Part 25 - China vs. Asia, Canada Takes Over The Nuclear World and America's Democratic Revolution
Part 25 - China vs. Asia, Canada Takes Over The Nuclear World and America's Democratic Revolution
It's always said that you cannot keep people down forever, and having spent most of the 20th Century under communist rule only to have its first attempt to open up to the world completely ruin by Tiananmen Square and the Hong Kong Crisis in 1989-90, the People's Republic of China had by the middle of the 2000s figured out what had been lost from their turn back towards authoritarianism fifteen years prior, and was keen to allow the memories of Tiananmen Square to be forgotten. Hu Jintao, who led China from 2003 until 2012, was more aware of this than most, and his leadership saw China open up its borders and indeed its society to foreign ideas and investment, but they quickly ran into issues with Commonwealth, Asian and some American firms for demands for the Chinese partner corporate bodies to have access to the intellectual property of their proposed partners, something that grew to be seriously disapproved of by many corporate bodies. Despite the troubles, Jintao's leadership time in China saw both consensus for the future of the country, massive economic growth and a sizable growth in the country's power in economic, social, diplomatic and military forms.
For the Commonwealth, the issue of Hong Kong complicated the relationship between the Commonwealth and China, but since the establishments of naval and air bases in Hong Kong in the 1990s and re-establishment of the Royal Navy's Pacific Fleet as a way of supporting the United Kingdom's far-off city and Hong Kong's 1990s and 2000s development of a "fight-or-flight" attitude when dealing with the governments of the mainland, Hong Kong's position was far more stable than it had once been, and the steady development of a democratically-elected Hong Kong Legislative Assembly in the 1990s had made sure that the city's views were well-known. While Hong Kong made no particular moves towards independence during this time, among most Hong Kongers the idea of integration into a China ruled by the Chinese Communist Party was seen as unthinkable, almost traitorous, and the city's own movements in the 1990s and 2000s were meant to grow the city's independence, including the growth of high-tech and biotech industries as well as becoming one of the world's leaders in the STEM fields. Even as relations between Hong Kong and China slowly normalized in the 2000s, the idea of a return to Chinese control was seen as unthinkable by Hong Kongers, even as Jintao's successor, Xi Jinping, dramatically shifted the goalposts with regards to relations between China and the rest of the world.
While Jintao had been keen on consensus-based rule and diplomacy with the powers around it, Xinping had no such illusions and was only too proud to take China's growing power and use it to forcefully exert influence, actions that by the late 2010s had made China's relations with Hong Kong and Taiwan once again grow colder and made Japan and Korea seriously begin talks for mutual defense and trade alliances, alliances that by 2020 had grown to include Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand and Australia, with the Commonwealth and the United States watching with interest. It ended up by 2020 becoming something of a stalemate, as Beijing saw the rest of Asia as seeking to stop China's growth in power and the rest of Asia saw China's actions as inflammatory and unnecessary, particularly Japan (whom Beijing had had rocky relations with for most of the time since World War II) and Hong Kong.
Japan indeed had become a completely different place than the islands China had once fought a bitter, war crimes-filled conflict with 75 years prior. Having had its sense of racial supremacy completely destroyed by World War II and the knowledge of its crimes against other nations having long since become a national shame that all of Japan up to and including its Emperor had spent many years seeking to atone for, Japan had begun landmark changes to its laws on nationality and immigration in 1964, smoothly and steadily opening the doors to new arrivals, a flow that grew dramatically in the 1980s during Japan's bubble era and had been steady since then, resulting in Japan by 2010 having nearly 12% of its population be people of other backgrounds, who in 1989 were finally allowed to become full Japanese citizens without having to adopt a fully Japanese identity, something that had been allowed for Zainichi Koreans since 1964 but which was now being spread to just about anyone who was willing and able to integrate into Japanese society. This move, initially controversial, became a much bigger positive after the bursting of the Japanese asset bubble in 1990-91 found them with vast assets that they either had to sell off (frequently at a massive loss) or make work as part of the corporations' assets, moves that made involvement in Japanese society by those from other parts of the world much more common partly out of necessity. By the late 1990s racism in Japan had become highly uncommon, especially towards those who spoke fluent Japanese (which virtually all immigrants to Japan did, as it made coming to the country far easier) and those who had positions of authority. Japan's aging population made immigration much more common, as Japan's government did not wish to sacrifice its influential and powerful society to an aging population. This dramatic change had manifested itself in ever-greater connections between Japan and other nations, with Canada and Australia becoming two of the nations most favored by Japan and its citizens, particularly as English had by 2000 become the most common second language spoken by Japanese citizens and was seen by then as a sign of a highly-educated individual. If anything, that Commonwealth connection also filtered down to Hong Kong, as by the 2010s Japan was easily the single biggest investor in the city outside of China or the Commonwealth.
