Little Boy used roughly 90% enriched uranium.
In general, the required isotopic purity is closer to 90% than to 98%.

Centrifuge enrichment does not happen in plasma. It uses uranium hexafluoride, which sublimates above 93*C. It is a regular gas like carbon dioxide or oxygen, only heavier.

There's also an obsolete thermal diffusion process, but it takes roughly 100x more energy (!). The last thermal diffusion facility in Europe, Eurodif, will free up some 3000 MW of power when closed. Its job will be done by a new centrifuge enrichment plant that takes only 50 MW.

Your numbers are far off. U-235 makes up only 0.7% of natural uranium, the rest is U-238 which is not fissile. Furthermore most uranium ores are far less concentrated than 5%. Common ore grades are in the 2000-500 ppm range, or 0.2%-0.05%. To get 1kg of 90% U-235, you need roughly 100 tons of 2000 ppm ore and 167 kg of pure natural uranium (assuming that the tailings contain 0.16% U-235, which is very low but possible; actual tailing concentration is 0.25%-0.3%)

That is true, but has little relevance for modern nuclear weapons. All nuclear weapon states except Pakistan use plutonium weapons, which are less costly and much smaller than high enriched uranium weapons. Plutonium can be produced from natural or low enriched uranium in specially designed reactors, then separated chemically. Some plutonium is produced in LWR reactors, but can't be used in nuclear weapons due to its isotopic composition: weapons plutonium needs 90-93% Pu-239, whereas LWR spent fuel contains ~60%.

Run this in terminal to get the old layout.

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

You can also use gconf-editor.
Sadly some idiot at GNOME decided that the "interface" tab in Appearance properties was redundant and removed it, so there's no simple way to do it from the GUI.

OS X spam.

Ubuntu doesn't require tinkering to keep working, unlike Windows. It sometimes requires tinkering at the start, and after major upgrades.

Hardware incompatibility is rarely the problem. In fact, migrating to a new version of Windows would be significantly worse on the hardware compatibility side, because old hardware usually has only 32-bit Windows XP drivers. Meanwhile Linux drivers are cross-platform.

The government PC is going to have a motherboard, CPU, RAM, a hard drive, and maybe a CD drive. Nearly everyone will go with the integrated motherboard components. Nothing fancy is required, and support for components such as disk controllers and Intel graphics chipsets is excellent. The only problematic case is the old i815 graphics, but it's not sold anymore. Hardware is NOT the main problem.

WTF!!! Do you realize that the "modified" DNA from GM food is not directly absorbed by your body, but broken into simpler molecules and then assimilated? That the proteins coded by extra genes are broken down into amino acids before being absorbed into the body?

Furthermore, you seem to think that it's wrong to use a gee from a mouse it in anything but a mouse. Well, it's silly. Many organisms do similar things with genes that are vastly different. Some functionally equivalent proteins are only 20% homological between e.g. people and cockroaches. Finally, we've been genetically modifying our crops for thousands of years via crossbreeding, hybrids, chemically induced mutations, and radiation induced mutations. Genetic engineering only gives us much better precision and diminishes the possibility of accidentally introducing unwanted traits.

Really, the organic / anti-GMO clowns are even more paranoid than the anti-nuclear clowns. There is no great conspiracy to poison you. Monsanto is not the only agricultural company in the world. GMOs will not kill you. There is no credible peer reviewed science to suggest that GM food is harmful in any way. GM crops reduce pesticide use, which is good. Go to a psychiatrist.

Farnsworth Fusor cannot yield a net energy gain. In general, any device where the plasma ion velocities are far the thermal equilibrium will never yield a net energy gain. I had a paper about this somewhere, but lost the reference.

I agree with the gist of your post, but:
1. TMI happened before Chernobyl, and had no impact on the public. It was a disaster only in the financial and PR sense.
2. Chernobyl's physical impact was moderate. What made it a total clusterfuck were ignorant and irresponsible foreign journalists, combined with the reluctance of Soviet authorities to disclose any actual data, that initiated a mass panic. If people were more rational about radiation, most of the exclusion zone would never be evacuated.

So nuclear technology is not at hand but solar and wind is? There is an 80% nuclear country (France), and an 80% hydro country (Brazil), but there is no 80% solar/wind country. It's pretty trivial to transition the grid to all-nuclear once the funds are available, but transitioning it to an intermittent source like wind or solar was never done before and the issues we will face are unknown.

I also find it interesting that you consider blackouts on the "centralized" grid to be a problem, because I live on such a grid as well and get a momentary blackout maybe once a year; most often it is a local transmission failure, rather than a power plant failure, so a distributed generation system will not help.

You are trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. In fact it would get much, much worse under the distributed renewable system, because a few days of calm cloudy weather is all it would take to bring down the entire country to a halt.

We can do this even now. Radioisotope thermoelectric generators convert decay heat directly to electricity using thermocouples. It's just shockingly expensive to produce meaningful amounts of power this way, because you need a lot of the most expensive metals.

Steam turbines scale excellently to very high powers, thermocouples and other similar direct heat to electricity technologies, not so much.

No treaty will ever accomplish this, and moreover I don't think it's the wise thing to do. Without nuclear weapons, big conflict between the superpowers is bound to happen sooner or later, and is going to be devastating. The threat of being incinerated in a nuclear blaze is what keeps the leaders cold headed.

The recent arms reduction treaty between US and Russia is not the work of pacifists, but a simple economic calculation. It's not necessary to be able to destroy every backwoods village in a country to exert influence, and keeping nuclear warheads in service costs a lot of money.

Arms reduction is popular among the crowd and a good idea financially, but total disarmament is very unlikely, and probably even undesirable.

By the way, most of this heat comes from uranium and thorium decay.
Geothermal power is an inefficient form of nuclear power.

That's an understatement. You'd have to use every possible natural site and then build ten times as many artificial ones. The amount of energy that would need to be stored is staggering, and the energy storage costs would make up the majority of expense in such a system.

The 10 000 square miles figure is far too low - the realistic figure is around 300 000 square miles.
http://www.cleanenergyinsight.org/energy-insights/what-does-renewable-energy-look-like-part-ii/

Vattenfall has demonstrated an EROEI of 93 on the Forsmark nuclear plant, by actually measuring their energy inputs, rather than inventing formulas.
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeEnergyLifecycleOfNuclear_Power