The idea here is that assuming molten lead or tin starts spewing out of the reactor, it will just sit there, solidify, and remain insoluble in both air and water. An area of a few tens of meters around the reactor will be contaminated. It will not burn with a radioactive graphite fire contaminating a whole continent (Chenobyl), it will unload the contaminated primary cooling water in the ocean (Fukushima), and it will not spontaneously burst into flames when encountering atmospheric oxigen and water, releasing poisonous smoke (Monju). It will not create air-born radioactive dust, and radioactive isotopes will not accumulate in living organisms, such as the case for tritiated water, carbon, potassium, iodine.

While lead is a neurotoxin, we know how to work with it, and there are already hundreds of thousands tons of lead in circulation due to it's use in lead-acid batteries around the world.

Yeah, except that coolant spontaneously catches fire when exposed to air, spreading radioactive dust all around. Monju is an expensive failure that showed how sodium fares in practice. Sorry, but in my back yard I will only allow a coolant/moderator that is chemically inert when exposed to air : no graphite, no sodium. It must also not seep into the food chain, so water is out also.
You are only left with lead/tin/bismuth alloys which have sufficiently low absorption cross sections, but relatively high melting points when compared with sodium/watter. Lead coolant has been used on Russian subs so we know it works.

Most likely, it's much more expensive to handle hot fuel. As you probably know but some readers might not, freshly depleted fuel is extremely hot, both in the thermal and radioactive sense, and continues to generate about 7% of the nominal output of the reactor. This residual heat caused the Fukushima disaster. So by leaving the reactors on standby a few decades most short lived products have decayed and the clean-up is cheaper and safer.

Can you name a single such site ? Could you possibly refer to the generation IV breeder reactors of which no commercial plant was yet built, or is even in the approval phase ?
Most importantly, the authors of generation IV projects planned a 20 years period of basic science research before their projects could become reality, starting with the year 2002. Since little of that research was actually accomplished, it's prudent to say commercial gen IV breeder reactors are decades away.

At this time, it seems prudent to say that the only reaction likely to ever produce commercially useful energy will involve copious quantities of tritium. Would you please address the main points of tritium self-sufficiency raised by Swiss physicist Michael Dittmar?
The issue is raised in part 4 of his study, page 20, The illusions of tritium self-suciency

More background: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24414/

Well, one of the major arguments for fusion research is that fission is dangerous and dirty. If we can have clean and safe fission, there absolutely no reason to pursue the fusion pipe dream.

The most important item in the economic equation of a nuclear plant are the capital costs. If we already established fusion needs to be big in order to work, probably much bigger than existing fission plants, then we should stop spending money on large experimental fusion reactors - it is not a solution in it's current form, not if fusion can solve the same problem today.

Given real-world resources and at the same time assuming that fusion power is an impractical fairy-tale that will never become reality, please give an estimate about the time interval we should expect societies to wisen-up and stop funding fusion projects. Does it outlast your own career ? How many PhDs will the fusion field create in the meantime ? What would be the total costs ? How much practically useful science will come of it, assuming again that the actual goal of fusion power is a hoax ?

The Quants and HFTs on Wall Street would kill for a 50ms link with Asia. When I think of how fucked-up is the global financial system, it might be a real possibility to spend a few billion dollars on this baby. Lobby for a public works programme, sell it to the public as an economic stimulus to create jobs. America needs it's own Neutrino link or the terrorist win !

You are of course right about the exponential being in the linear region.

I don't think it's exponential attenuation applies strictly to EM, it'a rather more fundamental issue that applies to mechanical oscillation (sound), repeated dilution, and any iterative propagation or function composition. Anyway, as I've said, I would be happy if someone can point to since that proves neutrinos don't attenuate exponentially when passing though planetary bodies.

Let me give you an engineering point of view, maybe some since-folks can clear things up in as much as "communicating through planets" is concerned.
The absorption of a generic beam is exponential to the length of the absorption medium. So assuming you have a one meter thick detector and you want to catch neutrinos transited from the other side of the earth, the attenuation of the beam is alpha^12756000000, while the attenuation inside your detector is only alpha (diameter of the earth = 12756Km).

Let's assume our detector is so sensitive that the neutrino beam passing through it generates a single electron (1.6 × 10^-19 coulombs) that is picked up by the electronic circuitry and amplified. By the law of exponential attenuation, it follows that the same neutrino beam at it's origin point would generate 1.6 × 10^12756999981 coulombs (!!!). Needless to say, the electric current that would represent and the heat generated by all those electrons hitting matter would pretty much blow the planet away, if not the whole known universe.