Korea was rather behind Japan in the adaptation of aspects of foreign life, but they made up for it in the "Korean Wave" that began first in Japan and Taiwan in the 1990s and then rapidly spread across the world. The Seoul Olympics in 1988 had been the point where Korea began to boot open the doors and allow its people access to the world around them in a big way, and it showed. The Koreans were hard workers even by the standards of Asians, and their growth from one of the world's poorest countries at the end of the Korean War in 1951 to one of its richest in 2001 despite being poor in natural resources was in many ways a success brought on by hard work and preserverence, and the proud Koreans weren't afraid to show it, though Korea rarely showed the levels of bigotry that had once existed in Japan, a result of having been the victims of decades of discrimination by the Japanese in the first half of the 20th Century. The Koreans did follow the Japanese in allowing immigration to their country as well, things weren't quite so smooth as in Japan, but despite that the Koreans too were plenty capable of holding their own in the world - and the Korean Wave also had the effect of growing the relationship between the two nations, that by the 2000s was seen as a relationship of equals.
This became most clearly seen in the aftermath of the Tohuku Earthquake and Tsunami in 2011. The titanic earthquake, the most powerful ever recorded in Japan measuring 9.1 on the Richter scale, produced a tsunami that was in some places over 120 feet high and reached over 10 kilometres inland, devastating the city of Sendai and hundreds of other communities - and worse, it caused the massive nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the tsunami destroying the plant's backup power systems, causing three simultaneous meltdowns at the three of the power plant's reactors, leading to three hydrogen explosions and major releases of radioactive materials from the facility. The tsunami claimed nearly 16,000 lives and caused over $200 Billion in damage, and that didn't count the damage from the Fukushima Daiichi power station, the radioactivity forced the evacuation of 154,000 people from its exclusion zone. The damage was such that the Japanese Government openly asked for any help that they could get, and one of the first to respond was Korea, which quickly mobilized its own medical response and disaster relief units and was able to have them in Sendai less than 18 hours after the Earthquake, beauting numerous other countries - including Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, as well as the United States - to the punch. Among the responders was the HMCS Terra Nova and her battle group, which had been heading for a port visit to Hong Kong and was 800 kilometres southeast of Honshu at the time, and which quickly did a right turn and raced north to the disaster area. Canada's DART team was followed by C-17 Globemasters carrying additional RCAF helicopters, allowing for the Canadians to have additional helicopters to help with rescue operations. The disaster at the nuclear power plant ended up being far more troublesome and difficult to repair.
Japan's government in the years preceding the 2011 Earthquake had been more nationalistic and had been pushing against many of the newer communities in Japan that had come as a result of the law changes, though this almost immediately stopped, as more than a few Japanese considered the devastation from the earthquake and tsunami to be a sign from unhappy Gods for the actions of Japan's government in the years before, though blame for the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi landed squarely on the shoulders of it's owner, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and operators. Japan, highly reliant on nuclear power, quickly had a reckoning on the future of nuclear energy in the country, well aware that it couldn't soon dismiss the technology but unwilling to let another such disaster happen again. Abroad, the Fukushima Daiichi disaster led to a major campaign to assuage public fears, including in Canada where many who loudly campaigned the most against Canada's nuclear power industry in the months after the disaster were the ones invited to tour facilities and get a good idea of just how Canada's power stations. As Canada's commercial nuclear power stations had never suffered a loss-of-coolant incident and the operators (most of all Ontario Hydro, which was refurbishing the Bruce and Pickering sites at the time and added additional safety measures to these overhauls in response, and then retrofitted them to all its other reactors, at a cost of nearly $4.5 Billion for all of the facilities), the operators felt quite confident in their facilities, though that confidence wasn't always agreed upon in the United States.
The Americans' desire for the retiring of the older-design reactors after the accident at Fukushima ultimately did have a major effect, as the reputation of General Electric's Boiling Water Reactor design, the type that failed so spectacularly at Fukushima, was pretty much completely ruined after the disaster. Hitachi in November 2012 announced the end of its joint-venture agreement with General Electric and its desire to sell its nuclear division, and the month afterward the American Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered all BWRs older than 30 years old - which was all but four of them - shut down for inspection and retrofitting. Facing losses in the billions as a result, GE joined Hitachi and began to look to sell.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Canada bought.
