She was 1 years older than the US female average life expectancy at that time.

Life expectancy for a woman who was Mme Curie's age when she started working with radioactive stuff, or life expectancy at birth? Because childhood diseases and accidents were still a substantial source of overall mortality in Mme Curie's day, and life expectancy at birth was heavily influenced by that reality. Those who made it to adulthood had life expectancies far more comparable to today's (heart disease and cancer - two major contemporary killers - were both considered quite rare in those days).

What people are saying is that since its advent, fewer people have died from nuclear power than coal

Give it time. Nuclear hasn't been around as long as coal, and with nuclear the plants themselves become more dangerous to operate as they age.

The massive stockpiles of highly radioactive waste that continue to accumulate also represent a not-so-slowly increasing risk.

and the reason we're still using 5 year old consoles is because the horsepower in them is still plenty and not being fully exploited.

No. The reason we're still using 5-year-old consoles is because it costs the console makers billions of dollars to design, produce, distribute and market a new console, which means it takes years of strong sales before they even recoup their investment on these expensive, dedicated devices.

The problem looming up ahead for the console makers is that they're a niche market compared to cell phones and - I suspect - tablets. Which means you're going to see rapid evolution in that mobile space, evolution which will make all but the most costly to develop and manufacture consoles look pretty lame in well under 5 years. Game developers are already starting to target more resources at the mobile space, which decreases the amount of time they'll have to spend on developing and improving upon their console games. Even if the console makers spend billions developing next generation devices, it isn't clear if developers will commit the resources it would take to fully leverage the capabilities of such devices.

Eventually, the console business is likely to hit a tipping point, one where it just doesn't make any sense to invest $5-$10 billion developing a "next generation" console, because developers won't be willing to support such a beast. Why, when they could make much more money developing games for the hundreds of millions of existing users on perfectly capable mobile devices?

Since social games continue to rise in importance, I also suspect that cloud-based gaming will reduce the need for bleeding-edge graphics hardware in the home. Users are already depending on good network connectivity to make their games playable, and that same connectivity enables developers to offload a lot of processing to the cloud. That's also hugely beneficial for mobile gaming developers, since it'll allow low-power mobile devices to deliver graphics performance rivaling power hungry dedicated gaming consoles.

We saw something like this happen back in the early '80s, when home computers dropped dramatically in price, and their capabilities outstripped those of the existing game consoles. Consoles eventually returned to prominence, as they were easier to use and their standardized featuresets made them easier to develop for. Mobile devices don't carry those limitations. They're as easy to use as consoles, and they're quite standardized compared to the personal computers of yesteryear (or even today). They're also deployed in truly staggering numbers, and users upgrade on a regular schedule (to largely compatible devices).

I wouldn't be surprised to see the console business shrivel over the next decade. With PC prices continuing to decline, I also wouldn't be surprised to see hardcore gamers migrate back to the computer, especially if the console makers decide to skip out on adding bleeding edge graphics to their next generation systems as a cost-cutting move (which seems likely).

There is a limit to what you should plan for.

That limit depends on how catastrophic the consequences of not planning for the event might be. A nuclear meltdown and the potential for burning nuclear waste are pretty catastrophic consequences, and should be mitigated accordingly. Of course, doing so probably renders nuclear power plants economically untenable, but that's their problem.

These events are simply too rare, and also the destruction caused by the event likely dwarfs the destruction caused by the nuclear reactor's problems. The latter argument can also easily be applied to the Fukushima plant.

Tsunami aren't particularly "rare" along the northern coast of Japan. That coast was hit by a similar event in the last 500 years - there are markers in the hillsides noting how high the last tsunami crept - and there is evidence of earlier events occurring on a roughly similar frequency. Since a nuclear power plant lasts at least 50 years, that gives a coastal plant in that area at least a 1 in 10 chance of being obliterated by a tsunami, given the evidence at hand.

>Nuclear power is far more expensive than coal power

Rubbish.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#US_Department_of_Energy_estimates

The D.O.E. estimates coal at about $95 per mw/h. Nuclear is $114 per mw/h. Note that the nuclear plants aren't being held accountable for the total liability they represent, and they aren't being required to pay for the enormously expensive transportation and longterm storage of their nuclear waste and the liability that crap represents.

However, your post reeks of bias. Appratntly you believe that by reducing coal burning by using nuclear will increase greenhouse gas emissions, but reducing coal burning by increasing efficiency won't.

