Older electronics like the Cube tended to be made from discrete components, through-hole mounted and soldered using wave machines or even by hand and they could be easily chopped around, extra bits soldered into them or signals tapped out with the chip specs and pinouts available from a number of sources. Newer devices like tablets and modern compact laptops consist of one or two dedicated ball-grid-mounted ASICs, not easily hackable or repairable by ordinary folks without expensive reflow soldering gear, jigs etc. and of course the specs for those ASICs are commercial secrets. Even scrapping modern devices is less fun than it used to be -- I junked a Belkin wireless router recently and the only reuseable components I got off it were things like the DC power connector and a few electrolytic capacitors. On the other hand I replaced a switch on my favourite ten-year-old mouse just the other day, a like-for-like swap from another old defective mouse I had lying around.

Yep, that's why Qatar's per-capita GNP is twice that of the US. Moving money around also inflates the GNP figures hence the appearance of Monaco, Leichtenstein and the Bermudas at the top of the world tables. Japan has virtually no raw materials it can export and it's not a financial black hole for rich people to hide funds from their national governments but it still holds up well in terms of GNP per-capita due mainly to its industrial base.

Actually the EU has a higher GDP than the US, the usual marker for the strength of an economy. Mostly that's due to the greater population (505 million EU citizens compared to 310 million or so Americans) as per-capita GNP in the EU is a bit less since we don't have quite as much raw materials production (oil, gas, coal) which inflates the figures.

The US tried withholding its funding contributions for ITER during the run-up to the off-the-books trillion-dollar war in Iraq after most of the other participants in the project decided it should be built in Cadarache in France, home of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys, instead of Japan. It didn't work, America decided to rejoin the project and they're pouring concrete this month in southern France for the reactor vessel's base.

WiFi in the 2.4GHz band is very close to the frequencies used in microwave ovens to cook food. Water molecules are "tuned" to that frequency and will absorb that energy most efficiently. It's part of the reason Wifi has that less-regulated spectrum assigned to it as it doesn't propagate over long distances very well especially if the air is damp or humid.

At the signal levels used in a classroom it's very unlikely to impossible a Wifi system will cause any kind of noticeable heating effect in body tissues. Having a couple of hundred watts of 2.4GHz RF bouncing around inside a commercial aircraft fuselage is starting to get into microwave oven territory though...

I have hardware in a cupboard that failed after a year or two or in some cases even earlier but I never bothered to jump through the hoops to get it fixed or replaced under warranty. I also have working computing gear that dates back to the 70s. That fact that some hardware has survived a decade doesn't mean that all (or even most) hardware will do so.

Businesses usually replace a desktop box every four or five years, laptops maybe every two or three. Any five-year-old desktop running XP or similar will have ageing components, hard drives wearing out mechanically, fans dying etc. which makes them ripe for replacement. They also probably don't support affordable amounts of RAM (typically 8 or 16GB) which can make a serious difference to performance in 64-bit operating systems -- nearly all XP installs were for the 32-bit version which limits out hard at 3.5GB. XP also has the 2TB drive volume limit and no TRIM for SSDs. Older boxes have no hardware support for SATA-3 and usually poor support for SATA generally. They may still be AGP rather than supporting any version of PCI-e, no USB 3.0 ports, the onboard video is crude and slow etc. etc.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the next big NASA space project although the funding has been on-off for the past decade, raising the final price and stretching the delivery time to 2018 and counting. It could still be cancelled by Congress to save money and help reduce the national debt. Europe is providing a number of instruments and an Ariane V launch for the project in return for access to the science.

The JWST is the last Big Space Science project on NASA's books though, all the other big observatories were cancelled or never got past the proposal stage. There are no plans to replace the Hubble with a similar visible-light observatory even in low Earth orbit, unless someone can rework those spare NRO Keyholes that were donated to NASA recently and find money to launch them.

Work out how much delta-v it takes to get a missile from the Moon's surface to somewhere, anywhere on Earth then compare that with the effort needed to fire a cruise missile from somewhere on the Earth to its target on Earth and then get back to me. After that we can discuss the pricetag and annual operating costs.

Lasers over a distance of 400,000km followed by 50km of atmospheric defocussing, right...

Absolute guess here but are you American by any chance? Any time I read militaristic stupidity and a belief that anything in space must have a military application then the odds are they're kill-crazy Americans.

Japan still has several thousand tonnes of spent fuel in store and reprocessing it would reduce the storage requirements if nothing else. I figure they will restart most of their nuclear fleet over the next few years, the cost of importing more LNG to make up for the cheap nuclear electricity they're not generating is starting to impact the country's financial bottom line.