On August 10, 2013, the Nuclear Technology Development Corporation of Canada (NTDCC), a company formed with the involvement of the Nuclear Energy Corporation of Canada, Stantec, Canadian Hydro Engineers, Ellis-Don Contractors, Atlantic Canada Nuclear Training Corporation, Western Electric and Second Planet Resources, bought the assets of the General Electric and Hitachi nuclear power units, assuming the maintenance responsibility for older designs - though the company quickly said that all reactors of generations BWR-4 (the type that failed at Fukushima) and earlier would not be supported and recommended their immediate decommissioning. The NTDCC continued the development of the GE-Hitachi ESBWR design, even after it was approved by American and European authorities for use in 2014, developing a form of the ESBWR that used thorium fuel with a uranium-233 driver fuel and a thermal emergency-shutdown system, where the core temperature reaching a high enough point would cause a gravity-driven dump into the core of water containing large amounts of lithium-6, a strong neutron poison which in such quantities would result in an immediate cessation of a nuclear chain reaction.
The bold play into the world's nuclear power development came as the Asian friends of Japan were proposing a complete replacement of the aged reactors Japan operated. Mitsubishi's Pressurized Water Reactors had a near-flawless safety record and in the aftermath of Fukushima the Japanese regulators got a lot more finicky on the operation of nuclear facilities, resulting in many of them being permanently shut down though with Japan's energy needs pushing for replacements. As the newer designs of CANDU and now the ESBWR-TH would produce far more power than older designs - the ESBWR-TH could produce 1525 MWe per unit - and far more safely, the plans began to get attention. But before then, the first ESBWR-TH began to be built in Canada, commissioned by BC Hydro. The two-reactor facility at the west end of Shuswap Lake was built in place of expanding hydroelectric capacity in the province, and was approved by the province of British Columbia in May 2016. Local environmentalist opposition was fairly muted (helped along by BC Hydro taking Ontario Hydro's lead in proactive public relations with regards to the safety of nuclear power facilities) and the local First Nations were mostly in support of the project owing to desires for jobs and recognizing that the facility would provide a sizable amount of power in a way that would almost certainly have small effects on the local environment. The Lake Shuswap Nuclear Generating Station was the first of its kind, and after its opening in August 2020 would operate for over 50 years without any serious incidents.
Japan would indeed ultimately buy both the CANDU-20A design and the ESBWR-TH, replacing over two dozen older reactors with the new designs, and with Japan's media pointing out that Canada's nuclear industry had an enviable safety record and if it was safe enough for them to have them within sight of several major cities (indeed the Pickering and Fanshawe Nuclear Generating Stations in Ontario were ultimately surrounded as a result of the growth of the cities Toronto and London) then it was surely safe enough for Japan to use as a clean form of electricity. Recognizing that, Canadian nuclear energy operators were quick to invite Japanese nuclear critics to visit the facilities they operated, and the Nuclear Energy Corporation of Canada did the Japanese a huge favor in 2012 then they offered to build a clone of the Darlington Tritium Removal Facility in Japan, getting the go-ahead within weeks and building the facility on the north side of the town of Namie, opening it in May 2014. It was a similar story in the United States, and the revenue from the vast growth in nuclear power plant development ended up making billions for the companies involved.
In the United States, the later years of the 20th Century had seen more than a little goalpost moving across its politics. After the 2008 Presidential election in the United States had been a tight affair between Democratic incumbents Paul Wellstone and Al Gore and Republicans Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, in large part driven by a huge fundraising advantage the Romney campaign had as a direct result of campaign donation laws being steadily whittled away. Not happy with this, and with one of the key points of the 2008 election attacks by Wellstone and Gore on Romney being the candidate of big business, and Gore commented that he planned on introducing a constitutional amendment to limit third-party and insider influence on American elections, in his words "making the elections of the United States be decided by all of the people of the United States." Wellstone and Gore won their re-election, and within weeks of the beginning of Wellstone's secord term that push began. It became a long and rather tortuous process, but in the end Congress voted on the Twenty-Eighth, Twenty-Ninth and Thirtieth Amendments to the United States Constitution in 2010.
The Twenty-Eighth Amendment, the American Citizenship Amendment, defined American citizens as natural-born or naturalized human citizens of the United States, removing the possibility for corporate bodies to be able to claim any rights under the United States Constitution. This basically made corporate donations in any form to political campaigns, both directly and in the form of third-party campaigns, strictly limited. The Amendment also enshrined the possibility of those from other countries to apply for American citizenship "without prejudice on the part of the United States of America", making any forms of discrimination with regards to immigration and naturalization for race, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or a variety of other conditions explicitly unconstitutional, and also provided an easy pathway to citizenship for those who had come to America illegally provided certain conditions were met. This Amendment also removed the requirement for the President or Vice-President to be natural-born Americans, but required someone seeking either of those positions to have been a citizen of the United States of America for at least twenty-five years before they were eligible for those offices.
