Most of the activity being released from Fukushima is tritium and the leaks in Vermont have also primarily been of tritium. Tritium doesn't bio-accumulate either.

Expertise and know-how counts for little. Essentially every country in the world either has that or could acquire it in short order. What matters in reality is stocks of highly enriched uranium or separated plutonium. Ukraine (probably) has neither and does not have the infrastructure to produce either on a short timescale.

I found your post a bit depressing. Not all acquired knowledge has to relate directly to job productivity to be valuable. It also isn't necessary to become an expert to know how to do something.

Similar has been done decades ago. The BORAX experiments for a start.

No. They are advising against travel to one specific area; the exclusion zone around the Fukushima plant.

People should actually read the contents of links before modding up.

We know exactly how to lift that much mass into space. No new tech required. Big pusher plate and a few hundred nuclear bombs - see Project Orion; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

All that fallout is just a bit politically unpopular.

He said that Bush senior removed all the tactical nukes which made the world safer. This is true regardless of what you think of the Bush's other actions.

I'm not sure that Dyson can easily be pigeonholed into a broad political definition. He's a very smart man who says what he thinks and doesn't really give a crap about anyone elses opinion of him. I don't always agree with him but he's generally worth listening too.

I was far from a bad teenager. I loved science though and if it went bang that was all the better. Draino and aluminium foil? Jesus. I made fertiliser bombs. I synthesised Nitrogen triiodide and all manner of other fun compounds.

One bonfire night I once had a visit from the police due to my homemade titanium salutes. They were amused and told me not to blow my hands off. These days I'd go to jail for a million years.

I think they mean the enrichment plant was secret. Not the whole site.

The AWE site at Aldermaston is enormous. It's an old airfield stuffed with big, nondescript buildings. Unless you're working on site you won't get within about half a mile of any of the 'interesting' ones and even when on site you won't know what's in most of them unless directly working there. I can well believe that they have a hidden enrichment plant.

The only mechanism I can think of which would case a solar flare to render optical disks unreadable would be radiation damage. A solar flare which delivered that kind of dose would likely wipe out all life on earth so you probably wouldn't be worrying about your backups.

You've got the wrong end of the stick. HEU works just fine in an implosion weapon and in a gun type, plut works only in an implosion type. The reason most weapons are plut is cost and availability. You're also misusing 'Teller-Ulam design'. This refers to the design of the fusion secondary in a H-bomb and not the design of the primary.

You are right about non proliferation buggering isotope production though.

Thorium has a heat capacity of 0.113 J g-1 K-1
It's not high, or remarkable. This is a scam no matter what they're proposing to do with the thorium.

Some crackpot or conman has mixed some genuine stuff about sub-critical, accelerator driven, fission reactors in with the word 'lasers' and is presumably even now coining in investment.

Has the science savvy of the editors really deteriorated this badly?