Britain's current nuclear fleet of 12 reactors generates about 8GW or roughly 20% of our electricity needs running flat out between refuelling stoppages. One small reactor at Wylfa, the last operating Magnox unit anywhere I believe, currently producing about 420MW to the grid may be shut down next year after 40-odd years of operation when the last fresh fuel elements are expended. Plans have been announced to build two EPR1400s with a total grid capacity of 3.2GW at Hinkley Point, an old Magnox reactor site and more recently a two-reactor generating plant with a similar capacity but based on boiling-water reactors has been announced for Wylfa, both to come on-line in about ten years or so when the other reactors currently operating, nearly all AGRs, start to reach end-of-life after 40-50 years of operation. The four Hinkley Point and Wylfa new-builds by themselves will replace about 80% of the capacity currently provided by the ten AGRs, and the new designs could operate until the end of the century. There's also an 1100MW PWR at Sizewell with a projected operating life out beyond 2050.

Reactors have been getting bigger over the past few decades -- some future designs are in the 1800MWe class -- but the extra size makes them more expensive to build. Fewer units are needed however for the same capacity in a grid and operating costs are generally lower per MW of capacity (reduced staffing, longer operation periods between refuelling, smaller footprints etc.) It's a problem (to get back to the original subject) that the NuScale and mPower small modular reactors face, loss of economy of scale. Yes, they can be built in a factory but most large components for an EPR1400 are factory-built anyway; moving one large reactor vessel or ten small ones to a site is a wash in terms of cost and disruption and any nuclear build will involve a lot of ground works, concrete and rebar which can't be done on a production line indoors.

The British, French, Russians and now the Japanese are currently recycling spent fuel. The Americans aren't so that means hardly anyone is doing it. Right?

Total world capacity for commercial reprocessing is about 5000 tonnes of spent fuel a year once the new Japanese plant at Rokkasho (800 tonnes/yr) is up to speed. These plants are based on chemical treatments of the spent fuel to produce nearly-pure forms of uranium and plutonium for reuse in reactors plus a waste stream to be vitrified or used as feedstock for separation out of other particular isotopes for research, industrial or medicinal purposes. There are R&D projects going on into other lower-cost means of processing spent fuel, by electrolysis for example but they're not actually processing mass quantities of spent fuel as the in-operation plants around the world are.

I understand the site off Tiree for the planned 1.8GW dataplate wind farm involved hard-rock mounts for the turbines and apparently the engineering costs for the mounts were going to raise the price -- this wind farm was to be situated in the north Atlantic which is a much harsher environment than the sheltered southern reaches of the North Sea. Some other wind farms in the south of Britain closer to major population centres in shallower more sheltered areas such as the Irish Sea have gone ahead at that strike price of 0.21 USD/kWh (£145/MWh).

The planned Hinkley nuclear plant's strike price of 0.15 USD/kWh is less than your wind farm's 0.19 USD/kWh and it will generate electricity for 60 years, at least -- the EPR1400 design could well operate for a century with mid-life upgrades. That price includes the cost of decommissioning the plant at end-of-life back to greenfield status. I don't know if that is factored into the price of wind turbines in Denmark, after all you can't simply leave the mounts littering the seabed after the turbines have been scrapped -- or is it a case of out of sight, out of mind and they'll be just left to rot? There's an older wind farm here in Britain where the ownership of the non-functional turbines built in the 1990s is in doubt (the farm was bought and sold a few times) and no-one's sure who's going to pay to have the scrap turbines removed and the site restored. There's no ring-fenced decommissioning fund as required for all nuclear plants these days.

Offshore wind runs about $5/MW of dataplate energy according to a report today on the BBC about a major project that's just been cancelled -- £5.4 billion ($8.6 billion) for an 1800MW capacity wind turbine array (Three hundred 6MW units). Offshore gets a little bit better capacity factor than land-based units, maybe 30% so that's 540MW average over a year or so. Expected lifespan of offshore wind turbines is about 15-20 years but the industry has been quite coy over failure rates and actual operating costs of offshore wind turbines. Decommissioning costs don't seem to be mentioned but for an array of that size it could be hundreds of millions. The strike price, the cost the grid would be obligated by law to buy this wind energy in at was set at £145 per MWh; apparently this wasn't enough of a return for the folks proposing the wind farm and the project has been abandoned.