The Twenty-Ninth Amendment, the Rights of American Voters Amendment, mandated that states develop a complete list of voters that were eligible to vote, allowed same-day confirmation of the right to vote and mandated a maximum distance to travel and a maximum wait time that one would have to wait in line to cast a ballot. Election Day was to become a national holiday, and those who worked in essential industries were required by be provided with early or alternative ballots, with it being the state's responsibility to make sure they got that ballot and that it was collected.
The Thirtieth Amendment was the American Territorial Lands Amendment, created with the intent of making the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico into full states of the United States, with the United States Virgin Islands becoming part of the state of Puerto Rico and thus able to vote as full American citizens, with the same rights offered for all citizens residing on the the United States' Pacific islands and territories, with the end goal of allowing them to choose between becoming full members of the United States or seeking independence on their own terms.
The Twenty-Ninth and Thirtieth Amendments found few willing to speak against them, but the Twenty-Eighth initially ran into some difficulties from the harder-right wing of American politics, who claimed it would not allow America to choose immigrants to fit its need, despite the fact that the amendment strictly held to genetic conditions that had nothing to do with one's achievements or qualifications - a fact that the United States Supreme Court agreed with when it was called to rule on the legality of the amendment in October 2010, finding no difficulties with the wording of it and ruling that it was entirely compatible with other amendments and that existing laws with regards to immigration selections and qualifications would not be unconstitutional under the amendment. Owing to this, the Twenty-Ninth Amendment cleared the United States Congress first, approved on September 18, 2010, with the Thirteth approved on September 27 and the Twenty-Eighth being approved on October 25, just in time for voting day in the United States. As the states now had to ratify it, those in favour of them got no less than twenty-three states to have the 2010 Election Day be declared a state holiday, and with turnout as a result way above the usual in these states, the State Legislatures in the United States had little difficulty being convinced of the merits of both amendments, and on January 10, 2011, Delaware became the first state to vote to ratify all three amendments. The ratification across the states was swift during the spring and summer of 2011, with the Twenty-Ninth and Thirtieth Amendments coming into force with the ratification of the Amendments by the thirty-eighth state, in this case North Carolina on May 22, 2011, with the Twenty-Eighth Amendment following it by about two months, with the thirty-eighth state in this case being Tennessee, which voted for it on July 19, 2011.
The effects were profound. Both of America's major political parties saw the possibility of benefitting massively from the Amendments, and in any case trying to say you are against growing the rights of American citizens and restricting those of corporate bodies wasn't likely be a position beneficial to one's political career. By the time of the 2012 election the battle lines were drawn, as the Republican ticket of Utah Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. and Maine Senator Susan Collins faced off against former Vermont Governor and Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, with a wild presidential race marked by vast rallies and huge pushes for turnouts by both sides and huge plans and proposals and far less of the mudslinging that had defined previous campaigns for the White House. Huntsman and Collins came out victorious, but with Democrats in charge of both houses of Congress, the White House was quick to learn how to work with their fellow Americans even if they didn't always agree. It was a reality that quickly filtered down to the various state houses, with similar elections in 2012 and onward in many cases being decided by turnout and with the path to victory being making a case for why you are the best candidate for the job being sought. Such an environment practically begged for dreamers, and more than a few rose into position of political power in the 2010s and 2020s, with much of America's older political class having to catch up or get left behind by the new times. The Democrats tended to have an easier time living with the times, but the Republicans who rose into positions of power and authority during the Huntsman Presidency in more than a few cases were far more dynamic, imaginative and open-minded than the people they replaced, a reality that steadily eroded the once-formidable lead among Americans of color the Democrats had once enjoyed.
In Canada, Ottawa looked upon Washington's dramatic late-2000s and early-2010s shift with some happiness, as in many ways it closed the gap between the two nations in many aspects of politics. Having long practiced some level of economic nationalism, Canada saw the free trade orthodoxy the Republicans had been strong believers in for decade decay some as a result of a need to create jobs for smaller communities that hadn't always been the beneficiaries of economic growth or social change - a situation that Canada knew as well, and indeed that fact led to many pushes for co-operation on figuring out how to deal with such problems. Washington and Ottawa's vast relationships with each other if anything grew as America began a massive effort in the first half of the 21st Century to deal with the effects of climate change, and that effort included massive collaborations on energy and transportation policies.
