Except for one thing though: you need much more uranium-233 to build a fission-style nuclear weapon than uranium-235. Needing more fissile material means a much heavier nuclear bomb, and makes it not very practical for ballistic missiles and you don't want a heavier bomb on today's jet combat planes.

There are too many examples of what happens when uranium-fueled reactors fail: Windscale in the UK in 1957, Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima Daiichi in 2011, not to mention several reactor failures on board Soviet era-submarines--the results are pretty scary.

Meanwhile, molten-salt reactor experiment at Oak Ridge showed such a reactor can be run very safely, and unlike pressurized water reactors if there is a coolant cutoff the reactor can be safely shut down without running the risk of a reactor vessel explosion that could spew out a lot of radioactive materials like what happened at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

However, I do want nuclear power advocates to get away from pressurized light water reactors (PWR's). There are so many disadvantages to using PWR's, especially with the use of expensive uranium-235 as fuel and the dangers of using a pressurized reactor vessel.

Meanwhile, China and DARPA are working on a joint experiment to test scaling up the molten-salt reactor (MSR) design that was successfully tested for nearly a decade at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. If they can scale it up, that means we'll have a nuclear reactor that is extremely safe to run (even in earthquake-prone areas) and uses commonly-available thorium-232 dissolved in molten fluoride salts as fuel, which means the potential for _thousands_ of years of fuel supply. And that could be a gigantic game-changer in terms of power generation, enough to do things like electrifying long-distance railroads around the world and do large-scale seawater desalinization to turn former deserts into arable farmland.

The answer is simple: the age of the "robber baron," as noted by the powerful trusts that dominated the US economy in the last three decades of the 19th Century. That was why they passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 and the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914 to stop these excesses.

How about what happened in the former Soviet Union during Stalin's reign between 1928 and 1953 and China during Mao's reign between 1949 and 1976?

Between unfettered mass shootings, labor camps, forced exile and deliberate famine (all of which the Nazis practiced in their "racial cleansing" program that included the Holocaust), scholars estimate at minimum 100 million people were killed, with some estimates as high as 150 million! That is genocide on a scale unimaginable in human history--all done in the name of "equality" as defined by the political Left.

Except for one thing: does the OWS crowd understand what happens when Socialism--the aim of many OWS supporters--runs amok? Ask the elderly survivors of the former Soviet Union under Stalin and China under Mao what happened--unfettered mass shootings, labor camps, forced exile and deliberate famine that may have killed (by scholarly estimates) at minimum 100 million people, with some estimates as high as 150 million people. In short, 10 to 15 times what the Nazis achieved between 1933 and 1945.

Now you know why I detest Socialism.

The answer is NO.

Two things electric cars need to have to become viable alternatives to petroleum-fueled cars: 1) the vehicle must have a range of at least 600 km (373 miles) and 2) the vehicle can recharge quickly from a commercial DC charger in under 15 minutes. I think that could be possible as early as 2020 when improved battery designs are available.

I myself have been using a Microsoft Natural Elite keyboard since 1999--and I love it.

Why? Because after getting used to the Microsoft keyboard, going back to a regular keyboard is awful--it feels "cramped" when typing for long periods of time and my wrists hurt after a while. Logitech's Wave and its wireless successor, the K350, was also designed to have a more "natural" positioning of the wrist, though Logitech didn't split the keyboard layout like Microsoft did.

Here's the problem: HBO has very expensive carriage right deals with the major cable companies and satellite providers in the USA, deals that are very lucrative to HBO itself. If HBO were to make HBO Go no longer needing proof of a cable subscription, that will effectively kill that gigantic revenue stream and HBO will obviously not have the money to do shows like "Game of Thrones."

It will take essentially an antitrust lawsuit to change this picture.

What we need is a MASSIVE overhaul of national taxation so it doesn't discourage savings and capital investment in the USA. The current tax code is rife with corruption, is 70,000-plus pages of tax law so complex that even the IRS can't figure half of it out, costs Americans just about US$500 BILLION per year in compliance costs, and drives millions of jobs, thousands of factories, hundreds of corporate headquarters, and (by some estimates) around US$15 TRILLION in American-owned liquid assets to foreign financial institutions as a means of income tax avoidance.

Economic and political insanity, in my humble opinion. Maybe it's time to seriously look at the no-loophole flat rate tax proposed by Steve Forbes in 1996 _at minimum_ as the tax reform, a reform that would encourage savings and capital investment staying in the USA and free up as much as US$375 BILLION per year now spent on tax compliance for more productive purposes.

Here's why the Northeast has so much affluence: the extreme earning wealth from the financial sector around New York City. You have a LOT of money managers in the New York City area earning yearly incomes that would make even Yankees' 3B Alex Rodriguez (before he got into his recent troubles with illegal drug doping) seen like a poor man in comparison in terms of earnings per year.

My old Logitech MX500 mouse pointer was ONLY retired because the scroll wheel no longer worked after five years of yeoman service. I've replaced it with a Logitech M500 model.

Here's the problem: the REAL people that should be standing up to NSA snooping are the Level 1 Internet backbone providers: AT&T, Level 3, Sprint and Verizon. Because the NSA directly tapped into the backbone, the spy agency don't need access to the servers at AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Yahoo! to get all the information they need. Indeed, I've read that NSA already has special rooms inside AT&T and Verizon operations to directly tap into the backbone--and this known for many years.

In fact, the very fact you don't need a pressurized reactor vessel and hope the coolant flow still works even in case of an emergency is why MSR's are potentially vastly safer than today's light-water pressurized uranium reactors.

And that would mean even in earthquake-prone areas like Japan, an emergency shutdown can happen a lot faster and there is no danger of the reactor vessel exploding and spew dangerous radiation products into a wide area.

There's still one nuclear reactor technology they haven't actually scaled up yet: the molten-salt reactor, where the nuclear fuel is dissolved in molten fluoride salts. Alvin Weinberg's experimental reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was only a small 5 MW unit that actually ran successfully but was shelved because it couldn't produce fissile material for nuclear weapons.

I'd like to see someone scale up MSR technology as a technology demonstrator to prove it can work to generate large amounts of electricity, at least in the 85 to 100 MW range. If they can do that, that could mean we can get far safer nuclear power plants, especially since shutting down the reactor is very easy to do (just drain the liquid nuclear fuel from the reactor) and it only generates a very small amount of radioactive waste, waste that has a radioactive half-life of around 300 years.