The major reason for the large capital expenditure of nuclear power is that a lot of reactors are quite large and need expensive containment. There are proposals to build modular reactors which would address this problem like the South African Pebble Bed Modular Reactor. The Chinese also have some projects like that.

Hydropower also is a large capital expenditure generation method and just like nuclear it ends up being cheap in the long run.

Nuclear fuel prices are going to crash down even further as centrifuge separation becomes commonplace while the maintenance costs are also much less with increased plant automation requiring much less people to operate the plant.

Europe? We are going to be paying for the windmill overconstruction for the next 20 years with guaranteed profit contracts for generated power regardless if it is required or not.

German steel producers have already said they will move elsewhere if the electric power prices don't come back down again. It is uncompetitive to manufacture steel in Germany at current prices.

So a significant part of the cheap power price is also natural gas, which is most decidedly not renewable and not zero-CO2.

Things are a lot worse than you think. The fact is the electric power prices went down in Germany because coal prices are down. Why are they down? The US has a natural gas glut and has been exporting the excess coal, which is not required anymore, to countries like Germany.

Germany has been trying to get off natural gas because the major supplier to Central Europe is Russia and you know how they are. *cough* Ukraine *cough*.

The Wind and Solar are window dressing. Coal is used to generate 45.8% of the electricity used in Germany while Wind and Solar combined are 17.1%. As Germany is winding down its Nuclear power plants they are building new Coal power plants to replace them.

If the trend continues the US will actually reduce its CO2 emissions in the next decade while countries in Europe like Germany will increase CO2 emissions. If you care about that.

http://www.world-nuclear-news....
http://www.world-nuclear-news....

The article claims it is expected to start operating this year. Construction started in 2009. So if they can do it it will begin operations 5 years after construction start which is quite good time for a novel design.

France built their nuclear reactors quite cheap. The trick is to do it in series so you can reduce tool costs, maintenance costs, training costs by using the same design more than once. South Korea has manufactured their reactors quickly. If you expedite the licensing, have a stable cash supply, do not go for exotic or untested designs you can build a nuclear reactor in four years. The APR and EPR are new designs and as such they are taking longer to build.

This has been the case since the Industrial Revolution. The solution back then was to ban child labor and reduce work hours. Today they are doing the opposite because they could care less about how the "poor people" live.

The problem is the weight of the reactor especially if the car needs to carry live humans inside. They had enough trouble with nuclear propulsion in the atmosphere with Project Pluto in the 1960s. The Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion in the 1950s tried to do this for bombers but even there the weight was an issue.

Would the fact that I'm a woman help me?

Probably.

Suppose I dropped hints that I was a lesbian. Would that help my chances of getting hired?

Yep.

Suppose I dropped hints that my grandfather was from Mexico. Would that help me?

No way.

PS: Probably most of the people doing computer science already had established teams for years by now and she expected to get a group by doing nothing. Things are more complicated than that.

When I got to the 2nd year a lot of the people I used to group with had given up on computer science. I simply ASKED people which I deemed suitable in the first couple of days of the new semester. I never had spoken with them before and in fact they previously were attending a different schedule. I continued working with these people in an on/off basis until I finished my degree.

That is a typical male response to avoid group envy. Plus to protect the female. Of course if she wanted to work with someone she could try ASKING. I am not very social and I did that more than once.

Somehow I bet most of the non-male, white, non-asians no-college degrees are 'Geniuses' at a store at best.

Arianespace is the premier commercial launch company in the world and they delay launches all the time. It is better to delay a launch than to have an unsuccessful launch. Quite often the launch company has to wait for the satellites to be completed before the launch and I bet that is where a lot of the delays are. Also SpaceX has needed to ramp up production and procure more launch sites to satisfy their quite hefty order log. That cannot be done in an instant.

In fact the customer of that secondary payload which crashed on reentry was NOT the government but a private company called Orbcomm. They were so dissatisfied with SpaceX in that case, which was covered by insurance BTW, that they continued their contract their SpaceX. SpaceX successfully launched 6 of those same satellites for Orbcomm on July 14.

That was a partial failure and the only reason the satellite was not deployed at the proper orbit was because NASA, which had the primary payload in that mission, requested that their payload not be delayed to deploy that satellite. That was a test satellite, the launch cost was peanuts as it was deployed as a secondary payload, and they still managed to test most of its systems in space before it crashed down. So to call it a mission failure is a misnomer.