My father works in the nuclear power industry. Back when I very young, I was still in elementary school because this took place before 9/11, the power plant my dad worked at had a "bring your son to work" day. I got to drive a robot around the power plant, that was really neat. They used them to work in hot rooms all the time, some tasks are easier to use a robot since there aren't any regulations on how long a robot can stay in a hot room.

The nuclear industry loves robots. These will probably help with the cleanup effort enormously. Not that they couldn't use people, the gear exists to keep them safe, but even with that gear there are still lots and lots of regulations to follow, my father says its a headache even under normal operating conditions.

One of my roommates in college was home schooled. He was also one of the smartest people I met in college, though I can't say if that was from natural ability or his insane study habits. He was also very self-disciplined and I still am envious of his self control. He was a little socially awkward, but not much more than any other geek (he was after all a physics major, I was computer science)

Granted he is only one example, but when you look at the state of public education, its no wonder so many people choose to home school. Homeschooling isn't entirely anti-social either. He was in a homeschooling group with several other home schoolers, their parents would would take turns teaching the subjects they were strongest in. I've also heard of homeschooling being able to join the extracurricular activities at their local public high schools, such as sports or band.

I don't know much about that world, but I think there's a lot more opportunity there than most people would expect. In any case its something I'll seriously consider when/if I have children. I am somewhat disillusioned with public education. My high school had such a bad drug problem they removed all the doors from the rest room stalls so it was easier to catch students smoking weed.

That's still an external power source. Newer designs like Westinghouse's AP1000 has no need of an external power source, its passively cooled through the use of convection and gravity.

I was guesstimating, figured in a logarithmic scale a .8 difference was roughly 8x since the difference between 8.0 and 9.0 is 10x. Seeing as I was 1.7x off I'll take it. :P

My father works in the nuclear power industry, and I've had the benefit of actually touring nuclear power plants. The containment buildings are very impressive structures. The Fukushima plants were designed to withstand an 8.2 magnitude earthquake, yet they survived a 9.0! They took 8x more abuse than they were designed for and performed perfectly. Simply amazing.

That being said, the tsunami has exposed some design flaws with the current generation of power plants. The chief being the need for electricity to power the cooling systems after the reactors scrammed. The plants weren't designed to handle several days without an external source of power, no one foresaw an event like the tsunami that would wipe out the infrastructure surrounding the plants. Had they been able to get electricity or even diesel fuel to the plant within a day there would never have been any melting of the cores. Unfortunately that's hard to do after a tsunami. The crew manning the plant has done a remarkable job mitigating the loss of cooling, but they are working with a flawed design.

In the end I think this will be a good thing for nuclear power. Safer plants will be designed, the AP1000 reactor comes to mind. It relies on an entirely passive cooling system. No external power required. A design like that would have weathered the quake and tsunami just fine. In the short term we may see more hostility to nuclear power, but I think in the long term this will just prove how safe it is. The world needs too much energy to ignore nuclear power for much longer.

That's a cute notion, but it'll never happen. An international space agency would be so full of politics that it'd be more likely to use the worst technology from each country than the best. We can't even get a long well enough inside the US to properly fund and direct NASA, and you want to throw international politics into the mix?

Still, I'll give credit where credit is due, its a good dream. Though I think for the significant future it will remain a dream.

Waste disposal is a solved problem. Reprocessing the spent fuel can remove all the extremely radioactively hot material which can then be fissioned in the reactor again. That'll break it down into much cooler material. The rest of the material has a half-life of only a few decades and is much lower level to begin with. You can even remove a small amount of precious metals from the spent fuel, stuff like silver, gold and platinum.

Storage for the stuff you can't fission again isn't a big issue. The material can be melted down into a glass and stored in a very small amount of space. We aren't talking a lot of material here, all spent fuel in the US since the first reactor came online could be stored in a football field sized hole about 15 feet deep.

All the engineering problems have been solved, most nuclear energy problems are created politically.

I for one thought it was a very interesting article. I encourage you all to actually read it.

I particularly liked the part about Google's separation of data. Its an interesting look at the way that company, who's efforts are all funded by our personal data, is run. Nice peek inside a world I wouldn't get to see otherwise.

Actually a random thought just occurred to me, if everyone was as concerned about privacy as slashdotters, would Google still have been successful enough to launch Android? Without personal data Google doesn't have a source of income. Without money, no R&D dollars for things not strictly related to their core business.