they make it up with coal.
From what I can tell from a quick google search, China has over 1000 coal plants, and is building almost 200 more [2]. The fact that China is building 15 nuclear plants instead of 150 feels like they're only dipping their toes into nuclear, not fully adopting it.
And it looks like the US has about 50 nuclear plants, with only 2 more under construction [3], so they're doing better than us, but that's a low bar.
They are however also designing and building their own molten salt reactors and are building next gen reactors on the pebble bed design.
So I think that somewhat excuses their lack of scale for now as they probably want to get operating experience with these technologies before scaling much harder than that.
Meanwhile Californians will tell us to manage power and power cuts.
I can’t get behind this agenda. It’s infuriating to see the west considering itself done. It’s in the name “Developed”, past tense. No need to develop anymore. We’ve thrown in the towel, large swaths of people are against population growth and against progress.
> large swaths of people are against population growth and against progress
Population growth is largely irrelevant unless you're really facing an extinction path (which we're very far from). The standard of living that can be delivered for people is what matters.
Modestly fewer people with increased standards of living is a very nice outcome for most nations. Some nations are drastically overpopulated in terms of density for their available space and resources (eg India, China). If you're in a more affluent context, having four or more children is not a blessing for most people. Raising two children well is a quite difficult and life-consuming task, even if one parent stays home full-time. It makes perfect sense that affluent populations would choose to reproduce at a lower rate. It's rational.
That said it's certainly disheartening to see the lack of spirit of seeking progress that used to widely exist in the West. It's still there, faintly, diminished.
Most economists think that population decline is tightly coupled with the economy. It may be rational in individual sense, but as a society, it is pretty much a bad idea.
> Most economists think that population decline is tightly coupled with the economy
To be fair, what “mosts economists think” tends to have fairly weak empirical support on purely matters that are purely internal to the narrow sense of the economy, and it only gets worse on economic connections to broader social phenomena. (And that's not even counting overtly ideological schools of economics like Austrian economics, where beliefs aren't even in principal empirically grounded.)
OTOH, there's a reasonably strong case to be made that reduced incentive for population growth is an effect of strong social saftey nets.