It's always said that you cannot keep people down forever, and having spent most of the 20th Century under communist rule only to have its first attempt to open up to the world completely ruin by Tiananmen Square and the Hong Kong Crisis in 1989-90, the People's Republic of China had by the middle of the 2000s figured out what had been lost from their turn back towards authoritarianism fifteen years prior, and was keen to allow the memories of Tiananmen Square to be forgotten. Hu Jintao, who led China from 2003 until 2012, was more aware of this than most, and his leadership saw China open up its borders and indeed its society to foreign ideas and investment, but they quickly ran into issues with Commonwealth, Asian and some American firms for demands for the Chinese partner corporate bodies to have access to the intellectual property of their proposed partners, something that grew to be seriously disapproved of by many corporate bodies. Despite the troubles, Jintao's leadership time in China saw both consensus for the future of the country, massive economic growth and a sizable growth in the country's power in economic, social, diplomatic and military forms.
For the Commonwealth, the issue of Hong Kong complicated the relationship between the Commonwealth and China, but since the establishments of naval and air bases in Hong Kong in the 1990s and re-establishment of the Royal Navy's Pacific Fleet as a way of supporting the United Kingdom's far-off city and Hong Kong's 1990s and 2000s development of a "fight-or-flight" attitude when dealing with the governments of the mainland, Hong Kong's position was far more stable than it had once been, and the steady development of a democratically-elected Hong Kong Legislative Assembly in the 1990s had made sure that the city's views were well-known. While Hong Kong made no particular moves towards independence during this time, among most Hong Kongers the idea of integration into a China ruled by the Chinese Communist Party was seen as unthinkable, almost traitorous, and the city's own movements in the 1990s and 2000s were meant to grow the city's independence, including the growth of high-tech and biotech industries as well as becoming one of the world's leaders in the STEM fields. Even as relations between Hong Kong and China slowly normalized in the 2000s, the idea of a return to Chinese control was seen as unthinkable by Hong Kongers, even as Jintao's successor, Xi Jinping, dramatically shifted the goalposts with regards to relations between China and the rest of the world.
While Jintao had been keen on consensus-based rule and diplomacy with the powers around it, Xinping had no such illusions and was only too proud to take China's growing power and use it to forcefully exert influence, actions that by the late 2010s had made China's relations with Hong Kong and Taiwan once again grow colder and made Japan and Korea seriously begin talks for mutual defense and trade alliances, alliances that by 2020 had grown to include Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand and Australia, with the Commonwealth and the United States watching with interest. It ended up by 2020 becoming something of a stalemate, as Beijing saw the rest of Asia as seeking to stop China's growth in power and the rest of Asia saw China's actions as inflammatory and unnecessary, particularly Japan (whom Beijing had had rocky relations with for most of the time since World War II) and Hong Kong.
Japan indeed had become a completely different place than the islands China had once fought a bitter, war crimes-filled conflict with 75 years prior. Having had its sense of racial supremacy completely destroyed by World War II and the knowledge of its crimes against other nations having long since become a national shame that all of Japan up to and including its Emperor had spent many years seeking to atone for, Japan had begun landmark changes to its laws on nationality and immigration in 1964, smoothly and steadily opening the doors to new arrivals, a flow that grew dramatically in the 1980s during Japan's bubble era and had been steady since then, resulting in Japan by 2010 having nearly 12% of its population be people of other backgrounds, who in 1989 were finally allowed to become full Japanese citizens without having to adopt a fully Japanese identity, something that had been allowed for Zainichi Koreans since 1964 but which was now being spread to just about anyone who was willing and able to integrate into Japanese society. This move, initially controversial, became a much bigger positive after the bursting of the Japanese asset bubble in 1990-91 found them with vast assets that they either had to sell off (frequently at a massive loss) or make work as part of the corporations' assets, moves that made involvement in Japanese society by those from other parts of the world much more common partly out of necessity. By the late 1990s racism in Japan had become highly uncommon, especially towards those who spoke fluent Japanese (which virtually all immigrants to Japan did, as it made coming to the country far easier) and those who had positions of authority. Japan's aging population made immigration much more common, as Japan's government did not wish to sacrifice its influential and powerful society to an aging population. This dramatic change had manifested itself in ever-greater connections between Japan and other nations, with Canada and Australia becoming two of the nations most favored by Japan and its citizens, particularly as English had by 2000 become the most common second language spoken by Japanese citizens and was seen by then as a sign of a highly-educated individual. If anything, that Commonwealth connection also filtered down to Hong Kong, as by the 2010s Japan was easily the single biggest investor in the city outside of China or the Commonwealth.
