There are plenty of working schemes:

Wave Dragon
Pelamis
Oyster

Human flight is one of those ideas which seem really obvious from a distance, so the fact that project after project fails does not seem to dissuade anyone. They were obviously just doing it wrong.

With most new tech the R&D happens in a lab out of public view. The numerous failures are hidden from view and you just see the final, working prototype or a finished product. Unfortunately that isn't possible for large projects like this, so they have to do their R&D in public.

You need a reasonable upload speed, but bandwidth is infinite over time and I have backed up terabytes over a few months with a 10Mb connection.

Consumers have mostly moved to external hard drives or cloud storage. I know everyone on Slashdot hates the cloud, but as a backup medium it isn't bad. Off-site, managed by someone else and low cost due to being shared by many other users. You can encrypt everything for privacy and use multiple providers if you don't trust any single one. Might as well make use of that upstream bandwidth you paid for over night.

Most importantly it's easy. No need to remember to do it, no need to rotate disks off site or plug them back in again. Most people seem to fail at backing up because they are lazy.

I just use a laser to etch my backups into the surface of the moon, and a telescope to read them back. Occasionally I get bit rot when a meteorite hits it or a Chinese rover makes tracks over it, but that's what parity is for.

I have CDs I burned in 1996 that are still in good condition and readable on any modern optical drive. Obviously, these are Taiyo Yuden archival grade discs, not cheap rubbish, but not terribly expensive either. You really can't beat optical media for backwards compatibility - a modern BluRay drive can still read the first CDs ever pressed without any problem.

These days my preferred format is archival BluRay. Tapes need expensive drives that wear out or can mangle the tape, and while Unix backup software will be available forever that does mean you need a Linux machine to do the actual reading and writing to tape. It's a shame they didn't decide on a standard, universal filesystem for tape decades ago, like they did with CDs.

In fact the current snooping laws have already been massively abused, when the government swore that they wouldn't be because of "checks and balances". Police used RIPA to get journalist's phone records, to find out who their sources in the Plebgate scandal were. Not even investigating a crime, just protecting their own image and trying to keep themselves out of jail (the police tried to smear a politician with lies, and then lied to investigators about it, and then lied to the press about it, and were then found out).

Cameron is a coward. He said it himself - he doesn't want to be remembered as the PM on who's watch there was a terrorist incident and hadn't given in to every demand for new powers from the security services. His vanity is apparently more important to him than abstract concepts like privacy and freedom.

You could compete with the power company yourself. Install solar or maybe a wind turbine if there is room, large battery pack for backup. Will pay for itself in 10 years anyway and no more outages.

That's the goal in super capitalism - become a monopoly with a guaranteed income.

They had experts telling them that Japanese plants had issues, and they ignored them. Making it even harder to point these things out seems like a bad idea. It's also why it's so hard to trust the plant operators and regulators - it often seems like their job is to hide problems and downplay issues, rather than put safety first.

As for frogs, the key is to do your research before you start pouring concrete. Then when someone asks you can point to your existing report that says you checked and there is no protected wildlife in the area, and if they disagree they need to show some evidence. It really sounds like either incompetence on the part of the people building the plant or a completely broken planning system.

I agree, but why pay more? Invest in renewables and you get a nice ROI, invest in nuclear and you just create more waste that you have no way of dealing with long term.

The cost in France is heavily government subsidised. You pay on your energy bill, you pay through taxes, in the end you pay more.

What happens if someone discovers a flaw? So far every reactor design ever built has needed some modification afterwards, due to unforeseen issues. Seems like if there is no way to force companies to make those modifications, like a government agency telling them or affected citizens having the right to sue we will just end up with another Fukushima style accident.

That's going to jack the cost up to military levels too then. Probably more, because unlike the military the nuclear plant operators would have to hire people on the commercial market and train them to a high level, and then pay them enough to retain them.

There isn't really enough volume to justify that kind of mass production. Even if there were, many of the parts are specialist and have to last the lifetime of the plant, because once contaminated can't be easily replaced. In other words, it wouldn't bring costs down.

Surely there are lawsuits over all types of new power generation. People hate windmills and coal plants and fracking and everything else near their homes. Nuclear is hardly unique in that regard.

Anyway, in the UK lawsuits are not such a big problem, but nuclear is still completely unaffordable and only gets built with massive, and I really do mean massive subsidy.