Seismic zones do however show patterns of periodicity of varying degrees of regularity. There is an underlying physical mechanism accumulating stress, and faulting must be triggered within a finite time limit given the finite strength of the fault zone (but may trigger sooner). Chances of a great earthquake absolutely do increase with time, dropping to minimal only after each major event.

The Hitachi press release contains absolutely no information about what might be new, unusual, or effective about their approach. They mention an undescribed new fuel core in passing, that's it. It would have been helpful if they had included something to give the sense that it is not pure hype.

Or - it could mean that few Republicans contribute at all to this PAC, and that Democrats dominate both the "Democrats Only" and the "Whatever Helps" category. Evidence for this is just as strong as your unsupported theory.

Oh Anonymous Coward, you seem as reading challenged as your are name-challenged. The OP pointed out that the political right never opposed slavery, he said nothing of "the Republican Party" (really, he didn't - have a look).

The fact is original Grand Old Party was the Liberal, leftist party of the day. The fact that it became the party of the right-wing and plutocrats later, as you say, "in no way changes history".

Sadly, you are completely correct. All three branches of government treat individual rights as as after-thought or less, the political parties despite an apparently unbridgeable chasm, are pretty much on the same page here, and the election process has been rendered ineffective at influencing this state of affairs, saturated as it now is with special interest, secret money.

So what we now have is a corporatist plutocracy presiding over a national security state in which foundational legal principles mean nothing if they constrain the power of wealth and government.

Not extortion, no siree!

The Mob is actually a benevolent society, concerned about the well being of local businesses.

You don't think your doodling during lecture is art? I do. Not good art, probably. But definitely art.

Since humans of 10,000 years ago made woven clothing, observed celestial events and linked them to earthly activities, produced very sophisticated stone tools (which had a long distance distribution system of some kind), and art at a high level, I would say that their culture was much closer to us than to apes.

Genetic studies show that the rate of human evolution has been accelerating, and since the advent of agriculture have become 10-100 times faster than in the paleolithic, so that 10,000 years could make changes similar to what could be accomplished during earlier phases of evolution in 100,000 to 1,000,000 years. We don't know, at this point, what all these changes mean.

Your post would be considerably more persuasive if you showed the price of uranium at which it became "unsustainable", and if you didn't throw out a random "well over 100x current cost" figure when your linked source only documented a 10-20 times cost using older technologies now being superseded described in the article. (Your provide no analysis to show that the even the 2007 price spike made nuclear power "unsustainable" - proof by unsupported assertion does not work)

At $130/kg the cost of uranium mining comprises a cost of 0.32 cents per kwh. So at $1000/kg this cost rises to 2.5 cents per kwh. The additional 2.2 cents is less than the estimated cost difference between advanced nuclear and more expensive future solar PV power, which I suspect you believe to be viable (I do). So the fearsome $1000/kg price still leaves nuclear power cheaper than solar. If more advanced technologies cut the cost (the normal pattern of things), and the topic of the Technology Review, this differential gets cut as well. A better article on seawater uranium extraction indicates that technologies under development should cost $300/kg, a price that drops the differential to only 0.42 cents per kwh, and making it a very minor component of nuclear power cost

It is worth noting that currently the world only maintains a 74 day supply of grain. A super-eruption of this kind would effectively shut down agriculture everywhere. About half of the world's grain is directly consumed as food, so if we immediately divert all grain use (feed lots, fuel and industrial use, etc.) to direct basic food use we could double that to 148 days, then we run out completely.

Of course this ideal model of even distribution is not reality: poorer places and food importers run out much faster, richer and food producing places would last longer - maybe a year? But the dramatic cooling which prevents crop production would probably last a number of years. All of the major food crops are sub-tropical species whose productivity are very sensitive to temperature. Even after the period of outright crop failure ends, productivity will be reduced. And as lgw states, the grain belt in the U.S. (~15% of world grain production) would be out of production entirely long after the direct cooling from the ash dissipated.

Another reference point is the Great Famine of 1315-1317 presumably caused by the eruption of Mt. Tarawera in New Zealand, which ejected about 6 cubic kilometers of ash, only 0.6% of a Yellowstone super eruption. The Great Famine resulted from two years of crop failure, with normal food supplies not being restored until 1325. Depending on region 10-25% of the population of Europe died. (The Black Death showed up 22 years later, the poor health of those who lived through the famine perhaps contributing to its development and toll.)

It would be safe to estimate that the majority of the world's population would die, probably a large majority.

Radioactive wild boars roam Germany. I'm calling it as the first sign of the Apolcalypse!

You are correct that restoring the species successfully (assuming we can make viable breeding PPs) is a long shot. One of the problems is their colony-style breeding behavior. The aren't solitary nesters, but live and breed in large groups. Attempts to breed them in captivity failed.