Korea was rather behind Japan in the adaptation of aspects of foreign life, but they made up for it in the "Korean Wave" that began first in Japan and Taiwan in the 1990s and then rapidly spread across the world. The Seoul Olympics in 1988 had been the point where Korea began to boot open the doors and allow its people access to the world around them in a big way, and it showed. The Koreans were hard workers even by the standards of Asians, and their growth from one of the world's poorest countries at the end of the Korean War in 1951 to one of its richest in 2001 despite being poor in natural resources was in many ways a success brought on by hard work and preserverence, and the proud Koreans weren't afraid to show it, though Korea rarely showed the levels of bigotry that had once existed in Japan, a result of having been the victims of decades of discrimination by the Japanese in the first half of the 20th Century. The Koreans did follow the Japanese in allowing immigration to their country as well, things weren't quite so smooth as in Japan, but despite that the Koreans too were plenty capable of holding their own in the world - and the Korean Wave also had the effect of growing the relationship between the two nations, that by the 2000s was seen as a relationship of equals.
This became most clearly seen in the aftermath of the Tohuku Earthquake and Tsunami in 2011. The titanic earthquake, the most powerful ever recorded in Japan measuring 9.1 on the Richter scale, produced a tsunami that was in some places over 120 feet high and reached over 10 kilometres inland, devastating the city of Sendai and hundreds of other communities - and worse, it caused the massive nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the tsunami destroying the plant's backup power systems, causing three simultaneous meltdowns at the three of the power plant's reactors, leading to three hydrogen explosions and major releases of radioactive materials from the facility. The tsunami claimed nearly 16,000 lives and caused over $200 Billion in damage, and that didn't count the damage from the Fukushima Daiichi power station, the radioactivity forced the evacuation of 154,000 people from its exclusion zone. The damage was such that the Japanese Government openly asked for any help that they could get, and one of the first to respond was Korea, which quickly mobilized its own medical response and disaster relief units and was able to have them in Sendai less than 18 hours after the Earthquake, beauting numerous other countries - including Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, as well as the United States - to the punch. Among the responders was the HMCS Terra Nova and her battle group, which had been heading for a port visit to Hong Kong and was 800 kilometres southeast of Honshu at the time, and which quickly did a right turn and raced north to the disaster area. Canada's DART team was followed by C-17 Globemasters carrying additional RCAF helicopters, allowing for the Canadians to have additional helicopters to help with rescue operations. The disaster at the nuclear power plant ended up being far more troublesome and difficult to repair.
Japan's government in the years preceding the 2011 Earthquake had been more nationalistic and had been pushing against many of the newer communities in Japan that had come as a result of the law changes, though this almost immediately stopped, as more than a few Japanese considered the devastation from the earthquake and tsunami to be a sign from unhappy Gods for the actions of Japan's government in the years before, though blame for the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi landed squarely on the shoulders of it's owner, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and operators. Japan, highly reliant on nuclear power, quickly had a reckoning on the future of nuclear energy in the country, well aware that it couldn't soon dismiss the technology but unwilling to let another such disaster happen again. Abroad, the Fukushima Daiichi disaster led to a major campaign to assuage public fears, including in Canada where many who loudly campaigned the most against Canada's nuclear power industry in the months after the disaster were the ones invited to tour facilities and get a good idea of just how Canada's power stations. As Canada's commercial nuclear power stations had never suffered a loss-of-coolant incident and the operators (most of all Ontario Hydro, which was refurbishing the Bruce and Pickering sites at the time and added additional safety measures to these overhauls in response, and then retrofitted them to all its other reactors, at a cost of nearly $4.5 Billion for all of the facilities), the operators felt quite confident in their facilities, though that confidence wasn't always agreed upon in the United States.
The Americans' desire for the retiring of the older-design reactors after the accident at Fukushima ultimately did have a major effect, as the reputation of General Electric's Boiling Water Reactor design, the type that failed so spectacularly at Fukushima, was pretty much completely ruined after the disaster. Hitachi in November 2012 announced the end of its joint-venture agreement with General Electric and its desire to sell its nuclear division, and the month afterward the American Nuclear Regulatory Commission ordered all BWRs older than 30 years old - which was all but four of them - shut down for inspection and retrofitting. Facing losses in the billions as a result, GE joined Hitachi and began to look to sell.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Canada bought.
