What's a "home" in terms of power?

If you use natural uranium as your fuel, the significant amount of U-238 that is present can breed to Pu-239, Pu-240, and Pu-241.

If you use Thorium as your fuel, your bred fissile is U-233.

In a LCTR (throium breeder that has a fast reactor core of spent fuel), you breed plutonium, but you also fission it in real time. (The designed reactor geometry is such that one fission (producing 2.7 neutrons on average) gives 1 to the chain reaction, 1 to plutonium breeding, and .7 to U-233 breeding and material absorption.)

That's not actually accurate, but OP's comment was inaccurate anyway.

LFTR is one idea: You fission U-233 such that one neutron continues the chain reaction and another is absorbed by a thorium blanket; the resultant U-233 is extracted and placed in the fissile stream. You do this in a thermal spectrum, using a fluoride salt as carrier solvent for everything as well as being part of the moderator system.

Unfortunately, this won't work for spent LWR fuel; they've already given up all the goodies they can handle in the thermal spectrum. This is why you hear all the talk about fast reactors; much of the fissile load in spent LWR fuel is flavor of Pu, which only perform well in a fast neutron spectrum. Further, other trans-actinides only fissile at all with fast neutrons. Fluoride is too moderating, so that can't be used as a carrier salt.

What's used instead is a LCTR (Liquid Chloride Reactor). Works pretty much the same way, except (a) you have a much bigger core (fast neutrons go further), (b) the fissile stream is fueled ONLY by spent LWR fuel, (c) you shunt off the U-233 for seed material for LFTRs. This also puts you in the fortunate position that your fuel salt is already easily processed as a liquid, in a form that is commonly used for what's called "Pyroprocessing" anyway.

While you could, in theory, harvest the plutonium that occurs in this cycle, there are serious engineering challenges to that task. The expense alone to do it frequently enough to avoid significant amounts of Pu-240 and Pu-241 would be astronomical.

The thing that bothers me about the Yucca NIMBY argument is that Yucca Mountain is not in ANYONES back yard. No one for TENS OF MILES lives there.

"Nuclear will never be clean, nor safe."

As a former nuclear engineer, I have to disagree. Current nuclear power plant designs are clean and safe. They emit fewer pollutants than you, personally, as a living human being do, and will likely kill fewer people.

Mind, I have misgivings the earlier plants; most of them have been retrofitted with lessons-learned-based safety features, rather than having them designed in.

Still, your statement is one of ignorance. You might want to learn about how nuclear energy works before declaring it unclean and unsafe.

Oh, so the combustion of coal no longer produced CO2? The mining of coal no longer fouls rivers or flattens mountaintops? Coal's lifecycle no longer /fucking kills people?/

Fuck your marketing. Coal is still filthy and blood-stained.

"We could do space solar today too."

Yes, because that's cost-effective and efficient. Even the design phase proved to be a failure. The only benefit of going to space is modest gains via escaping atmospheric absorption - which are then lost by inefficiently converting that light to electricity, then inefficiently converting that electricity into a maser (while losing energy to positional maintenance). This is not to mention the cost of flinging the damned thing into space.

Space solar is a spherical cow. Any engineer can tell you.

"You seem to have forgotten about Chernobyl. Two workers died in the Tokaimura incident too."

Chernobyl was the result of people mucking about with an inherently unsafe reactor design; Tokaimura was an experimental reactor. Neither of these have anything to do with modern APWRs.

"You should also read up on solar thermal collectors."

Best one is 125 MW, it takes up a ridiculous amount of land to get that, and it cost us nearly $25/W to build. Nah, they're shit.

"I am with those who insist that the main technical problem with nuclear energy is a sound regulatory framework. I don't see it."

Then you're fucking blind, mate. Nuclear energy is the most well-regulated technology the developed world engages in.

"financial/technical reality on the other hand."

The financial and technical reality is that nuclear is cheap when compared to anything but coal, and safe when compared to virtually anything else.

"Things don't get anymore true because you repeat them over and over."

Take your own advice, then do some research before opening your mouth again.

"It is simply not true that coal (for example) is worse than nuclear."

A 1GW Coal plant belches about half of what TMI and Fukushima excreted in terms of long-lasting radionucleides, in the form of thorium and uranium /every year/. Oh, and that climate-changing stuff as well as SOx, NOx, and particulates. But hey, those don't count.

"How's that called. Nuclear strawman? Hahaha."

Ok. Tell me when you have a solar plant or wind farm that produces a gigawatt and doesn't consume insane amounts of land, and doesn't /require/ a carbon-belching natural gas plant to provide power back-up. Then we can talk about why asking to abandon nuclear is the realm of magical fantasy land.

I can't stand this shit: "new power generation technology; it's 250% more powerful than the last one!" Yeah, that's fucking awesome - except that you're not really telling us anything. It can take 800kW? Great. What do you expect the mean and standard deviation of that output to be like? How much do you expect one of these units to cost? What, precisely, do you have to quantify this technology's value to the human race other than vagaries about green energy? We've got renewables - wind, solar pv, solar therm, hydro, geo - why is this one special?

This is not a put-down of the technology; this is a put-down of shitty publish-the-press-release technology reporting. Give us fucking numbers.

USB. I'll explain.

The PS/2 port has been around since 1987 - over 20 years - and while it's at end of life, even in 2012 there will be those little PS/2 to USB adapters.

Why? Because it was a popular choice for keyboards, that's why. When people buy a new box, they never seem to want to buy a new keyboard.

So now USB is becoming the defacto standard for KB/M systems. PS/2 is creaking past it's lifespan. As such, a USB hard drive should do the trick. Preferably, stored in vacuum.