I believe I won't have to convince them of anything. They will come to the same conclusion eventually. They can have either nuclear power or rolling blackouts.

It would also require more rare earth elements than exist in the earth's crust. Perhaps that is an exaggeration but not by much, mining enough lithium, cadmium, or whatever, is not trivial. We just do not have the capacity to produce that amount of electricity storage in batteries.

I held out promise for technologies like flywheel storage as it was a simple technology, requiring not much more than a motor/generator and a weight. I then realized that such devices would be expensive, require considerable maintenance, and still require significant amounts of rare earth elements to produce.

Other storage technologies have similar problems. Water storage requires differing elevations and, obviously, large amounts of water. Compressed air storage requires suitable caverns. Molten salt storage requires vast resources as well.

None of these can compete with even first generation nuclear power, and we have fourth generation nuclear power coming on line soon.

This study claims a reduction in carbon emissions from solar power but I've read studies that show increased carbon emissions from solar power. Why is that? Because solar power is very poor at matching when people use power. Sure, people tend to turn stuff off at night when the sun is down and turn them on when the sun shines but the load curve seen by utilities shows a peek power usage at about 6:00PM, when the sun is setting and solar power has already begun to wane.

How does this translate into increased carbon output? When solar power wanes there needs to be a power source that can be brought up to power quickly and still be inexpensive enough that it is economical. That is where natural gas comes in. Instead of using highly efficient combined cycle power, which takes hours to come up to power, the utilities use natural gas turbines. Combined cycle power plants get about 60% efficiency, gas turbine power plants might get 40%. Turning the turbines off and on burns more fuel, reducing the effective efficiency.

So rather than using a highly efficient combined cycle power plant a utility that must accommodate the quickly changing output of solar power must use less efficient gas turbines. The more solar power on the grid means more gas turbines. More gas turbines means less efficient use of natural gas. Therefore there is no net reduction of carbon emissions from use of solar power.

Then comes the argument for storing the solar energy for use when the sun does not shine. That adds cost. We have nothing that can store electricity that is cheaper than burning natural gas or coal, using nuclear power, or using hydro power. If solar power is to become cheap enough to compete with coal and nuclear then we need a means to store electricity that is cheap.

The problem then comes in that any technology that makes storing electric energy cheap also makes coal and nuclear power cheaper. Then why not just make solar power cheaper? Because that will never solve the problem of the sun going down.

Solar power is a dead end. Solar power would have to be cheap enough to make up for the costs of its manufacture and storage as well as compete with coal and nuclear. While we might run out of coal in 300 years we just cannot run out of nuclear fuel, it is just too common.

Then there is the environment disaster that is caused by the manufacture of photovoltaic panels. Making them requires significant amounts of water, toxic chemicals, and lots of energy.

Solar power is not the answer. Nuclear power is the answer. I know someone is going to point out the nuclear waste that comes from nuclear power now. My answer to that is Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactors. These things eat radioactive waste. If it is radioactive then it is fuel. If it's not radioactive then it's not waste any more, right?

Encrypting the data transmitted is nearly trivial. There are numerous encryption algorithms out there that can sufficiently prevent eavesdropping of the data. Techniques beyond mere encryption can further prevent jamming, false data being sent, and such that can be equal security issues.

What concerns me more is that these rifles will be sending out radio beacons of their location. Various techniques can be used to keep power output low, spread the data out so it doesn't stay on a single frequency, and otherwise diminish the radio beacon properties of a transmitter but that does not make it go away. A sneaky radio is hard. Someone with just a wideband radio receiver can detect if one comes close. This might be enough to trigger a mine.

I don't see recharging as much of an issue. The rifles will need to have ammo replenished, be cleaned, etc., adding the step of checking the batteries does not seem to be too much to ask.

I don't understand, just because the suspect is not holding a firearm does not mean they are incapable of killing an officer/soldier, nor does it mean that use of a firearm to stop the suspect is somehow illegal, unethical, or otherwise improper. Blunt objects, fists, and feet kill more people than handguns.

Also, what if the cell phone is the trigger to a bomb? Or a gun in disguise?

Here's another idea, if a person comes face to face to someone in uniform and pointing a rifle at them does not immediately empty their hands and put them where they can be seen perhaps, just maybe, that person deserves to get shot. If you want to be the one that wants to argue with the cop/soldier that it's only a banana then I'll be sure to send flowers to your funeral.

I find it odd that there seems to be such a high correlation between people that advocate for the choice to abort their pregnancy and those that advocate for mandated vaccinations. I would think that people that advocate for being able to choice to get one potentially life altering medical procedure would advocate for the choice in all such procedures.