On August 10, 2013, the Nuclear Technology Development Corporation of Canada (NTDCC), a company formed with the involvement of the Nuclear Energy Corporation of Canada, Stantec, Canadian Hydro Engineers, Ellis-Don Contractors, Atlantic Canada Nuclear Training Corporation, Western Electric and Second Planet Resources, bought the assets of the General Electric and Hitachi nuclear power units, assuming the maintenance responsibility for older designs - though the company quickly said that all reactors of generations BWR-4 (the type that failed at Fukushima) and earlier would not be supported and recommended their immediate decommissioning. The NTDCC continued the development of the GE-Hitachi ESBWR design, even after it was approved by American and European authorities for use in 2014, developing a form of the ESBWR that used thorium fuel with a uranium-233 driver fuel and a thermal emergency-shutdown system, where the core temperature reaching a high enough point would cause a gravity-driven dump into the core of water containing large amounts of lithium-6, a strong neutron poison which in such quantities would result in an immediate cessation of a nuclear chain reaction.
The bold play into the world's nuclear power development came as the Asian friends of Japan were proposing a complete replacement of the aged reactors Japan operated. Mitsubishi's Pressurized Water Reactors had a near-flawless safety record and in the aftermath of Fukushima the Japanese regulators got a lot more finicky on the operation of nuclear facilities, resulting in many of them being permanently shut down though with Japan's energy needs pushing for replacements. As the newer designs of CANDU and now the ESBWR-TH would produce far more power than older designs - the ESBWR-TH could produce 1525 MWe per unit - and far more safely, the plans began to get attention. But before then, the first ESBWR-TH began to be built in Canada, commissioned by BC Hydro. The two-reactor facility at the west end of Shuswap Lake was built in place of expanding hydroelectric capacity in the province, and was approved by the province of British Columbia in May 2016. Local environmentalist opposition was fairly muted (helped along by BC Hydro taking Ontario Hydro's lead in proactive public relations with regards to the safety of nuclear power facilities) and the local First Nations were mostly in support of the project owing to desires for jobs and recognizing that the facility would provide a sizable amount of power in a way that would almost certainly have small effects on the local environment. The Lake Shuswap Nuclear Generating Station was the first of its kind, and after its opening in August 2020 would operate for over 50 years without any serious incidents.
Japan would indeed ultimately buy both the CANDU-20A design and the ESBWR-TH, replacing over two dozen older reactors with the new designs, and with Japan's media pointing out that Canada's nuclear industry had an enviable safety record and if it was safe enough for them to have them within sight of several major cities (indeed the Pickering and Fanshawe Nuclear Generating Stations in Ontario were ultimately surrounded as a result of the growth of the cities Toronto and London) then it was surely safe enough for Japan to use as a clean form of electricity. Recognizing that, Canadian nuclear energy operators were quick to invite Japanese nuclear critics to visit the facilities they operated, and the Nuclear Energy Corporation of Canada did the Japanese a huge favor in 2012 then they offered to build a clone of the Darlington Tritium Removal Facility in Japan, getting the go-ahead within weeks and building the facility on the north side of the town of Namie, opening it in May 2014. It was a similar story in the United States, and the revenue from the vast growth in nuclear power plant development ended up making billions for the companies involved.
In the United States, the later years of the 20th Century had seen more than a little goalpost moving across its politics. After the 2008 Presidential election in the United States had been a tight affair between Democratic incumbents Paul Wellstone and Al Gore and Republicans Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, in large part driven by a huge fundraising advantage the Romney campaign had as a direct result of campaign donation laws being steadily whittled away. Not happy with this, and with one of the key points of the 2008 election attacks by Wellstone and Gore on Romney being the candidate of big business, and Gore commented that he planned on introducing a constitutional amendment to limit third-party and insider influence on American elections, in his words "making the elections of the United States be decided by all of the people of the United States." Wellstone and Gore won their re-election, and within weeks of the beginning of Wellstone's secord term that push began. It became a long and rather tortuous process, but in the end Congress voted on the Twenty-Eighth, Twenty-Ninth and Thirtieth Amendments to the United States Constitution in 2010.
The Twenty-Eighth Amendment, the American Citizenship Amendment, defined American citizens as natural-born or naturalized human citizens of the United States, removing the possibility for corporate bodies to be able to claim any rights under the United States Constitution. This basically made corporate donations in any form to political campaigns, both directly and in the form of third-party campaigns, strictly limited. The Amendment also enshrined the possibility of those from other countries to apply for American citizenship "without prejudice on the part of the United States of America", making any forms of discrimination with regards to immigration and naturalization for race, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or a variety of other conditions explicitly unconstitutional, and also provided an easy pathway to citizenship for those who had come to America illegally provided certain conditions were met. This Amendment also removed the requirement for the President or Vice-President to be natural-born Americans, but required someone seeking either of those positions to have been a citizen of the United States of America for at least twenty-five years before they were eligible for those offices.
