Do the major continents float on top of the crust?

Yes.

Normal people can't afford things like that.

People on welfare perhaps couldn't, but yuppies sure could. There are lots of $2000 appliances around today. I don't see why people buy them, but they do.

Yuppies started getting household microwave ovens in the early-to-mid eighties, and they didn't really penetrate to lower middle class until the early nineties.

A little earlier, I think. My college dorm got one in the middle of the '70s, and I think it was only around $500.

I wonder if the rare earths in the old panels make them a worthwhile "trade-in" option? Anybody know much of the various elements are present in panels?

I don't know exactly what they were made of (mostly silicon, though), but there are almost certainly no rare earths involved. Even today I can't think of any rare earth usage. I know of cadmium, tellurium, copper, indium, gallium, selenium, arsenic and silicon being used in solar cells, and none of them are rare earths.

While antimony is currently inexpensive, it is also rather rare. This would appear to put a limit on the expansion possibilities for the battery if they continue to use it.

This means that they are claiming special shielding against gamma and neutron radiation.

Other than an operating nuclear reactor, neutron radiation is pretty rare. Which sill leaves you with the gammas, of course.

We made punch card decks to run assembly language on the school district's IBM 1440. We made the cards after hours, when the computer input class wasn't using them. They had a Fortran compiler but we were told the huge deck of cards made it not feasible for student programs. This was the project of a counsellor, and the grade didn't count in our average.

My program was Conway's Life, and I got it to run.

Debunking K-40 to Cs137

Why do you bring up potassium? I never did. Potassium-40 is indeed much less dangerous. There is an alpha emitter in the decay chain of radon, too. It is pretty nasty.

1.2 trillion Becquerels of Plutonium is almost none?

From Wikipedia, compare: "The highest levels found (of Pu-239 and Pu-240 combined) were 15 becquerels per square meters" and "up to 35 bq / kg plutonium 241 in leaf litter" to "4.7Mbq / kg" for cesium contamination. I consider 50 to 4,700,000 to be almost none. (I'm not sure how to compare a square meter to a kilogram, though).

First off, I don't think radon is the leading source of radiation dose to the population; the leading source is natural radioactivity. It may be true that radon is the leading source of artificial radiation dose to the population.

Why would you think that radon is unnatural? It is a decay product of naturally occurring uranium and thorium. Perhaps CT scans, which feature artificial radiation, are more important for some people, but there are a large number exposed to high radon levels.

LNT may or may not be correct, but it is the most conservative model.

BTW, Radon has a half life of 4 days. Caesium-137, 30 years.

Radon isn't the end of the decay chain. The worst step in the decay chain is 210 Pb, with a half life of 22 years, quite comparable to cesium.

There was almost no plutonium release at Fukushima. Nearly all the long term contamination is from cesium.

I have to agree about Canticle, although I really don't remember whether I finished it or not.

If I'm going to read something depressing, at least it should be short. Each an Explorer, by Isaac Asimov, was pretty depressing, but at least it was short.

Whether we can afford to burn oil until it runs out isn't known, especially since what counts as oil changes. There is for sure enough coal that we can dig up to cause big problems.

What we can do about it is to replace coal with nuclear, electrify most transportation, change refining processes (no more coke for iron) and use different material for cement. What's left we can offset by grinding up the right rocks to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Well, that's my recommendation anyhow. I don't expect to live the fifty years or so before we face serious consequences.

Right now with gas prices dropping to below $3 a gallon in my area, a Prius operating at 50 MPG costs 6 cents a mile in fuel. How does the Tesla compare?

I make it as about four cents, assuming you pay the national average for power. But, a Prius is not the proper comparison. A BMW 5 series is about right. Really, the question is whether the quiet ride and performance is worth the lack of range - fuel costs don't matter to these people.

Ah, so AP is access point. I really had no idea.

Bread doesn't usually contain eggs. It does have milk, though.