It's folly to claim that the "waste" that is 95% re-usable won't be reclaimed well before the "100000 years" that you claim it is dangerous. The only reason so few countries have bothered with reprocessing said waste is because it isn't economical right now, and it's actually dirt cheap for us to store it since there is so little of it. As uranium becomes harder to find in a few decades, do you honestly think scientists and engineers won't be looking at the spent fuel and say "hey, I bet we can reprocess that economically"? Side note: once reprocessed and run through a reactor again, high level radioactive waste is only dangerous for ~300 years. Surely that's manageable, compared to fossil fuels that dump poisonous gasses and heavy metals into the atmosphere at thousands of times the quantity that do not decay.

In that event, what would the damage be? I'd imagine the worst case would be a plant that is incapable of running again and cost quite a bit to clean up, so it would be an economic disaster for the company that runs the plant. But would anyone be harmed outside of workers at the plant? Psychologically, maybe, but physically no. A much better "use" (in terms of damage/effort) of a terrorist hijacking a plane is to aim it for skyscrapers and highly populated areas.

The best case (without nuclear) for Germany is that by 2025, you will be getting 25% of your energy from renewables with the remaining 75% as gas "backup" from Russia. Furthermore, your electric bills will be 5-20 times the countries as economically developed as Germany. Do you think all that work on the longest sub-sea gas pipeline in the world will be for nothing after another 14 years?

I'm sorry, but while I appreciate the tone that you provide in this conversation, your comment seems quite delusional to me. 100% renewable is a physical impossibility. A high of 35% capacity factors that are all tied to uncontrollable sources can not possibly power your country. You have a serious fossil fuel industry that not only has significant resources invested in supplying the fuels, but also burning them. That industry isn't just going to say "OK, we're going for wind and solar now." They will fight to the bitter end. Your country's hatred for nuclear will have to turn to a hatred of coal and gas, and even then I doubt your government will roll over and force them to do the "right thing".

A man has a pool in his back yard, but the neighborhood kids keep sneaking in at night and peeing in it. The man decides to expand his house around the pool and hire a small squad of 24/7 security personnel for $250,000/year. While the man is at work, a very dedicated psycopath with explosives and automatic weapons takes out the man's on-shift security team, kills his wife, rapes his kids, and pees in his pool. The man's neighbor (Germany) hears about all of this and says "good god, I'm getting rid of my pool now, it's just too dangerous."

I disagree. I'd say that some people are smart enough to realise that while the damage to the nuclear plants in Japan was unfortunate, it was a casualty of the earthquake/tsunami, not the tragedy itself. Nuclear plants may not be perfect, and they can cause a small amount of harm in incredible circumstances. Things like record-breaking earthquake+tsunamis, acts of war between advanced nations, meteors falling in unfortunate locations... these kinds of incredible circumstances are far worse for the populace than the anything nuclear plants can do. Perspective is important, and the German populace and politicians seem to be lacking it right now.

I'm another user stuck on IE7 at work. Last year they upgraded us from Windows 2000 running IE6 to Windows Vista running IE7. My laptop is completely locked down. Until a few months ago, I ran a Portable version of Firefox, but then I got a nasty email from IT saying that my Internet access would be revoked if I continued to run unauthorized programs on my laptop. 800 people on site, and the eight person IT Department just happens to be in the cubes right next to me... *sigh*.

Anyway, to the Slashdot programmers: this sucks. Not only do I have the same issues that other posters mentioned (Bars on main screen show up on the right covering the first half of all stories on the main page), but just going to slashdot.org completely breaks portions of my instance of Internet Explorer. After visiting the main page, google's gchat fails to connect and many sites don't load at all. Google reader also breaks down. Restarting the browser fixes it, but going back to Slashdot re-breaks it.

The buttons for any of the options pages don't have any text on them, neither do "Post", "Preview", or "Cancel". I'm hoping that the layout of the post buttons haven't changed, but I'm effectively running blind.

Yes, IE7 sucks. Unfortunately, some of us are stuck on it. I didn't ask to be a beta tester for this site, so I'm not pleased.

You are correct that there is some difficulty for those with degrees in getting jobs, but the recession hit those with less education the hardest. December 2010's unemployment numbers are as follows: Less than highschool 15.3%, Highschool grad with no college 9.8%, Some college or associate degree 8.1%, Bachelor's Degree or higher 4.8%.

Source

Even though BitZstream is using quite a few flame inducing words, he does have a point. A quick google suggests that we've identified life on Earth that uses gamma rays for energy. This was one of the examples I found by searching...

Pretty much all of the US designs. Take a look at the EIA's data from 1998 through 2009. The two baseload sources that are supposed to be running 24/7 are coal and nuclear. Nuclear power has been ridiculously reliable in the past decade. Even with a select few nuke plants shut down for a year or more, the average for nuclear is way higher than coal.

The reason for this is simple - the nuclear industry is very effective in implementing predictive/preventive maintence programs and sharing operating experience between companies. Whenever anything goes wrong with a critical component it is extensively analyzed, and the important information is relayed to all other nuclear generating facilities in the US. External failure is treated with the same rigor as internal failure.

Of course, there are some exceptions to this, but the point I'm trying to get across is that the nuclear industry takes itself seriously, and the results of the dedication are self-evident.

When you played Doom multiplayer, you were using a serial cable. "Null modem is a communication method to connect two DTEs (computer, terminal, printer etc.) directly using an RS-232 serial cable." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_modem)

A little younger, and you might have missed it.

Thank you.

I'm quite annoyed by the people who are here pretending to care about the environment and safety of the public. Most people yelling about safety in these comments are just here because it contains the words nuclear and/or radiation. If they really care, they should be asking how it compares to other situations that happened near us, such as: the Gulf Oil leak, the Massey coal mine collapse, the Natural Gas power plant explosion in CT, the Natural Gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno CA, any non-nuclear related chemical plant that leaks dangerous substances, your average coal-fired power plant operating under normal circumstances...

All of these events have happened in the past year in or around this country, and no one seems to care any more. Should I list China's coal mine collapses too? I'm willing to bet that any given incident I listed was more significant in terms of damage to surrounding life and the environment than whatever has happened or will happen at Honeywell.

This doesn't appear to be too large of a story in the media yet. I wonder if they are giving nuclear commensurate coverage for once.

I've never had Minecraft crash on me. Are you playing a pirated copy or something?

SMP required a rather large re-write, so there are definitely issues with it. Considering that server-side inventory was just released (in beta-state, mind you), issues like item duplication are almost expected.

The Motorola Backflip calls it the "Backtrack Navigation Pad". I'd assume Motorola already has a patent on it. It's mildly annoying - I've had the phone since April and I still forget it's there 90% of the time. Easy enough to disable in the options, thankfully.

It's a nice proof of concept and step in the right direction, but I wouldn't call it complete. He is simply tracking the two closest blobs, which happen to be his hands. Give the community some more time before we start making announcements about a minority report type interface being complete :P.

Unrelated to what Fibe-Piper was talking about, but the community of modders has come up some handy mods/hacks such as D2MultiRes for higher resolution in Diablo 2. But my favorite mods are probably Median XL by Laz (total conversion with entirely new skills, uniques, sets, uber levels, challenges), and PlugY (infinite stash, stash shareable between characters, redistributable stat/skill points).