The collapse of the population to zero seems to have proceeded in phases (3, I count): loss of forest food sources from cutting, extermination efforts (hunting and simple pest-control killing) which capitalized on the dense groups that made easy pickings, but then after PP extermination was circumscribed, the population continued to collapse since they were below the natural breeding population size. In its last couple of decades efforts to save them were being made, but they were unsuccessful. The genetically documented population "bottleneck", when the breeding population dropped to 50,000, might have been a single colony.

A similar situation occurred with the cheetah, which once dropped to fewer than a dozen individuals within the last 10,000 years. There is also evidence of humans bottlenecking with populations in the low thousands within the last 100,000 years.

The enormous numbers of the Passenger Pigeon actually suggest that they were the beneficiaries of an extreme environmental disruption that occurred a few centuries earlier: the sudden and dramatic disappearance on the large scale agricultural and horticultural societies of Native Americans when ~90% of the population died from successive onslaughts of pandemic disease brought by the arrival of populations from the Old World (Europeans and Africans).

European observers only ever got a look at pre-pandemic North America along the east coast, and the evidence there is of stunning change in the ecology.

Genetic studies of Passenger Pigeons have shown that the subabundance was a transient, new phenomenon. In the last million years the breeding population only averaged about 1/3 of a million, and sometimes as few as 50,000, and began a population upsurge 6,000 years ago. The enormous explosion to billions was much more recent than that.

The ecosystem for the PP were forests of nut-bearing trees, which the super-population of PPs could be seen to be damaging in their locust-like swarming and foraging, an unsustainable situation. These forests were not "natural" though, they were managed for thousands of years by Native America horticulturists who encouraged the development of large dense stands of edible nut trees.

When the Native American populations suddenly disappeared that left large stands of unexploited nut-food that allowed the PPs to break-out into the vast populations that were observed. Their habit of long distance migration in large groups was well suited for such an explosion, exploiting all of the nut-tree resources on North America.

Come again? Current typical PWR fuel usage is to take fuel that contains 4.5% U-235, and discharge after a fuel burn-up of 50,000 megawatt-days/tonne, spent fuel containing 1.02% U-235, which would be using 77% of the U-235 in the fuel rods, not 5%.

Also it is not clear whether your "1%" number refers to the theoretical fissile energy from the originally mined fuel (including the safely stored, easily accessible depleted uranium, which is not in the fuel rod) or just the actinides in the fuel rod itself. In the latter case, not only is U-235 burned, but a significant amount of U-238 is transmuted and burned as well (a bonus of going to higher fuel burn-ups), so about 5% of the total actinide content in the fuel is burned, a lot more than "1%".

Right - it is the unburned transuranics that comprise nearly all of the long-term hazard. Reburning spent fuel in specially designed reactors can extract power and keep the size of this spent fuel actinide inventory stable. Active reuse of the fuel will also prevent it from being seen as a permanent burden, eventually it will be taken away and burned.

The problem is that only heavy subsidies will build these burner reactors - they will never compete with once-through U-235 burning because the capital and fuel cost of these is lower.

Mining and enriching U-235 is actually cheaper that reprocessing spent fuel. Regular enriched uranium fuel is not "hot". It is easy to handle without special hot cells for everything. The U-235 is easier to burn. You can't even argue that eventually they will have to build them because the natural uranium will run out. It will be cheaper to extract U-235 from seawater than use transuranic fuel, in which case we will have a 10,000 year supply of once-through burning.

Transuranic burners will require government intervention to bring them into existence, to subsidize their operation in some fashion. Perhaps tying the spent fuel tax will to this is how to do it, but it looks like the tax is too low currently. If this is going to happen maybe someone should start making it happen - real development plans - now so they will actually exist in 25 years, instead of still being fiction in 75.

Nope they do not produce "weapons-grade plutonium" (which can only be made in low burn-up reactors, far below the burn-ups of current power reactors). It does produce extremely dirty weapons-useless plutonium*, but then it burns it too, so the net effect should be to reduce it.

Please cite the legal vehicle through which Carter "banned" them? (You can't because this is fantasy.)

What Carter did do was veto funding for the Clinch River Breeder Reactor project one year, since it was growing into a colossal boondoggle, but the veto had no effect since it was over-ridden and the project continue unabated. The project was eventually killed by Congress in the Reagan Years (1983) because as Carter argued, it was a colossal boondoggle. The cost had grown from $400 million (with industry kicking in $257 million) to a project coasting $8 billion (with government covering all of that cost increase). That, and there was no wast processing facility to handle its fuel, that having been shutdown during the Ford Administration.

There is no "breeder ban".

*It is possible to make nuclear explosives with any combination of the transuranics, they are all fissile. But trying to make a practical munition out of the very hot (thermally and radioactively) transuranics is impossible. The weapon would require special cooling at all times, no one could service them unless using a hot cell, service life would be very short, requiring constant rebuilds.

Or even more correctly Evangelical Fundamentalist Christianity into schools. The Fundamentalist bloc is a political powerful sect in the U.S., but fairly unimportant in world Christianity; but has managed to misappropriate the term "Christianity" to only apply to themselves in practice. We shouldn't propagate this erroneous usage.