The larger problem is regulatory capture by industry. It's a virtual revolving door out there of people moving from paid industry positions tote regulator and back again. The same issue prevented hundreds of breaches at Fukushima being taken seriously. Jail time for CEOs and making the operators responsible for clean up would go a long way however.

To answer your question directly. There are more that 20 GE Mk-1 reactors running in the US. They all suffer from the flaws that led to melt throughs and loss of containment at Fukushima. These factors include embrittlement of the primary containment by neutron bombardment. This embrittlement means that cooling has to occur slowly, something that is tricky in an emergency. They also have steam suppression systems that are too small (torus) and valve systems that need to be manually actuated in emergency situations. These flaws were known by GE engineers. These reactors should no longer be licenced as the flaws cannot be fixed by retrofitting. However, shutting down these reactors (which have ha their licenced extended far beyond their engineered lifetimes) would bankrupt the US nuclear industry and scuttle the "nuclear renaissance". It's an ugly truth that the US regulators are gambling with lives to keep the wheels rolling. Prime time to move on to more modern energy sources (large scale solar and wind with flow batteries for load smoothing would be a good start)

Passive safety is rarely complete. For instance the newest Westinghouse reactors can only deal with decay heat for 48 hours. There's a lot of energy to dissipate even after shutdown.

A prompt criticality is unlikely in a BWR reactor unless you get fractionation of the fuel after it has melted. With MOX fuel it is conceivable that you could accumulate a critical mass of plutonium after a core melt even with boron. Another way in which a prompt criticality can occur is in a spent fuel pool that is packed too tight. Some have suggested this may be the case at unit 3 Fukushima.

I'm sorry, your keychain does not contain more radioactivity that approx 30% of three nuclear core loads. I invite you to go and stand in the water coming out of the basement of unit 2 for an hour while you redo the math.

So not being able to go home because the area is too polluted by radioactivity is not a negative consequence of the meltdowns?

Except cameras have barely altered crime rates at all. http://www.google.com.au/searc...

I thought I'd help google out and start redrafting the terms. By signing up for this account you give us the right to all your most personal secrets. If you don't tell us we will work them out. We will sell, share and sit around our big masturbation round table and use your ass as we see fit. If you object we will plant kiddie porn in your account and call our friends at the NSA or DEA or FBI or the local fat cop we bought last year. We will use your aggregate data to control financial markets and influence politicians. We are not evil, we're actually quite cuddly.

Open cycle nuclear engines are a bad idea anywhere close to earth orbit. They are essentially an open system that expells nuclear fission byproducts as well as propellant. They are not permitted to operate in earth orbit for a good reason. They would leave significant trails of radioactive material in orbit. This has implications for the sensors on satellites and is still going to fall to earth eventually. So these open cycle reactors may be useful for longer missions but would still need to get a heavy reactor into orbit. They also run essentially unshielded so on a manned mission you'd need lead or water shielding. Nuclear power sources using decay heat are probably better suited due to low levels of gamma an neutron radiation. The idea of collecting propellant along the way is quite attractive too but beyond our current engineering. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...

Actually your logic is floored. Abscence of evidence is not evidence of abscence. It's one thing to state that cops are unlikely to be aliens but it's another thing altogether to prove that no cops are aliens.

Sadly, democracy is dead. We no longer have a government that represents the people. We no longer have a state that adheres to the principles that guided our ascent from feudal rule. Another system will come but first these hegemonists will create a world in which they believe we will cling to their heels as they rape us by night. Instead they will multiply fear and inequity until they too become powerless. As has happened before, we'll slowly pick up the pieces. Or, maybe we'll wake up first...

You need your head read. Google has shown time and again that it does not care about your security. There is no need to trade off convenience for security in cloud backup. Encrypt locally and send the data encrypted to backup. This would be great but i bet that Google also holds they keys and decrypts on their end. Google says it wouldn't be able to use your data for their massive data mining and information theft machine if it were properly encrypted. This is why the data sits on their servers unprotected by encryption, they are the antithesis of your guardians of security. If you value your data, turn off all Google services and manage your own backups.

Actually it has 32GB of reg ECC RAM but that's not all for ZFS!

It's not too hard to do with a script. My snapshots are daily and they rotate every month leaving the first of every month as a longer term backup. It's granular enough for my data but hourly or even every minute would work fine too.

The recommendations vary a lot, mostly because it also depends on whether you're accessing a subset of your files more frequently than others. 1Gb per Tb seems good for most loads but ZFS will use as much as you throw at it.