Safe until it kills millions when a plant blows up.

Unlike, say, coal, which kills millions under normal operations, right?

Or didn't you know that routine coal-mining fatalities are a couple of orders of magnitude more numerous than all fatalities associated with nuclear power? Hell, coal mining fatalities in the 20th century in the USA ALONE were comparable to the death-toll from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

And then there's the rest of the world's coal mining casualties, plus secondary effects from the pollution.

And never mind that nuclear plants don't "blow up". Unless you fill them up with TNT and set it off, of course.

Nuclear is dead, I can't be bothered to argue about it. Ten years from now renewable energy will be a fraction of the cost of nuclear and will be the cheapest form of energy worldwide without any need for subsidy. 10 years from now if you suggest we use more nuclear energy, anybody who knows anything will frown at you like you're mad.

It's funny, but I remember hearing the same sort of comment back in the '70s during the energy crisis.

Oddly enough, it didn't seem to have worked out that way.

Surely not Clarke, he perfectly knew we will never be halfway to anywhere. He was a real scientist.

Which no doubt explains "Rendezvous with Rama" and 2001:a Space Odyssey"....

Clarke was enough of a scientist to know that we don't know the limits of the "possible" quite yet....

Wait until the SCOTUS tells states that immigration enforcement is a federal matter, and that states therefore cannot prevent illegal immigrants from voting or holding elected office.

While some elected office require citizenship, not all do, in case you are unaware.

However, voting requires citizenship at local, state, or federal level.

Which means that even if SCOTUS says that immigration enforcement is a Federal issue (it is, frankly), that won't result in any new voters until citizenship requirements are met. Though it might result in some new candidates for public office....

As far as we know, there may be no way to produce or find and mine hydrocarbons such as methane. Mars's atmosphere lacks significant hydrogen content. If there's subsurface minable water, that could solve the problem, but only if there's plenty of it.

Hmm, CH4...so methane is 1/4 H2 by mass, and 3/4 C...

Which means, absolute worst case, that we have to carry the H2 to Mars, thus giving us only a factor of four improvement over having to carry ALL the fuel to Mars.

If, as seems moderately probable, Mars has frozen water under its surface, you produce all the fuel there. Or, if our moon has H2O, as seems probable, then it's actually easier to ship fuel from Luna to Mars than to put the same fuel into Mars orbit FROM Mars.

Note that a mass-driver, a la "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (which would also be workable on Mars, if you built one on steroids) would make the process even more efficient, in that all the H2O from Luna could be sent to Mars or LEO without having to burn any of it to get it off the moon.

The writer of the original article should be shot, hung, shot, and then boiled.

Hanged.

The writer may very well have twelve inches, but that's not important here. What's important is the past tense of "to hang" (in the sense of putting a man on the end of a rope) is "hanged"....

Like a demolition charge, it's utility is pretty limited, but when the right (or wrong, depending on perspective) situation comes up, there's no substitute....

Interesting that you'd pick those names. A quick google for wealth of US Presidents (adjusted for inflation), puts Bush at 15 (the elder) or 17 (the younger).

And this is as opposed to, say, John Kennedy (1), Lyndon Johnson (7), FDR (9), Clinton (10), who all have that peculiar D after their name.

And note that Obama is #21. Hardly poor by any definition of the term....

Note that I ignored the rest of the top 10 because they served far enough back that the Party they were part of had no real similarities to the current version of the Parties of the same name (once upon a time, the Republicans were the anti-slavery Party, not the Democrats, for instance).

a good discression

I really hope you meant "an indiscretion" here, otherwise I have no idea what you're talking about.

So, enquiring minds want to know: are you semiliterate, or are you trying to say something else entirely?

What I find more interesting is why stars rarely collide?

Too much empty space.

This.

Consider that for two stars to hit each other, they essentially have to pass within one stellar diameter of each other (absent gravity, but they're moving at over escape speed relative to each other, so gravity won't enlarge that distance a whole hell of a lot).

So, one stellar diameter is ~1.4 Gm for Sol. Nearest star is 40,000,000 Gm away. If that nearest star were headed toward us (it's not), it's course would have to be within 0.01 seconds of arc of our Sun in order to actually hit it.

And stars farther away have an even smaller course window to be in to smack us....

What you describe is pretty much the way the US was originally intended to be. The Feds handle standards (like weights and measures) and foreign policy, pretty much everything else handled at the level of the individual States.

Alas, the Feds have been working hard to move every decision to Washington for a long time now, whether it makes sense to do so or not....

Good idea! Tax everyone on net assets, not income.

That way the barrier to entry to middle and upper classes will be raised enormously. wouldn't want any of that riff-raff at the country club, now would we?

So, part of their case is that a FB guy mentioned modular hospitals last year, and they're the only ones who do that sort of thing?

Sounds a bit thin to me....

GenIIa reactors like the Russian VVER-1200 and the uprated French M310 designs can swing their output by 30% in fifteen minutes or so, given modern control systems and a few decades of experience in running such PWRs and BWRs.

Hmm, without mentioning numbers, I'll offer that a nuclear submarine can do larger transients faster.