That doesn't match all with the reports from Fukushima. There were some early thoughts that the fuel pool was leaking, but that proved to be false. The large quantities of short half life radioiodine released show that the leak was from the reactors, not the spent fuel pools.

The issue is that a containment vessel can only tolerate a certain internal pressure. The reactor core produces heat even when shut down, and heating in a sealed space leads to a pressure increase. In the absence of some way of relieving pressure (such as a functioning cooling system) this will inevitably lead to failure of the containment vessel.

Some new designs can provide this cooling passively using water tanks above the containment, but the vast majority of reactors require active systems to do this.

This thorium stuff is just another paper reactor. They're always the safest. It's when they try to implement them that problems show up.

Yes, the NOx and particulate matter are still several times worse for diesel than for petrol, despite stricter regulations. Before Euro 5, the diesel requirements were *much* slacker.

Though apparently the fancy new direct injection petrol engines produce significant amounts of particulate matter, though still less than diesels. A little less greenhouse gas but much more pollution doesn't really seem like a good trade to me.

Hardly - the scrubbers may filter out *most* of the pollutants, but not all by a long way. As for carbon capture - that's still limited to a tiny number of small scale test projects at the moment. None of the planned coal plants in Germany will have it, for example.

You could have used "it" to refer to AMD (if it's a singular entity rather than a group of people, then by the same logic it's inanimate). Grammar is a matter of convention, and the convention is that companies are grammatically plural. You might as well ask why French has feminine tables.

And how much difference do you think that would make? Solar/wind and the like already get vastly more public funding than fusion. Adding the fusion budget to it would barely be noticeable.

There's rather a lot of difference between 0.85 THz and 500 THz. A similar factor increase in frequency from visible light would give you X-rays, and I doubt you'd say they were the same as visible light.

Visible light is several hundred THz.

UPnP means that it is. And without UPnP plenty of legitimate applications won't work without lots of manual configuring which your average person won't know how to do. Besides, if you've got malware then you're already stuffed, firewall or not.

I doubt anyone's fibre is. Maybe Virgin's coax & twisted pair are though.

Batteries are already mass produced though, aren't they? Perhaps not on the scale that electric cars would use, but certainly enough to have achieved the cost reductions associated with mass production rather than specially built low-volume items.

More like 60% for modern CCGTs. Even older ones should be above 50%, if they haven't been scrapped due to low efficiency.

Well, I guess they have to somehow disguise the fact that watching 30 seconds of sprinting is extremely dull.

The E in E =mc^2 refers to the rest energy, which is indeed zero for a photon. There's also a component related to motion, and it can be shown from relativity that the total energy is given by E^2 = p^2c^2 + m^2c^4. For a photon of course, this means that E=pc.

Relativistic mass is a rather useless concept, since it doesn't behave as we'd intuitively think that mass would, and is in any case equivalent to the total energy mentioned above. Best to stick to rest mass, which has the useful feature of being independent of frame of reference.

The main problem with Fortran is Fortran programmers. Or, more specifically, those who started off with F77 or earlier and carried on doing things the same way. For numerical stuff, I prefer F90 or later to C - far fewer ways to shoot yourself in the foot with memory management.

What possible mechanism could have caused that? Radioactive leaks aren't like an infectious disease, they don't cause distant power stations to become damaged.