I've found this story about US Atlas program in 1993:

The Ariane rocket was brought down by a forgotten rag in 1990.

Any citation to back that crap up? From what I understand fuel recycling has been hampered by technical complexity (breeder reactors), fear of uncontrollable proliferation in a full-scale Pu economy and non-competitivity in face of cheap uranium and oil. And the first obstacle in the construction of new reactors has always been that extending the operational life of existing ones, as was done in Japan and is currently done in Russia, is by far the most profitable move.

From my point of view one of the most serious obstacle against the credibility of nuclear energy is probably the smug and haughty attitude of those innumerable assholes ready to deny at any cost the shortcomings of their pet technology and to wipe off any legitimate concern as necessarily coming from so-called "ludites" and "joe-six-packs". Are you certain that you are not the blind idiot here?

There, fixed that for you.

You'd have to know what services you truly need. I remove all obvioulsy uneeded services on any new CentOS installation but always stop at these ones: acpid, auditd, cpuspeed, haldaemon, irqbalance, messagebus, microcode_ctl and possibly kudzu and sysstat. Do I need them? I just have no idea and no willingness to try.

No. You just shouldn't have SSH accessible from the outside, period. Use OpenVPN if you need remote access, it's free.

I hear this argument all the time on slashdot that we don't have those nice thorium/breeder/fusion reactors because of despicable greenies and nimbies or detestable "ludites" and "joe-six-packs" (and also this revoltingly idiot Jimmy Carter, compared to whom even W. Bush looks like a chess grand-master) but I don't buy it, it just doesn't cut it. Those people simply do not have such a political momentum. From my understanding breeder reactors have shown to simply be too complex and fragile to deploy on a commercial scale. Fusion energy is currently unreachable for engineering reasons. I'm not sure why thorium reactors have not been more developed lately but I suspect the reason is much more mundane, it's the same as why we don't have solar power plants: fossil fuels are simply too profitable to too many people to allow any serious investment in any other direction.

Ore who rapes them to be even more eloquent.

And a bullet in the back of the head (pointing downwards in order to preserve the eyes for organ harvesting).

"Why a four year old child could understand this. Run out and get me a four year old child, I can't make head or tail out of it." -- Groucho Marx

You put forth an argument regarding safety of NP and asked "what about it?", I told you I think it's bullshit and argued why, now you fork off about a question of price.

My point is that regarding risks and impact on life of each energy generation technology, intrinsic risks (basically, the worst case) as well as mitigated risks (i.e., the best we can do) need to be properly assessed and compared. Comparing intrinsic risks of coal to mitigated risks of NP doesn't bring much.

As many nuclear fanatics on this site, you sound to me as a very angry, choleric person, not as much interested in trying to figure out a rational answer to the specific question of what energy politics would be best for humanity as inn winning a dick contest where "your" technology would so much better than "my " technology. You say "look harder" but it appears to me that dismissing people's concerns about NP as ridiculous would also need some reevaluation, especially in light of recent events.

The page conveniently doesn't mention concentrated solar power, which is obviously the safest and cleanest, if possibly not the cheapest, way of producing usable energy bar none. However the price is high as long as externalities are not considered. The true price of energy generation for humanity once each and every components are taken into account (pollution, accidents, politics, crime, hidden costs) is still to be determined with precision imho. My bet is that on the very long term, i.e., if humanity is to survive a couple centuries, most energy will come from solar. Nuclear power will possibly be part of the mix but not in the form we're doing it today.

Nobody would fall from any roof if construction regulations that are enforced with NP would be applied to roofing. Similarly, coal would not be as much polluting nor as cheap if pollution regulations on par with those used for NP were enforced - all pollutants can be filtered expect possibly CO2, and even this one could be captured. These aspects are not inherent to the energy source, they're only consequence of a historical / cultural development.

No, it's partisan bullshit, at least in part. We should all aim at the truth, not at advancing our own agenda / pet technology. Renewable energy is not "my tech" like some other asshat said somewhere, neither is nuclear power the devil. I'm simply looking for some honest, objective, thorough assessment of the alternatives, which this page doesn't qualify for as far as I can see.

However they might be sufficient to provide solar A/C which might put a good welcome dent in the peak electricity usage of developed countries.

I have a hard time following your way of reasoning. Project Desertec is already doing this, and how woud it require to move anyone from there? We're already using coal, oil and uranium from other nations, how would using solar radiation be any different?

I say "Nuclear as it is done today has proved itself an immature technology not suitable for long-term energy generation, thus you mentioning the need for breeders, reprocessing, etc; let's build solar thermal power plants while developing acceptable long-term alternatives like possibly thorium and fusion reactors."

The fact that it's using figures regarding the Chernobyl death toll that were later admitted as bogus and recanted should ring a bell. Also the notion of counting roof falls as a consequence of solar energy sounds to the very least like an extremely contrived argument to me, if not outright partisan bullshit. However the fact that I'm able to easily spot a few glaring crocks in an argument unfortunately doesn't make me magically able to come with better figures.

That sounds like a wild speculation - do you have any citation to this claim? I doesn't look very plausible to me that insurers are wary of people coming in 20 years and asking for compensation for their cancer, which they'll have a very tough time proving as caused by radioactivity. I'm pretty much convinced that they simply do not want to compensate for the potential loss of real estate and business in case some large city needs to be evacuated.

You asked earlier "is that all anti nuclear people can muster?" so I'll get back to you the same: is that all nuclear fanatics can muster? Of course if you decide that radio-isotopes at large in the environment are not a problem, then you have indeed solved the one annoying problem with nuclear energy :-)

I fail to see how solar captors on roofs or in the deserts shut down large extents of arable land.

I never said that oil had no subsidies, or that coal was not bad for your health and get a free pass regarding pollution. Only that NP would probably not be very viable if at all without huge public funding. Do not dismiss the fact that the existing nuclear technology is mostly a by-product of decades of military investments, all publicly funded. Renewable energy never have benefited from such massive investments, which is too bad imho.

Solar thermal energy doesn't have any of those drawbacks; now is it a viable energy source for all of our needs is open to debate.

That's not a conclusion you can draw from the facts we have now. You might say that NP has been the least polluting energy generation in the last few decades. However we've been inches from a major disaster, and you're advocating multiplying the existing nuclear reactors park a hundred-fold, and deploying them in countries with very different standards regarding personal responsibility, corruption, accountability, technical expertise, education, etc. We might face in ten or twenty years a Fukushima-style accident where a whole megacity would have to be indeed evacuated, at which point your statement will not be true anymore. Even if you deem any new such accident simply impossible, because the designs are now so good that no degree of human stupidity, corruption and greed will ever be able to overcome them, you still assume that the waste are properly processed, which is far from a given.

Really it's not a line, it's a large grey band, and it's moving all the time. What was considered unacceptable in the 60's is now totally boring. But anyway, my point was not that the government will not be able to draw an arbitrary line and prosecute people according to the mood of the day. They can and they will, as you've stated, and very happily at that; they will never balk at using and showing their power. My point is simply that it will be useless in keeping porn off the non-xxx domains.