The opposite is equally odd, pro-life people (those advocating removing the choice of aborting a pregnancy) also tend to be those that advocate allowing parents to choose whether or not their children get vaccinated. To them "my body, my choice" doesn't have the same meaning. The way I figure that this apparent dichotomy can be resolved is that a parent cannot choose to terminate a pregnancy under the "my body, my choice" mantra because the fetus is a separate body from that of the mother. But also in the case of a child does the parent have the authority to vaccinate the child under that logic? Does the parent "own" the body of the child? I suppose not but then the government cannot claim ownership either and order the child to be vaccinated. If anyone should have authority over the health of a child it should be the parent, not the government.

Liberals want to let people choose to terminate a pregnancy but not to choose to not have their child vaccinated. Liberals claim to be all about people's ability to choose but only if people choose to do what the liberals want them to do. Conservatives seem to believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and also seemingly in that order. Liberty would allow for abortion but that would violate a higher priority of preserving life, therefore conservatives don't believe in abortion.

Does allowing parents the liberty to not have their children vaccinated violate the higher priority of preserving life? Perhaps it does. What seems to be common among conservatives is that while parents should be free to choose to not have their children vaccinated there is also a belief that parents should choose vaccination. I agree that parents should get their children vaccinated unless some medical condition exists that would place the child at risk. I also don't like the idea of the government telling parents how to raise their own children. Let the parents choose, not some unelected government bureaucrat.

I'm sure he was a... very bad person.

The first call I had from a scammer claiming to help me with a virus I strung along for a while. I told him I had six computers running Windows, I just needed him to tell me which one he was calling about. I don't remember how he reacted to that but I do remember him asking me to write down a very long number to verify something. After I started to run out of space on the scrap of paper I was scribbling this number onto I stopped him and asked him what this number was for. At that point he got frustrated and hung up.

Another call was much shorter. I got a call and the caller said that my computers were not responding to updates from Microsoft. I told him it would be odd for them to respond since none of my computers ran a Microsoft operating system (which was a lie). He was stunned into silence for a second, laughed out loud, then hung up.

My mom was taken by one of these guys. She let them remote control the computer for a bit but they were asking for money to help her out. She told them her sons helped her with the computer and didn't want to spend any money fixing it. It may have been coincidence but a week after that call the computer started to act funny. Out of an abundance of caution my brother and I wiped the drive and installed Ubuntu.

Last Christmas my brothers, sisters, and I got her an iPad. She loves it. She gets her e-mail, surfs the web, plays Candy Crush, and can do FaceTime with her grandkids. The only thing she uses the Ubuntu computer for now is to act as a print server since the printer does not do AirPrint natively, now she can print her coupons and recipes from the iPad.

They won't scam Mom again and I can't wait for them to call me again just so I can play with their heads.

I've seen some people, that might be considered conspiracy theorists, that believe this is the intent. If it is possible to remove children from foundational documents like the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and Federalist Papers then it would be much easier to convince children to be quiet and obey Dear Leader.

I'm not saying it is a very convincing argument but I've seen it made many times now.

Instead of trying to find new ways to store nuclear waste for thousands of years we should be looking for ways to burn this stuff for energy, medical isotopes, and other useful things. One technology that comes to mind is the Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor. The people from MIT that are working on this claim WAMSR can destroy spent fuel from conventional uranium fueled reactors while also producing electricity and/or industrial heat.

There are two things that destroy radioactive waste, time and neutron bombardment. Setting this stuff aside for millennia means building structures to store the stuff and then maintaining them until the stuff is no longer a danger. Burning this so called "waste" in a reactor means getting rid of it for good while also generating valuable heat, electricity, and medical isotopes.

I believe anyone that claims we need to store radioactive material is ignorant, misinformed, or has something to sell. I think these people have something to sell.

You are confusing fluorine with fluoride. A fluoride will not burn because it has already reached a state with a potential lower than that it would have with water or air.

With that said most every LFTR design I've seen does have fluorine as a gas at some point in the process but that is in the chemical processing of the fuel while outside the reactor. There is little to no fluorine in the reactor vessel.

There would not be a fire because the stuff in a LFTR does not burn. If there were things burning then the answer is to use water.

Uranium tetrafluoride is an insoluble salt, no more toxic than sand. Saying uranium and fluorine are very toxic is like saying sodium and chlorine are very toxic. Sodium and chlorine alone are very bad but combined they create a substance vital to life. I suppose you think we should ban the use of table salt because of the toxic materials it is made of.

The worst case is you douse it with water for hours, maybe days, until it cools off. After it's cool you send in people with jackhammers and tractors to haul away the pieces for recycling. The mangled mess would no doubt contain radioactive material but since fission would have been stopped for days at this point the pile of scrap would be about as radioactive as a typical granite counter top. The workers would have to wear protective gear for the dust because heavy metal poisoning is a risk, just like for people that mine for gold or coal.

Perhaps I am mistaken, perhaps I exaggerated a bit, but regardless a LFTR simply cannot burn or react with water like you describe.

What's not to love? You get the cost and complexity of having both a fission and fusion reactor but no more useful work done than if the reactor did just one or the other.

I thought of how one might build a fission/fusion hybrid reactor and realized just how complex such a device would have to be to work. Everything inside the reactor would be very hot, bombarded by neutrons and gamma rays, and have to be precise and powerful enough to maintain confinement of a fusion reaction. I suspect that at some point someone will build such a hybrid reactor just because the idea is so compelling. I just think that it would never be as profitable as a much simpler device that did only fission or fusion.

A similar idea to a hybrid fission/fusion reactor are accelerator moderated fission reactors. Both ideas solve two problems inherent with fission reactors. One problem is the initial source of neutrons, the other is the problem of too many neutrons. With a fusor or particle accelerator providing the neutrons the neutron flow can be moderated by how much power is supplied to the neutron source. What many people have found out is that there are much easier ways to solve these problems.

A lack of neutrons in the fission reactor can be solved with enriching the fuel and/or control rods. Too many neutrons can be solved with control rods too, the control rods might be of a different material but it is still control rods, or by simply allowing the fissile material to heat up and expand to a lower density. Once a fission reactor gets going it naturally tends to produce enough neutrons on its own that a constant neutron source is unnecessary.

I could be wrong, maybe there is some detail I missed that makes my assumptions incorrect. I just don't see hybrid reactors as feasible outside of a research setting.

Because thorium might end up being cheaper and easier than uranium. The reason we were able to go from the speed of a horse to beyond the speed of sound is because we were able to find cheap and plentiful energy in coal and petroleum. As energy gets cheaper the more things become feasible.

Why is it that people don't have flying cars? We certainly have the technology for everyone to have their own personal aircraft. The limitation is the price of energy. It just costs too much to fly a helicopter for a person with an average income. But if energy were to be one tenth of what it is now then we'd be flying to get groceries instead of driving.

I believe we need to investigate every possible energy source. Solar power may last us for a billion years but I doubt it will ever be able to do so at a price as cheap as what thorium could do.

We don't burn coal because we want to live in a smog filled world. We burn coal because it gives us energy cheap enough that we can enjoy air conditioning while sitting in front of a computer. We are going to keep burning coal until something cheaper comes around. We do that because cold beer and hot pizza means more to us than some theoretical future where Florida is under water from melting the polar ice caps.

So, why thorium? Because beer, pizza, and Miami.

Radiation == bad, got that. What I didn't see in the article is any mention of baseline data. What was the radiation level in the area before the reactors blew their tops? What naturally occurring radioactive material was in the leaves fed to the butterflies? How much radiation did that produce? What is the rate of naturally occurring mutations in the butterflies without the radioactive cesium in their diet?

I've got even more questions about this study but they didn't seem concerned with actually collecting data, they wanted to tell us that radioactive stuff can cause mutations. We knew that, but they neglected to state how much of a real effect this has on the environment.

This "study" would probably be good for a "B" grade in a high school science fair. This does not look like something worth publishing in a scientific journal.

A few more quick thoughts. We can detect radioactive cesium in the grass miles from Fukushima. We can also detect the radio transmissions from a space probe that has left our solar system. Just because we can detect it does not mean it has any real effect on our lives.

Nuclear power is the greenest energy source we have in carbon output per kWh produced, even better than solar and wind. Yet we hear people scream, "What about the radiation!" I thought that if we don't reduce our carbon output now every coastal city will be under water in a decade. Seems to me that a few mutated butterflies is a pretty good trade-off to having the Statue of Liberty up to her neck in sea water.

The risk of having radioactive cesium getting blown miles from a nuclear reactor accident is something inherent to solid fueled/water cooled reactors. If we use liquid fueled/gas cooled nuclear reactors we remove that risk. Molten salt reactors simply cannot melt down and blow up like Chernobyl and Fukushima. Not only do MSRs not blow up they eat radioactive waste from current solid fueled reactors.

To get rid of the scary radioactive stuff we need more nuclear reactors, not fewer. We just need the right kind of reactors.

I've heard an argument similar to this one to abolish the minimum wage. Pay people based on what they produce, not how many hours they work. Which is precisely how some businesses have gotten around mandates like minimum wage and Obamacare, every "employee" is an independent contractor and they get paid on units produced or other similar metric.

This does not work well for all industries. Some kinds of work just does not translate well to anything other than an hourly wage. Just about everything can translate to better work resulting in better pay.