Economics lesson for you: the price of coal doesn't care why usage is reduced, only that it is.

Wrong. While increasing efficiency will also lower the cost of coal - the same as converting some coal-sourced power to nuclear would do - the techniques and technologies created in the process can be exploited by other coal-burning economies, ultimately reducing their carbon footprint as well.

Read Adam Smith sometime. He did a great job a couple hundred years ago explaining how markets work. If the price of coal falls, you can be certain more coal-fired plants will be built, especially by nations that want to maximize their return on investment or don't have a ton of capital to dump into nuclear power plants to begin with (they're far more expensive to construct).

Now, bear in mind that this area of the world is not susceptible to the kinds of earthquakes Japan

We don't know how susceptible that area of the world is to enormous earthquakes. We know they don't happen frequently, but we also know large quakes do happen hundreds - and in some cases thousands - of miles from plate boundaries, and at infrequent intervals. The New Madrid quakes that hit the middle of the United States in the 1800's are a prime example. Such events are infrequent, but because of the nature of the mid-continental crust, can cause enormous devastation over a much wider area than quakes along the mountainous margins of a continent.

Which is worse:

Taking the risk of a few nuclear catastrophes during the next couple of centuries, or to keep dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere ignoring the fact that it pretty darn definitely has some effect in the long term...

Nuclear power is far more expensive than coal power - especially if the plants were forced to buy private liability insurance. Even if a country the size of the United States replaced all of its coal burning plants with nuclear power plants, all that would accomplish would be to lower the price of coal, providing an incentive for poorer countries to build scores of coal fired plants.

So the idea that nuclear power is somehow going to save us from the horrors of global warming is an economic fantasy. You'd be better served praying to Zeus - at least that wouldn't waste a ton of energy building useless, dangerous nuclear power plants, ultimately increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses pumped into the atmosphere.

The best way to prevent global warming is to use less energy by boosting energy efficiency as quickly as possible. The next best way is by continuing research into alternative sources of energy which are carbon neutral. Finally, money that would otherwise be wasted on deploying nuclear power (and dealing with its dangerous waste) could instead be invested in researching and deploying better ways to sequester the CO2 emitted by plants which burn fossil fuels.

I work for a large scale nuclear generator and we're certainly not subsidized by anyone.

Oh, so you're at a U.S. plant that's started buying insurance in the private market then, and are paying whatever the going free market rate is for your liability insurance?

No?

So in other words, you're being heavily subsidized by the taxpayers already with sweetheart rates for government-run liability insurance. And when there's a catastrophic accident near a major city, the government fund that nuclear power plants have been paying into - for decades - doesn't have enough money in it to begin to cover the liability. Which means more money will be stolen from the taxpayers to clean up your mess.

I'll believe nuclear power is safe and practical when the nuclear industry can buy private liability insurance - from an adequately capitalized insurer, one who has the resources to actually pay out in case of a disaster or two - and still turn a profit.

I'm not holding my breath.

Phone hardware is power-constrained, not just by battery, but also by heat management design of a phone.

Not if you offload a lot of the processing to either a docking station of some sort, or to a remote cloud service like OnLive. That stuff is the real threat to traditional consoles, especially for multiplayer internet games where you're already dealing with participants in remote locations.

Also, phones are on an annual development cycle, not these half-decade to decade-long dev cycles the console makers have locked themselves into. While it's true that today's phones aren't terribly impressive as standalone game machines, next years' models will be much better, and the year after they'll be better again. Having a kick-*ss gaming experience in your pocket for $300 makes blowing $300 on a game console feel like a waste of money to all but the most hardcore gamers. Sure the consoles might be better for a year or two, but the phones will rapidly catch up. And they're gonna have much larger game libraries.

I think the proliferation of smart phones will do to the modern console what the early home computer revolution - when the Commodore 64 and Atari 800XL dropped down into the price range of a game machine - did to the 1st gen consoles: it'll kill them off.

These are the people that eat all the food on the life raft.

Yes, but on the plus side, then the other people on the life raft kill and eat them. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered, as the old saying goes. So to some degree it's a self-correcting problem.

I have a feeling we're approaching just such a correction point.

Pity all the troops are overseas engaged in a massive war profiteering operation for the benefit of the 0.1%. Who will defend the hogs when the 99.9% come to slaughter them?