So through-planet communication is possible only if:
- neutrinos beams don't attenuate exponentially through matter
- a detectors can be built that is implausibly more sensitive than the earth's interior
- some quantum B.S that a mere engineer can't fathom
- you are Darth Vader and want to send a message to the people of Alderaan

Or better yet, blame overbroad trademarks and the IP mafia. This privatization of the vocabulary has reached fucking-ridiculous proportions, see "Apple" and "Face"(book), aggressively enforced in areas where the respective companies don't have priority, or even any business. I might be a little more relaxed with made-up words since they don't diminish the size of the available "vocabulary pie", however in this case "Hobbit" has clearly become a part of the vocabulary.

A trademark is NOT property, it is a positive right. The only reason you get to have a trademark, and have it enforced by society (custom agents, police, courts etc.) is because it is socially useful to help you to differentiate your products from those of an imitator. This allows you to invest in quality and customer satisfaction that would not pay-off for a generic product, therefore better products become available on the market. Using a trademark when there is no danger of confusion between two similar products is a breach of the social contract and the philosophy behind trademark enforcement.

Ha ha, I can see it now: a nice profile pic with one guy kissing some other guy's neck, while he smiles lasciviously to the camera. We are both wearing punk leather outfits, steel pentagrams, inverted crosses etc. Headlines from my wall:
- Gay adoption: the time has come
- I'm thinking of a sex change operation, but I heard the reconstructed vag looks kinda fake. Thoughts ?
- Is Satan the real enemy ? 2000 years of judeo-christian lies
- Homoerotic Calendar 2012. Check these cuties out !

The whole interview recorded on my phone. "So you want to look at my Facebook profile ? Well... I guess I have nothing to hide...". Kaboom ! Make sure you answer all question flawlessly, and deliver an otherwise perfect interview. Wait for your rejection, then send the recording and printed Facebook profile to a good lawyer and watch the ensuing hilarity. Optional: settle out of court for a gazillion bucks.

It seems to me that if an independent research lab can invent the building blocks of the modern PC and not profit from it, than clearly a large corporation with limitless resources and pressured by a competitive market can innovate without the need of a patent system. The innovation was "stolen" by the competition ? Great, work on getting it cheaper, or work on the next big thing, without a comfy patent that can neuter the competition. So how about we ditch this patent system altogether ?

I'm not saying Xerox PARC does not deserve to profit from it's creations - they certainly deserve it much more than the patent trolls. I'm saying that if they XP can sustain a high level of innovation without proportional compensation, that's a clear argument against the need for profitable patents as a method for of stimulating innovation. The economic cost of the patent system is higher than the value it delivers through innovation: XP was able to deliver phenomenal results with limited compensation.

One one hand profitable patents are not necessary for innovation as explained above, and on the other hand patents are frequently harmful to innovation: patent trolls, preventing the competition from building on your invention etc.

Are you so sure about the bolded part ? Assuming the majority of stock holders agree with issuing new shares, the proceeds of selling those shares belong to the company, so all stock holders gain by the same amount they are loosing through share dilution. Sure, the management can decide to use the cash for rewarding itself with higher bonuses to compensate the stock loss; however I can't see they can discriminate against existing stock holders.

On the other hand, we're talking about stock options; if the contract says the employees have the option to buy 1000 shares at 1$ each, and the stock price has jumped to 500$ in the meantime, then yes, issuing 500x more stock is the legal and accepted way to "solve the problem". I assume the contracts of these Zynga employees says a different thing.

They are founded by right-holders and have an arsenal of favorable laws. No surprise they can get results.

There's nothing wrong with the sandboxing model per se. It's probably the only way to make our computers more secure. That Apple is moving in that direction should not be surprising: they make idiot-ready software (also known as good software), and you can't really have security and idiot friendliness without a trusted 3rd party to sort out the nitty-gritty details.

It should also be unsurprising that Apple moves to an authoritarian model where it and it alone can act as the trusted 3rd party. Almost everything Apple does is to maximize clout and control over the product environment. Apple is a control freak: it's profitable and risky, it almost got them killed when the PC revolution happened.

I would much rather like to see a sandbox where multiple private companies publish application profiles and the consumer choice is maximized; that's a nice role for the AV companies to play, move from a blacklist to a whitelist model. Should such a company turn into Big Brother, limit the consumer choice and push it's own interests, the consumers can easily move to a different "security provider".