How Dangerous Is the China-UK Nuclear Deal?

[cronus]

http://thediplomat.com/2015/10/chinas-d ... lear-deal/

China’s Dirty Money: How Dangerous Is the China-UK Nuclear Deal?

Pundits of all stripes in the U.K. have worked themselves into a lather over the announcement of old news that China would invest in a U.K. nuclear power plant which is due to begin producing electricity in 2025. In a visit to China last month, Chancellor George Osborne made a strategic investment agreement with Beijing for two additional nuclear power plants.

The news has been dramatized in the media which see the danger of China’s spy agencies taking control of or damaging the operating nuclear power plant during some sort of crisis. This produced the unusual event of GCHQ, Britain’s cyber espionage agency, saying to the press in response a week ago that it had a role in monitoring cyber security aspects of the country’s critical infrastructure. U.K. security agencies are genuinely concerned.

Throughout Asia, and in the United States, the military strategic implications of China’s expanding global investment portfolio have been a concern for some time, as the debate over Huawei investment in the United States and Australia shows. Yet BT (British Telecom) is one of Huawei’s best customers and it describes the Chinese firm as a trusted supplier of multi-billion pound contracts. In 2013, the U.K. government appears to have conceded that it did not give due security consideration to the 2005 contract with Huawei.

This same story is playing out in Australia right now with an “after-the-fact” controversy about the 99-year lease by a sub-national government (the Northern Territory) of part of Darwin harbor to a Chinese-owned firm. The Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Peter Jennings, has raised predictable concerns about apparent lack of high level ministerial scrutiny of the deal, suggesting that it should have been approved by the National Security Committee of Cabinet.

Jennings cited the following overarching concern:

We face an increasingly tough strategic competition between China and the US and its friends and allies. No one could confidently claim this competition wouldn’t give rise to open hostility.

The U.K.-China nuclear deal is particularly complicated by the fact that it is this sector that has been named by the United States as one of the main victims of Chinese commercial espionage by cyber means. Westinghouse nuclear power station secrets were among those that figured in the May 2014 indictment in a U.S. Federal Court, alleging that China was making commercial advantage over U.S. firms.

Moreover, a cyber attack on a Chinese nuclear power plant (in Hong Kong) provides the opening sequences of a movie released just this year, Blackhat. In 2014, the EastWest Institute called for international agreement to quarantine civil nuclear stations form cyber attack. So the nuclear cyber sector is definitely a live issue for China, its partners and all of us.

The mix of competing interests opposed to the U.K.-China nuclear deal has been enriched by environmentalists who have argued that Britain need not expose itself to any possible Chinese threat because it did not have to go down the nuclear energy path at all, and could rely instead on other renewable resources.

(continued)

[JimC]

I suppose I'll get used to eating rice with every meal...

[cronus]

I suppose I'll get used to eating rice with every meal...

I'm having some for dinner - Uncle Ben's made in Texas, no rice without risk...

[laklak]

I prefer Uncle Tom's rice.

[cronus]

I prefer Uncle Tom's rice.

He's the slave that took over the farm isn't he?

[mistermack]

I prefer Uncle Tom's rice.

He's the slave that took over the farm isn't he?

No, just the cabin.

I'm perfectly happy with China funding the power station. If you're going to borrow, does it matter who from?
Although we don't need nuclear. We should be fracking the ass off our own fossil deposits, and fuck the imaginary global warming.

[rainbow]

This is how imperialism works.

Next you'll have their missionaries over showing you how to have sex.

[cronus]

...they are well in already, the PR campaign. So long as you ask if they are valid party workers, who are regularly tested for STDs, no fear.

[rainbow]

...they are well in already, the PR campaign. So long as you ask if they are valid party workers, who are regularly tested for STDs, no fear.

你能说普通话？

[cronus]

Apparently they are going to build the new reactors out of foam polystyrene according to Private Eye. Should be up and running in no time.

[cronus]

Apparently they are going to build the new reactors out of foam polystyrene according to Private Eye. Should be up and running in no time.

[mistermack]

If they had had a speck of common sense, they should have looked on ebay.

The chinese are probably selling nuclear plants already, at one tenth of the price, with delivery three weeks via Hongkong.
It's always best to buy a spare though, just in case.