This quote is probably worth noting:

Japan Steel Works is spending 80 billion yen ($864 million) at its Muroran plant in the country’s northern island of Hokkaido by March 2012 to increase capacity to make parts for 12 nuclear reactors a year, compared with 5.5 units now, the president said.

The investment will increase annual sales from Japan Steel Works’ cast and forged steel for electric and nuclear power to 70 billion yen from the year starting April 2012, up from 45.5 billion yen expected for the current year, Sato said.

This is important, you see, because we can’t make this part in America. Despite all the hype recently given over to the idea that we’ll be steadily building new nuclear power plants (and wind turbines and solar cells and lots of other, non-carbon based energy production mechanisms) in this country as a partial offset to our ever greater carbon emissions, it’s completely clear that we can’t and won’t be building very many nuclear reactors, if any at all. Simply put, we cannot because we cannot. We cannot cast the key component here. Meaning in this country, which, as we are constantly reminded, is supposedly superior in all respects. But rather it’s over in Japan, where Japan Steel Works is currently the only place that can cast these large, integral, and functionally irreplaceable single pieces. And, oh by the way, China has an interest in cornering some or all of their current and theoretical output:

The country has 9,100 megawatts of nuclear capacity and has approved the construction of additional reactors able to generate 25,400 megawatts, Sun Qin, then-deputy head of the National Energy Administration, said last month. China will issue a plan by the end of the year to push development of clean energy sources such as nuclear, wind, solar and hydro power.

The average time it took to build China’s first 10 nuclear reactors was 6.3 years, according to a report commissioned by the German environment ministry.

Gross domestic product in China expanded 7.9 percent in the second quarter as the economy rebounded from the weakest growth in almost a decade, boosted by stimulus spending.

“Similar to road and railway construction, nuclear energy is also part of China’s plans for a recovery after the economy slowed,” Sato said.

In fact, the entire future run of this component for five to ten years (or more) is already spoken for. Recovery X all over again. We need a new economy. We need to make things, preferably things that are in demand. You want a real National Security issue of the Call to Greatness kind? This is it.

A real country with functional leadership (and, uh, leaders) would be talking about this right now. Acting, right now. It will take decades to do even begin to do anything about it. Instead, we’ll spend those decades not doing anything while China (and the rest of the world) acts. As it stands right now, China looks to have the money, the power (both political and but more importantly: electrical) to be unassailably in ascendancy over the next 50 years. The US: not so much. We’ll be lucky to still be a reasonable tourist destination come 2050.

You might just take a look at what quantity of excess electrical power-generation the United States had on hand in 1940. What are a few of the more important war and/or peace projects that we carried off with that seemingly excess power capacity? Compare that situation with today’s. Then look at China. Who is better prepared for the future? To grow and locate a new market in an X-shaped recovery, in which the “old” jobs and the “old” economy simply never return? Just saying.
Then pause to consider this: which country is currently leading the world in wind turbine production? In solar cell production? GeoThermal? Hydroelectric? I’ll give you a hint: the United States isn’t even reliably in the Top 5 of those categories. Even from a purely capitalistic position: which countries are then better positioned to profit on the grand conspiracy that is climate change and carbon emissions reduction? Is it to be thought of as an a priori harmful concept to generate power from sources other than fossil fuels? Or to make and sell equipment to others who may wish to do likewise? Judging from our national posture, one could only assume it must be.

The Chinese and others have chosen their priorities and are working towards them. We have an inwardly focused, rotting core of a political system that is doing less than nothing about even setting national priorities, much less acting on them. Wonder who’s going to come out on top in that equation? Sure as hell won’t be America, home of Free Enterprise, with special emphasis on would, as in “theoretically could”:

Czech forges have said that they would be able to retool to build large reactor vessels within about two years.