God forbid you might like to use the board to teach C, C++, perl, python, pascal, BASIC,..... this thing is designed for kids in a classroom and for use at home on the TV.It is designed to be dirt cheap so breaking one isn't going to be a problem.

Bullcrap, why don't you go and watch the video of it being demo on their website. It's running an ARM version of ubuntu.

No-one said passive systems were easy, in fact they are quite difficult to design and required modern computational power to produce. That is the stark difference between the old designs and the new designs such as the AP1000 - computing power. We can now model the nuclear, thermal, chemical and structural processes to a degree that was impossible when the first and second generation nuclear designs were produced. This is one of the reasons we can much more confident in the generation III+ reactors.

I'm astonished you compared averages and attempted to use this to backup your argument. Go and have a look at the distribution of power produced by each of those coal plants. You'll see that the majority of the 42% comes from a few large scale coal plants, equivalent in scale to the nuclear installations.

indeed :P

wow so many typos today... there = they.

Nuclear power would be great if humans didn't have irrational fear about things there don't bother to understand. If reactor construction had not stopped after the Chernobyl disaster, very few of these old, crappy designs would still be in use. Most of the problems in the modern nuclear industry are related to ancient systems that have had their lives extended due to the lack of replacement plant.

I think you missed the sarcasm.

Great pictures, they remind me of the ITER construction site. I love heavy engineering.

Ignoring the massive earthquake, tsunami and the ancient reactor design of course...

Good. Glad to see a the US pushing ahead with a new generation of nuclear reactors. I hope we remain committed in the UK.

+1 funny

One thing you have to bare in mind is a lot of companies are utterly allergic to spending more money on something than they have to - they want to know they are passing the standard at minimal cost, rather than risking spending money on something that may be unnecessary - one reason all the standards have a good margin of safety. As a tesla could not meet the standard, it would not realistically be considered. A cheap LCR circuit, a charge pump and a solid state switch would cost a similar amount and do exactly what they want.

Generally, you will find that the low-level surge testing is done in-house during development, especially by the larger electronics companies. This would be the wack it, smell it test (or more precisely - measure to see if any inboard transients occur that will damage stuff you want kept alive). We cater for the higher threat level requirements where the cost of the test equipment starts to become prohibitive and the test experience is of significant value (we advise on mitigation). Even for this aspect of lightning testing Tesla coils are ill-suited. Contact ESD, surge and coupled transients all have well defined standards (all derived from experimental measurements of typical threats) which a Tesla would not be able to correctly produce.

The polarity observation could be consistent with the relative difficulty of producing -ve streamers compared to +ve streamers. +ve streamers are generally produced at a lower E-field than -ve. It is possible you are seeing this preferential breakdown behaviour in your current results.