The two EPR1400 nuclear reactors planned for Hinkley in England will produce about 3200MW baseload at a capacity factor of about 90% or so, averaging about 2700MW per annum, expected construction costs about £10 billion ($16 billion) and a working lifespan of 60 years minimum, probably more. The grid will buy this reliable and very predictable baseload at an agreed strike price of £90 per MWh assuming the project actually goes ahead, that price to include paying into a decommissioning fund on each kWh sold as well as covering the cost of fuel, operation, mid-life refurbishments etc.

Those are the grid-supply pricing targets an array of small reactors will have to meet; it would take more than 35 NuScale 45MW reactors to deliver the same generating capacity as an EPR1400 which costs (according to the Chinese who are closest to completing their EPR builds on time and on budget) about £5 billion a pop so each NuScale reactor needs to cost less than £150 million for them to be even marginally an economic prospect.

The $226 million grant from the DoE isn't to build a reactor, it's to fund further development and help NuScale to get a licence to build and operate a prototype in maybe ten years time -- that process could cost a billion dollars in itself.

"Next up: Why not just do this using batteries--never mind the cars?"

NGK make large storage batteries and they use their own products to power an office complex in Japan, doing just what the article suggests by storing overnight lower-cost electricity in a large battery pack.

Apparently it two weeks for the resulting fire to be extinguished.

NGK have sold a bunch of these batteries around the world, including to support wind power in the Shetland Isles in Scotland.

Positioning such a battery a couple of metres from a 3,800 tonne fuel-oil tank was probably not a good idea...

That's a bit like AsbestosNacht -- the idea that the wonder material of the twentieth century, asbestos, was a toxic hazard to health would have been laughed at by the enlightened rationalists of the 1930s and 1940s. Fortunately everyone knows tobacco is harmless and indeed positively beneficial hence the presence of public smokatoriums burning the weed in city centres so everyone can enjoy its healthgiving effects and pleasant odours. And let's not forget those other boons to mankind, lead and mercury, so prevalent in the atmosphere and drinking water...

Reprocessing commercial PWR and BWR spent fuel produces a mixture of two isotopes of plutonium, Pu-239 which can be used to make weapons and Pu-240, the presence of which spoils an implosion weapon's functioning by producing lots of heat and radiation since Pu-240's half-life is a lot shorter than Pu-239. Weapons-grade plutonium is produced in specialised non-commercial military breeder reactors which produce a purer for of plutonium with only a tiny amount of Pu-240.

Proliferation isn't really a problem for reprocessing, the real hurdle to overcome is that it is expensive and complicated to do safely. The upside is that it reuses spent fuel, but at the moment freshly-mined uranium is very cheap so the cost factor predicates against more countries operating a reprocessing facility. One major benefit is that reprocessing concentrates the unwanted isotopes in the fuel (aka "waste") into a much smaller volume which, although much more radioactive per kilogram than unreprocessed spent fuel makes it easier to dispose of in a deep geological burial site or storing it temporarily aboveground.

Neighbourhood-scale generating systems are great until the central generator has to be taken off-line to be fixed or refurbished or whatever at which point the people being supplied need a solid grid connection to other generators to keep the lights on. That somewhat obviates the cost benefits of local power generation to start with.

Small nuclear plants supplying a local need are being closed down in the US and elsewhere because of economics and the cost of licencing, inspection etc. The operators of Vermont Yankee, an old 600MW single-reactor station announced it was going to close next year because it was not cost-effective to keep it running. It had a licence to keep operating for several more years but the low cost of gas and the high cost of regulation made the decision for them. A similar 550MW reactor at Kewaunee in Wisconsin shut down earlier this year for similar reasons.

A single 100MW LFTR plant for a city will still have to pay for inspections and monitoring like a dual-1400MW pressurised-water reactor operator does, maybe not as much but still a substantial overhead per kWh generated. It would cost the builders hundreds of millions of dollars to get the licence to build and operate the reactor in the first place, and good luck getting an exemption through Congress for these "safe" but totally unproven reactors with no history of operations, no generational knowledge of engineering etc.

The Oak Ridge uranium-fuelled molten-salt reactor never generated any electricity, the 7MW of heat it produced at full power for short periods was dumped directly to the atmosphere through a fan-assisted radiator. Assuming it had been coupled up to heat exchangers and a turbine generating system it could have produced maybe 3MW of electricity, no more. A modern EPR1400 PWR will produce about 4700MW of heat energy and deliver about 1500MW of electricity to the grid 24/7 when operating with an expected uptime of about 90% annually and an expected lifespan of at least 60 years with the possibility of continuing safe reliable operations for a century.