The Twenty-Ninth Amendment, the Rights of American Voters Amendment, mandated that states develop a complete list of voters that were eligible to vote, allowed same-day confirmation of the right to vote and mandated a maximum distance to travel and a maximum wait time that one would have to wait in line to cast a ballot. Election Day was to become a national holiday, and those who worked in essential industries were required by be provided with early or alternative ballots, with it being the state's responsibility to make sure they got that ballot and that it was collected.
The Thirtieth Amendment was the American Territorial Lands Amendment, created with the intent of making the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico into full states of the United States, with the United States Virgin Islands becoming part of the state of Puerto Rico and thus able to vote as full American citizens, with the same rights offered for all citizens residing on the the United States' Pacific islands and territories, with the end goal of allowing them to choose between becoming full members of the United States or seeking independence on their own terms.
The Twenty-Ninth and Thirtieth Amendments found few willing to speak against them, but the Twenty-Eighth initially ran into some difficulties from the harder-right wing of American politics, who claimed it would not allow America to choose immigrants to fit its need, despite the fact that the amendment strictly held to genetic conditions that had nothing to do with one's achievements or qualifications - a fact that the United States Supreme Court agreed with when it was called to rule on the legality of the amendment in October 2010, finding no difficulties with the wording of it and ruling that it was entirely compatible with other amendments and that existing laws with regards to immigration selections and qualifications would not be unconstitutional under the amendment. Owing to this, the Twenty-Ninth Amendment cleared the United States Congress first, approved on September 18, 2010, with the Thirteth approved on September 27 and the Twenty-Eighth being approved on October 25, just in time for voting day in the United States. As the states now had to ratify it, those in favour of them got no less than twenty-three states to have the 2010 Election Day be declared a state holiday, and with turnout as a result way above the usual in these states, the State Legislatures in the United States had little difficulty being convinced of the merits of both amendments, and on January 10, 2011, Delaware became the first state to vote to ratify all three amendments. The ratification across the states was swift during the spring and summer of 2011, with the Twenty-Ninth and Thirtieth Amendments coming into force with the ratification of the Amendments by the thirty-eighth state, in this case North Carolina on May 22, 2011, with the Twenty-Eighth Amendment following it by about two months, with the thirty-eighth state in this case being Tennessee, which voted for it on July 19, 2011.
The effects were profound. Both of America's major political parties saw the possibility of benefitting massively from the Amendments, and in any case trying to say you are against growing the rights of American citizens and restricting those of corporate bodies wasn't likely be a position beneficial to one's political career. By the time of the 2012 election the battle lines were drawn, as the Republican ticket of Utah Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. and Maine Senator Susan Collins faced off against former Vermont Governor and Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, with a wild presidential race marked by vast rallies and huge pushes for turnouts by both sides and huge plans and proposals and far less of the mudslinging that had defined previous campaigns for the White House. Huntsman and Collins came out victorious, but with Democrats in charge of both houses of Congress, the White House was quick to learn how to work with their fellow Americans even if they didn't always agree. It was a reality that quickly filtered down to the various state houses, with similar elections in 2012 and onward in many cases being decided by turnout and with the path to victory being making a case for why you are the best candidate for the job being sought. Such an environment practically begged for dreamers, and more than a few rose into position of political power in the 2010s and 2020s, with much of America's older political class having to catch up or get left behind by the new times. The Democrats tended to have an easier time living with the times, but the Republicans who rose into positions of power and authority during the Huntsman Presidency in more than a few cases were far more dynamic, imaginative and open-minded than the people they replaced, a reality that steadily eroded the once-formidable lead among Americans of color the Democrats had once enjoyed.
In Canada, Ottawa looked upon Washington's dramatic late-2000s and early-2010s shift with some happiness, as in many ways it closed the gap between the two nations in many aspects of politics. Having long practiced some level of economic nationalism, Canada saw the free trade orthodoxy the Republicans had been strong believers in for decade decay some as a result of a need to create jobs for smaller communities that hadn't always been the beneficiaries of economic growth or social change - a situation that Canada knew as well, and indeed that fact led to many pushes for co-operation on figuring out how to deal with such problems. Washington and Ottawa's vast relationships with each other if anything grew as America began a massive effort in the first half of the 21st Century to deal with the effects of climate change, and that effort included massive collaborations on energy and transportation policies.
