Well, they tell us that there will be cake....

The article does mention one other problematic issue - it is this unsettled scientific question called "evolution". Seriously, read TFA.

Say what? All of the scientists/science teams studying this issue are independent parties testing the hypothesis - that's what science is and how it works. It is a process of continual repeatable testing of the hypothesis.

What is your concept of this "missing outside party"? A new "super science" that mysteriously needs to be created to address this one issue because, as you admit, it is politically inconvenient for Wyoming?

It isn't politics - it is economics.

Private enterprise if fully capable of building new nuclear power units in the U.S. if they want, the licenses are available, and the U.S. government still underwrites the insurance for the industry (a significant subsidy since it is a favor that other industries do not get). This has been true continuously for all of the last 35 years.

The reason none have been built is that the capital cost is very high, and the long pay-off time makes the investment unattractive compared to coal and natural gas. Also modern American business is allergic to investing to make profits in the distant future when profits can be made sooner in other ways.

It is a straight-up business decision by (short term) profit maximizing capitalism not to build them.

Or possibly, do you mean that politics should create mandates requiring they be built?

Such rich ore in thick veins is very rare - the uranium content of the ore was the highest in the world, 20-60% uranium, the average ore concentration current mined is around 1%, and many mines operate with ores containing a few tenths of a percent. Some Canadian mines have ore grades up to 20%, so there is a possibility it another might be found there.

We do know that similar reactors have existed in the past. The isotopic concentration of U-235 in natural samples exhibits an unusual variation in concentration over a range of about 0.008% (say, 0.7199% to 0.7207%). Other mid to heavy elements with multiple natural nuclides don't do this. The explanation would seem to be ancient nuclear reactors that have eroded away have created regional U-235 variations.

Unfortunately you overestimate the power and influence that investors, even very large investors, actually have these days

Consider executive compensation packages. Those packages are often a significant portion of the company's profits, and can remain enormous even when there are no profits at all. This is money being taken out of the pocket of shareholders. In theory those shareholders should be able to control corporate behavior in those periodic meetings where they get to vote their shares, and should thus be able to reign in these enormous levels of compensations that greatly exceed world standards, and historical U.S. standards. But voting on executive pay has only recently be mandated by law (before such votes were rarely taken) and they are non-binding - i.e. the board can ignore them entirely. The result - executive compensation packages, which have been at record levels for a couple of decades, continue to explode, breaking records year after year.

I think you are including unexploded cluster bombs in this count - which while not being actually landmines do function in effect like them.

There is a treaty to do just that: The Ottawa Treaty. 161 States are parties to the treaty, unfortunately hold-outs include a majority of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the United States, Russia and China.

And of course a ban does nothing to remove those already in place.

Oops - editing era (accidental list deletion). That should read: "These could easily last more than a century, particularly in a dry climate like Somalia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Angola, Iran and Egypt (which happens to be the most heavily mined country)."

You sure about how long mines will (not) last?

A fair number are modern mines consisting of sealed plastic cases and modern military explosives that are stable and waterproof. These could easily last more than a century, particularly in a dry climate like Somalia (which happens to be the most heavily mined country). In fact it is not clear why these mines would ever stop working.

You are not considering the fact that the mines render huge areas essentially unusable due to the risk of getting killed or maimed. This is an enormous continuing cost burden on the affected nations This area denial effect is the reason the mines were put there in the first place!

The estimated cost of extracting uranium from granite is something like $700/kg-U. This would increase the price of nuclear energy something like 20% - not desirable but certainly not a show stopper.

But the key problem with extracting uranium from granite is the huge volume of granite that needs to be excavated - the "yellow coal" problem as it is known. The volume of rock that needs to be excavated and crushed is less than coal, but it does chew up huge amounts of granite formations just the same.

But at $300/kg-U seawater extraction becomes possible with present technology, and the world reserve extends to thousands of years of fuel, even if only U-235 is burned in existing designs.

A famous quotation by Nobel Prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli upon reading a poorly written paper: "It is not even wrong".

And so it is with this summary and the TFA and with the original paper.

To start off with the academic paper discussed is arguing that concrete led to the downfall of the Roman Republic NOT the Roman Empire. In other words she is claiming that it led to the rise of the Roman Empire. She argues that the availability of concrete to facilitate major engineering projects under Julius Caesar "weakened the entire political system" because it was such an awesome spectacle (apparently). As a theory of historical causality it is more than a bit daft. It seems a bit like claiming Albert Speer weakened the Weimar Republic.

Then bringing up the monocausal "lead poisoning brought down the Roman Empire" is the brain-child of the newspaper reporter who is sensationalizing, err, "covering", the academic paper. It has nothing at all to do with the concrete/Caesar/Republic thesis, but the reporter heard of this once and concludes that it was "widely believed by academics" and just threw it in for the hell of it (possibly it is the only thing she knows about Rome). This is hogwash. Any monocausal theory about the fall of Rome is going to be treated skeptically by modern historians, who have no shortage of good reasons for accounting for the end of the empire. The lead poisoning theory got a lot of press, but was never taken seriously by the community of historians, and it was debunked by other scientists pretty quickly (sure there was lead over-exposure about, but nothing like what the theory posits, and the Romans were well aware that lead could be bad for you).

They used data that is already public.

Did you actually read the article? The statement from B612 was "The foundation says the CTBTO data would suggest that Earth is hit by a multi-megaton asteroid - large enough to destroy a major city if it occurred over such an area - about every 100 years." Since there was a very famous one just over a century ago in Siberia (1908) that most definitely would have destroyed a major city if it had been hit it is not all obvious that there is any exaggeration here. And notice that it did NOT leave a crater. Computer modelling shows that this is the norm for megaton asteroid explosions, not the exception - most asteroids are rocky conglomerates that would dump their energy into massive atmospheric explosions and leave no craters, even as the fiery plasma jets from the sky lay waste to the surface of the Earth. The asteroids that form craters are megaton range iron asteroids (only ~1% of meteors are iron based on Antarctic data), or extremely large (hundreds of megaton yield) rocky ones.