China Nuclear Power Poised for Export in `Self-Reliance’ Bid

Bloomberg: China is gearing up to become the world’s biggest producer and operator of nuclear plants. The country plans to build about 30 new reactors by 2020, at a cost totaling 450 billion yuan ($61 billion). Deals signed this year with Westinghouse Electric Co. and Areva SA will put the Chinese in position to copy the latest technology. Its biggest threat may be as a competitor in selling the $3 billion to $5 billion nuclear plants at home and abroad. China’s atomic industry may follow the copy-and-compete blueprint laid out by local makers of cars, drugs and coal-fired power plants says Bloomberg’s Dune Lawrence and Alan Katz.
See also:
Stronger Future for Nuclear Power Physics Today, February 2006
Nuclear Power to Explode in India, but China Prefers Coal New Picks, October 2007
Africa’s Pursuit of Nuclear Power, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, November 2007

New Findings Underscore an Earth-Venus Kinship

The New York Times: In a news conference at the Paris headquarters of the European Space Agency, the scientists, working on the agency’s Venus Express mission, played up the Venus-as-Earth’s-twin angle in presenting their newest findings, including signs of lightning, surprising swings of temperature and additional evidence that Venus could have once had oceans the size of Earth’s.

Famous Physicist’s Hands Not So Dirty

ScienceNow: It’s not quite a rehabilitation. But a new study clears Dutch physics Nobel laureate Petrus “Peter” Debye of the most serious accusations that arose last year after publications about his past in Nazi Germany. Debye, who succeeded Albert Einstein at the helm of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin in 1934, was not an anti-Semite or a Nazi, the study concludes–but it knocks him for opportunism.