For whatever reason product placement doesn't particularly bother me. When I see a close-up of a phone or a shoe in a movie or TV show, I know that it is a form of advertising but it doesn't detract from my viewing. Probably because the actual time of advertisement is on the order of a second or less. When it is just a brief glimpse that requires no interaction on my part I can tolerate it. What I can't stand are commercials that you have to sit through on TV, or worse, commercials you have to sit through to view a web page or online video. If the advertisement presents itself and then disappears very briefly without interrupting me or requiring input on my part, that is just fine. When the ad requires me to click it to go away, click it to continue, blocks what I am trying to do, or wastes my time, that is unacceptable and I will always either block it or stop using the service that employs it.

You do realize that the "waste" and the reactor are the same thing, right? The "waste" is spent fuel which was previously in the reactor.

You have a gross misunderstanding and your criticism is thus profoundly wrong. Fukushima Unit 4 had its core offloaded into the spent fuel pool because it was in a refueling outage. All the decay heat which potentially causes a meltdown in the core was in the fuel pool instead. This decay heat must be removed just as it must be removed from the core.

You fail to even understand basic concepts of how a nuclear plant works. How your post got modded +5 is boggling to me, these facts are easily available e.g. on wikipedia.

Spent fuel pools do require active cooling, but nothing elaborate - just a simple heat exchanger. The caveat is when a core is offloaded into the spent fuel pool during a refueling outage. In that time frame, all the decay heat must be removed and requires additional heat exchangers to be running. The time for the pool to boil is much shorter during that period, on the order of ~24-72 hours. The reason for pumping water into a spent fuel pool during an emergency situation is indeed to cool it - to replace water that is boiling away. There are plans now to make portable external backup coolers as a result of the initial concern over spent fuel pool boiling at Fukushima (which turned out later to have not been a problem).

Your logic is comically flawed. The danger posed by 1 pCi is extrapolated from the danger of exposing one person to 9000^12 pCi. You are then trying to double extrapolate that 1 pCi back to a large number of people. Statistics doesn't work like that.

Analogy: Drinking 5 liters of water all at once will kill 1/10 people. Obviously therefore drinking 0.05 liters of water will kill 1/1000 people.

If you want to ban dumping lead into the environment without actually banning it, using a tax, you could impose a $1,000,000 per gram tax on dumping lead. Even though I can't afford $1,000,000, I can avoid dumping any lead at all. You can't avoid emitting carbon dioxide. A tax on carbon dioxide is a tax on energy.

The correct car analogy is:

a) Squint harder and try to determine if the truck really is a truck, and if it is whether it is headed right for you.

b) Immediately dive into a nearby ditch filled with mud, ruining your clothes, just in case that distant light really is a truck headed right for you.

Yes we expect you to believe such a rationalization because that is the definition of rational. Are you proposing that we base science and policy on emotion and fear instead?

That might help in the short run but eventually we'll be stuck in the same place again, with large numbers of students taking out student loans for degrees which are not in demand or there are too much supply. Government interference in the market is always the root cause - it creates a moral hazard. A better idea would be to fix the education system so that a high school degree has some meaning again, perhaps like the system in Germany where you have college-prep high school and technical high school to prepare for real life. Or alternatively, increase the desirability of cheap community colleges.

Yes.

They are.

If the banks aren't loaning any money then how is it we have $1,000,000,000,000 of student loans?

The reason why far fewer people went to college 50 year ago is because our high schools weren't utter failures at meeting basic education needs back then. In 1950 a high school diploma meant something, so there was no need to go to college for many people. Nowadays you can't get a job as a lab technician or repair guy without a bachelors degree. I blame the public education system for this.

I still have no sympathy for anyone complaining about $100,000 student loan debt though. There is absolutely no reason why you must go to an out of state private school to receive your higher education in art history. Go to community college for 2 years while working part time, then transfer to public state university and graduate on time. Even with no financial assistance it is not at all hard to graduate with zero debt.

You have to understand why things work on an iphone. Each iphone has its own combination code, to prevent what we are attempting...to use our iphone...to order Reliant... to lower their shields...

...

WHERE'S THE OVERRIDE! THE OVERRIDE!!

Enough for a manned mission to the outer solar system but still several orders of magnitude too low for a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri. For interstellar travel to our nearest neighbor within a human lifetime, you would need something like 1000 times the energy produced by the world for the mission.

This applies:

http://xkcd.com/927/

Too complex? Your rationale is about as sophisticated as a child's. "Why not just pay everyone a million dollars! Then everyone would be rich!!"

If you force businesses to pay workers more than their labor is worth, then the business must raise the prices on the goods produced to compensate. Hence the workers have more money, but everything costs proportionally more. It's just like thermodynamics. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Of course we know it, that is our clearly stated position. Just like it is an "inconvenient truth" that the proposed policies by western governments to combat GW will do nothing to combat GW (as long as they completely ignore the developing world and entirely focus on the US alone), but will certainly make those in politics extremely rich and powerful.