Nuclear safety is amazingly safe as-is, what is needed is replacing older plants with new designs that are inherently more safe and provide that safety more cost effectively.

The reactionary approach due to Fukushima is precisely the wrong way to look at things, the takeaway lesson should be that even with the worst possible scenario nuclear is vastly safer than coal, gas and hydro and possibly safer than solar. It's the small frequent events vs large singular event problem that plagues the car vs airplane safety disparity all over again.

We as a species need to learn to evaluate risk better or at least try to be more fact based in global infrastructure matters.

If Obama has a sense of humour he should admit he wasn't born in the US, but that he actually is a 400 year old dutch soldier and he was a citizen of the united states at the time of the adoption of the constitution.

Haven't you seen it on Doctor Who?

...>1Gbit/s is currently not on the top of my list of residental broadband problems. Sure, more bandwidth is always nice, but there is a long list of issues that impact me more, like the crappy unreliable modems/home gateways that is provided by ISPs, the bufferbloat issues in them that cause latency to be intolerable, the lack of IPv6, the underprovisioned networks, etc...

Uranium based ones: easy to build, hard to get materials for

Plutonium based ones: relatively easy to get materials for, very hard to build

This has been known for years, nothing much is new here.

I still have some liquid soap left from last year's flu hysteria. And some air masks too. Who wants some? There was also a hysteria for the mad cow disease, but my wife did not buy anything, we merely rode the car through pools of soapy water back then (near farms) The problem when the media says apocalypse is coming once a year, and we're still there the next year is that we pay less attention the next time.

Not every disaster that didn't happen was hysteria. They are just unlikely. If an catastrophe has 5% chance to happen and if it would happen it would kill a third of the world population, it makes sense to try to reduce that 5% chance. Whether those methods for reducing the risk work or not is another matter, but by definition 95% of the time when disaster doesn't happen we end up with some people saying there was nothing to be afraid of in the first place.

Of course. Genetic research in the Soviet Union was set back by decades because Stalin selected the theory that was wrong.

At least that was a theory, albeit a flawed one. Creationism is just a logical paradox - the omnipotent entity - not falsifiable.

No, but the idea came from sites like these.

I ended up so annoyed by the scare coverage that I actually started a site that provides a very simple message: http://isthereanucleardisasterinjapan.com/.

The point is, noone has died from the nuclear accident and so far the effects have been entirely localized to the power plant, with no health effects to the outside world. What's more, it is extremely unlikely that anything like that could ever happen. The media hysteria is entirely overblown with so many wrong statements flying around that it's impossible to find a mainstream coverage without errors in every second paragraph.

What the situation at the nuclear powerplant is: an accident, a critical event, nuclear meltdown, a serious situation, something to pay attention to, a testament to the security of nuclear design.

What it isn't: a nuclear disaster, a nuclear nightmare, an apocalypse, Chernobyl, a radiation leak requiring people to leave the area outside the exclusion zone.

Someone writing to BBC and complaining about the coverage of events put this in much better words than I could have:

Kevin Dunn, in Tokyo, writes: "Why is the western media so focused on the non-event that Fukushima is? An expert on the Chernobyl aftermath on BBC tonight said, "nothing has been learnt from Chernobyl by the media", it's the same sensationalist, stress and anxiety inducing scaremongering. The lessons that have been learnt are in action now by Tepco power company. She says that they have done everything "by the book", and she "very much doubts" anyone will be seriously effected by the damage of the plants. The Fukushima nuclear power plant situation is not the disaster, the real disaster is further north where tens of thousands of men, women and children have died, millions are homeless, hundreds of kids are now orphans. We have made donations and hope to volunteer. The Japanese people need our help, not for us to run away and abandon them to their fate."

In any event, there is an RSS/Atom feed on the site I created. If let's say enough radiation escapes from the nuclear plant to cause more than a dozen deaths over the next 30 years, I will switch the site to say "YES". I don't expect that to happen though.

Do they ask for the password to change the email address aswell? If not, an attacker could just change the email address and ask for a password reset.

As an oncologist, I fully support this idea!

I kid, I kid.

The choice isn't between nuclear scientist vs random PhD, but between random PhD and sensationalist churnalism. The guy's writeup was a lot better than what I've read anywhere else over the past couple of days and his assertions seem to be supported by the small number of specialist sites that provide reasonable information.