... took time to write something on this topic a few month ago in The Independant - http://buff.ly/1wyJhU6 It's time we start to carefully think about what we are doing, it's not Sci-Fi anymore.

You can watch it live on webcam: http://www.livefromiceland.is/... (general view) http://www.livefromiceland.is/... (close up)

Except that Ebola can actually survive out of his host and stay infectious at ambient temperature for a few days.

That's it, I'm cancelling my subscription. While I can understand the need to recruit talents, this so- called "HR-culture" is just awful. Where is the human in HR when you deal with your employees that way? Whatever the quality of the service, I will not help a company who think that employees are a commodity. The consequences of a culture of fear are depressions, suicides and broken families. And it is in no way improving the overall quality of the company. The best discoveries and improvements are generally made in enjoyable working environment.

Well, I happen to be a nuclear scientist and I think their work is doubtful. And I have arguments.

The problem here is not one of numbers but of the relevance of said numbers.
What is reported here was not the only anormal behavior observed during the days following the disaster. In an article that I unfortunately cannot retrieve, decontamination workers said that there was not enough counters for everybody so they had one per team - and that the teamleader carrying the counter was staying back during the interventions.
When you know what it takes for a japanese worker to start complaining about their working conditions, it is pretty clear that the worker themselves, trying to mitigate what was surely the worst nuclear catastrophic event, participated in cooking the numbers to protect themselves and their hierarchy.
The kamikaze sentiment is not completely dead in Japan (and by that I mean the willingness to give one's life for a greater cause, if needed).

Indeed. But they confirmed 5 cases out of 174.000 tested children... when the prevalence rate of thyroïd cancer is less than 2 in 1.000.000 in this area of Japan and age range, according to the article you are citing. Smells fishy to me.

... because some of the subcontractors were forced to shield their counters. The problem was even discussed on Slashdot. This means that the numbers are underestimated. Probably badly, knowing how japanese usually keep quiet on this kind of problems.

In France, like in UK or Japan, the spent fuel IS indeed reprocessed.
It is first dissolved in nitric acid and then passed through separation columns containing specific resins that separate Uranium and Plutonium from the mixture (that's about 90% of the wastes in mass) - the process is called PUREX and was developped in US. Part of the recovered U+Pu is then used to produce Mox, mixed oxides fuel that is used in the PWR reactors.
Superphenix was terminated for two main reasons :
1. Political: a new left-wing government was just elected composed of 15% of ecologists who asked for Superphenix to be closed
2. Economical: superphenix was a joint project with the army - which was a bad idea as they don't have the same security margin as civilian have ; superphenix was offline most of the time due to poor design of non-nuclear parts (for example, the roof of the alternators collapsed under the snow in winter)
But afaik it was working well ; its little brother Phenix worked from 1973 to 2009 (with a few years stop to increase earthquake security) so it is definitely possible to use this technology. Not easy, but possible.
Anyway, this is the main design adopter by the Gen4 forum that define the future of nuclear. France is supposed to build a new breeder around 2020. If the crisis doesn't stop that.

Damn, that's expensive. This is a bit off topic, and I don't know how it is in US, but in France we got a new cellphone service provider last year whose offer is, for 20€/month:
- unlimited SMS
- unlimited calls to landlines in 40 countries (US included)
- unlimited calls to cellphones in France
- unlimited internet connection (but with reduced bandwidth if you go over 3GB of data)
That was a huge change with previous plans of other provides, which usually charged around 0.1€/SMS.

You obviously never worked inside an academic research department. Just read RetractionWatch to have a daily account of how peer review completely fails to detect fraud and bullshitting most of the time. Plagiarism, image manipulations, data manipulation. Even creation of whole data sets, like in the case of Fujii, a Japanese anesthesiologist who faked data in some 172 papers . Universities indeed recruit scientists that publish lots of research. Such incentives push researchers to fake data in order to get a job - and latter on, to get grants. The whole system is rotten by this idea - more papers means more papers to peer-review, means less time to dedicate to each peer reviewing, means overall decreasing quality.

Reading TFA, you can have a look at the curve showing the evolution of believes (lets call it like that) over time. Only Q3 denies evolution ; question 1 merely shows that about 35% of US citizens believe in evolution AND in god - thus they cannot deny that god could have an influence on the evolution. Thus Q1 and Q2 should be counted together when speaking about believes in evolution. A simple first-order (y=ax+b) curve fitting over the 3 possible answers (A gives an estimated fraction of people in 82, and B the rate of change over time) gives these results: -Q1: a: 38.54%, b: -0.08% (RMSD= 1,99) -Q2: a: 7.72%, b: 0.23% (RMSD= 1,19) -Q3: a: 45.80%, b: -0.06% (RMSD= 1,86) What does it tells us? To cheer up, lads! In 82 there were 46,2% of evolutionists against 45,8% of creationists. Without having computed the error bars, we could only say that they were on equal terms at this time. From then on, the proportion of evolutionists increased by about 1% every 7 years, and now the proportions are 50,9% evolutionists against 44,0% of creationists. This is most probably statistically significant, given the relative mean square deviations over the fits. Thus, evolution theory is winning! That's why the 44 remaining % are starting to be nervous... Moreover, these results support the fact that people are less and less religious - Q1 and Q3 are decreasing overtime - while the fastest growing population are the scientifically literate agnostics. And this population almost DOUBLED since 1982, from 7,7% to 14,6% today! Always do you stats lads, always do your stats...