Reproduction shops can add texture given a lot of work and significant amounts of cash money for each "print". They can't easily add translucency and layering of colours unless they reproduce the painting process itself stroke by stroke which is a lot harder to achieve and it's these sorts of effects that make coming face-to-face with the originals of fine artwork a revelation.

"If I had the world's greatest art at my fingertips... would I fill my home with it? No. I already have access to the same art. I can get prints or lithographs of any of it and really its close enough that would would care."

I once had the pleasure of helping to organise an artshow of original works by an artist whose main income was from selling artbooks and limited-edition prints as well as commercial commissions doing book covers and the like. The originals (he worked in oils mainly) had texture and colour the reproductions and prints could not match no matter how expertly they were produced. Seeing his work up close was a revelation.

When I had my own vehicles I parked in side streets when I could find a space; there are more residents with cars than spaces for them, a deliberate decision by the local council to deter car ownership in the city centre. There's little or no private off-road parking around this area as it's typical high-density housing, blocks of tenement flats with thirty or forty people living on a land footprint smaller than a US McMansion with a three-car garage and a driveway, the sort of home wealthy electric vehicle owners have.

I've read histories about early car users, enthusiasts who were rich enough to afford the equivalent of a Tesla more than a hundred years ago. It was easy to arrange a delivery of benzene or petrol fuels in cans even when there weren't gas stations every few dozen miles. All it took was money and a horse-drawn wagon. Kerbside charging points will only be installed in the city centre if and when the local authority pays for them which will be never, basically. They'd rather blow a billion dollars on a new tram system.

I live in a block of flats, I don't have a garage or other place to plug in a car to charge it on a regular basis. I'd have to visit a local supermarket car park which has two electric vehicle charging bays at the moment to charge an electric car if I owned one. It's about a kilometre from home on foot and the car park rules only allow me to park there for two hours at a time before I'd have to pay penalty fees of up to £80 a day. That's assuming either of those bays is free when I get there of course.

There are millions of people like me in the same situation, not rich enough to afford the infrastructure necessary to own and operate an electric car. I've not got any sort of car at the moment and no real need for one (one of the benefits of living in a major city centre with excellent public transport) but I had no problem running a car when I did have one, spending five minutes in a petrol station filling up with diesel when I noticed the tank was running low. Can't do that with electric cars.

Fast-charging an 85kW battery, the same capacity as fitted to the Tesla S, from 20% to full in five minutes would take about 700kW or roughly the power feed for thirty-five typical US homes (100A @ 200V). If the "gas" station wanted to charge two batteries at the same time then double that figure. Halve the charge time to two minutes, double the power feed rating again. Assuming 400V battery packs a 2-minute fast charge unit would require connectors and cables rated to handle about 10,000 amps.

Folks don't realise just how much energy there is in a litre of gasoline sometimes.

How well would, say, California today cope with a large tsunami with peak heights of up to 15 metres? What are its sea defences like, are folks willing to pay billions or trillions of dollars to pay for installing and upgrading precautions against a once-in-a-millenium event?

Japan gets earthquakes like the Mississippi valley gets tornadoes, they plan for them, their building codes are written around them and as a result few people die even in a large earthquake. Tokyo experienced the equivalent of a Richter 7.1 during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, I think one person was killed when a section of interior roof fell on top of her. That's not bad for earth movements greater than, say, the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California which killed more than 50 people.

Actually the tsunami defences along the Tohoku coast were a lot lower than the 5-metre high seawalls at Fukushima Daiichi, where defences existed at all of course. Lots of towns still don't have that much in the way of sea walls in place, Itami for instance.

Onomichi, a little seaside town in Japan I visit regularly has tsunami defence walls about a metre high with access gates through them to the piers and quays oceanside. The only change I've seen there since the 2011 tsunami are notices telling people not to park blocking the seagates so they can be closed in an emergency. Life goes on, Nihon.

Once you actually look, you find out the UN does a lot of productive stuff like peacekeeping and conflict monitoring, elections, health and welfare, education etc. It's just that sometimes the UN doesn't do as the American government tells it to do so it is by definition ineffective and unproductive.

http://www.theonion.com/articl...

There are plenty of places to bury waste, even spent fuel if the owners don't want to reprocess it. The fact is there isn't really a lot of spent fuel or reprocessed fuel waste around at the moment to dispose of. France, which has run forty power reactors for thirty years and more has a few hundred cubic metres of vitrified high-level waste and that's all. It's not a Hollywood movie scenario where this waste will start roaming the countryside destroying everything in its path with its fiery breath or converting mild-mannered Dr. Bruce Banner into the Hulk, it just sits there in large blocks of glass. It doesn't even glow in the dark.

Finland of all places is actually in the process of digging a deep hole, 500 metres down into shield bedrock, to put their spent fuel into. They expect this deep repository to handle about 400 reactor-years worth of spent fuel in the end and it will cost about a billion dollars US over a century or so before they cap it off. They've already got the money to pay for building it in the bank from a levy on electricity generated by their existing reactors over the past couple of decades.

Dry storage of spent fuel on the surface will suffice for most places for a few more decades before actually digging pricey holes to bury the stuff in. If nothing else it allows for generating levies to make paying for the excavations more effective. In the intervening time there might be breakthroughs in affordable reprocessing, economical waste-burning reactor designs get built, winged monkeys might fly out of my butt, whatever.

The problem is that any waste-burning reactors will still have to pay their way by generating electricity at an affordable price even with an offset for the value of destroying some waste. The BN-series reactors the Russians are building and operating and the Chinese are considering buying can burn waste but not a lot of it and they require highly-enriched uranium and plutonium to generate the neutron flux needed. The financial details of how much the existing BN-series reactors cost to run are not transparent.

There's a lot of Powerpoint Warriors in the waste-burning business, not many folks pouring concrete and bending metal. It's the same with proponents of small modular and thorium molten-salt reactors. The financial costs of licencing, building, operating and eventaully decommissioning such paper designs tend not to be emphasised in the flashy slide presentations.

True enough. If only nuclear waste facilities were held to the same regulatory standards as, say, fertiliser plants in Texas which are totally innocuous since they don't store any nuclear waste on their premises.

Ummm, no. That's a bit like saying the contents of a kebab shop's grease trap is organic so it will work perfectly well as fuel in your car engine, just pour it in and turn the key and away you go. The nuclear equivalent of the AAA is just a phonecall away after all.

Some transuranics aren't fertile, they produce less than one neutron per fission event on average so they damp out the chain reaction needed to keep a reactor operating. Some have a low cross-section, they're difficult to hit with a moderated neutron in the first place. Some eat neutrons and don't fission at all, so-called fission poisons. Most of them start off radioactive as hell with short half-lifes unlike regular enriched uranium which can be handled wearing gloves and a Tyvek overall so they're more difficult to use in fuel rods. There's also the radiochemistry and high-temperature performance of the materials, how do they expand as they heat up, do they disassociate from their oxide forms etc. etc.

Designing fuel elements using these materials, assuming you're willing to spend the billions needed to separate them out from one another and then reformulate them appropriately, is a complicated process which, given the currently ridiculously low cost of fresh enriched uranium fuel for power reactors, no-one is really interested in investigating. The only transuranic used in reactors anywhere today is plutonium in mixed-oxide fuel. It's being used only after years of experimental tests and commercial operation of such fuel elements. It's still a wash financially speaking given the pricetag for a reprocessing plant to make MOX -- the US has half-funded a plant to make MOX (probably to use up surplus military plutonium to begin with) but there are no customers signed up to use MOX fuel in the States, no guarantee the NRC would license its use in American reactors and Congress just zeroed the budget needed to continue construction of the MOX plant which is, needless to say, way over budget and behind schedule.

Translated from the Chinese: "Oh, look, the hardstand at the tropical Diego Garcia airfield has just sprouted a large rectangular patch of shrubbery usually native only to the West German plain but the really weird thing is that in near IR it's got the shape of a 777 underneath it. How odd, as Confucius might say."

If a Russian (or Chinese or French or Indian or any other nation's) LEO observation satellite crossed over Diego Garcia in the past two weeks then anyone attempting to hide a 65 metre long aircraft on that billiard ball of an island is going to be SOL.

A 777 doesn't do well on soft ground, it needs to roll on tarmac and concrete so if MH370 is on Diego Garcia island it's either on a hardstand off the runway or in a building attached to the hardstand areas. The only building even close to big enough to take it is a hangar which is, as I said before, only 40 metres deep. I suspect the hangar entrance isn't big enough vertically to even accept the nose of a 777 but I can't make that detail out from the Google Earth pictures.

Is Tracy Island in the neighbourhood? It could swallow a 777 no problem.

There isn't anywhere on Diego Garcia to hide MH 370 if it did land there. The only hangar at the airbase is 40 metres front to back and a 777-200ER is over 60 metres nose to tail so it would have to be parked in plain (so to speak) sight of everyone from janitors through pilots and aircrew working there.

Have a look at the island sometime on Google Earth, search for the Diego Garcia postcode which is BBND 1ZZ. The current image has a number of B-52s and (I think) KC-135 tankers parked on hardsstands; I've seen a B-1B there too in previous images. A 777 is significantly larger than a B-52.