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Do you have a citation for this "environmental damage"? Real damage, not caused by nuclear weapons manufacturing, and not the "OMG, three atoms of tritium escaped, we're all going to die!" sort of "damage".

The costs of the plants are a matter of record, so have a look. The NRC opened the door for litigation, and otherwise mired the nuclear industry. The AEC was an effective regulatory agency with an excellent safety record and reasonable costs. Under the NRC, costs skyrocketed and a number of reactors were even partially built yet never operated. Abundant examples are no further than your nearest search engine.

Do you have a citation for this "environmental damage"? Real damage, not caused by nuclear weapons manufacturing, and not the "OMG, three atoms of tritium escaped, we're all going to die!" sort of "damage".

The costs of the plants are a matter of record, so have a look. The NRC opened the door for litigation, and otherwise mired the nuclear industry. The AEC was an effective regulatory agency with an excellent safety record and reasonable costs. Under the NRC, costs skyrocketed and a number of reactors were even partially built yet never operated. Abundant examples are no further than your nearest search engine.

Jaczko isn't credible. He is a head case that drove his colleagues, including his fellow Obama appointees, to publically and unanimously condemn his tenure as NRC chairman while seated right next to him during congressional testimony. They forced him out because they'd had enough of his shit.

So now he is going to be a professional anti-nuke gadfly. Last week good 'ol Senator Harry Reid resurrected the head case and put him on the NNSA board so he can make that group dysfunctional and say scary things about the stockpile. Now that he's out of the shadows he's taking more shots as nuclear energy as well.

If you read the linked story you'll eventually learn what, specifically, his problem is with contemporary operating reactors; they are large and have enough residual heat to damage fuel after shutdown. The notion that our power reactors are too large is not new. It has been well understood since the beginning of nuclear energy production. Jaczko is talking about it because that's his job now; use the credibility of his "Former Chairman of the NRC" moniker to make headlines by saying scary things about nukes.

Incidentally this discussion raises the question; how large can a reactor be without risking fuel damage? The answer is about 60 MW thermal for traditional PWR light water designs. Common power reactors are 2000 MW thermal.

BTW, we aren't going to do anything about any of this. We're not replacing the reactors, or coal or gas or building out green energy or anything else. We're a balkanized welfare state nation occupied with feathering our environmental nest while evacuating our industrial base to Asia. The power system you have now will be approximately the power system running when you die. Maybe a reactor will melt and we'll replace our nukes with more gas consumption. That's about as much as you can expect.

In practice, it is either or. The manned program is one big chunk (ISS/shuttle), the unmanned program is made of many (comparatively) small missions. So to avoid canceling the manned program, they cancel or postpone unmanned mission to pay for it. It would be nice if there was a strict wall that prevented that, but there isn't.

As for the ISS, it was sold as a science platform, not as an exercise in living / building stuff in space. Yet, the science results are not there. What little science they do is in fact automated, and doesn't need to be hosted on a manned station. What we could do is build an unmanned station to provide orbit maintenance, communication and power, and then use automated vehicles to shuffle experiments back and forth between the ground and the station.

If you have a quasi-religious belief in the need for spreading to other planets, and a romanticized view of historical colonists, that is your problem, but you cannot sell this in the name of science and pay for it with science budgets. Heck, this shouldn't even be taxpayer funded.

And please stop with the helium-3 bullshit. (See this for instance). It is just a desperate attempt to justify a manned moon mission.

If we were interested in science in the short term, we would halt the manned program and pay for all the exciting stuff we could do within a decade or do but aren't: sailing the seas of Titan, flying through volcanic plumes at Io, deploying a meteorological network on Mars, orbiting Neptune, drilling through the ice of Europa, and much more...

Sorry for the rant.

No it can't.

Err, perhaps petroleum contributed to the process of development, but Fertilizer is not petroleum based

FRAUD ALERT! Slashdot sometimes carries stories about Israeli companies looking for investors. Is someone at Slashdot being paid to run those stories?

This comment, at present attached to the story linked by Slashdot, explains the fraud:

"By WCoenen on Jun 20, 2010

The energy extracted from this battery actually doesn't come from the potatoes, but from the corrosion of the electrodes. So it only recovers a fraction of the energy that was necessary to produce the metal from ore. Not exactly an efficient way to store power, and a terribly stupid way to use expensive metals!"

That comment links to this explanation: Yes, you can get energy from an "Earth Battery". No, it ain't free.

The story amazes and shocks me. I guess there are people at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who know the story is a sneaky lie. Are they arrogant and believe only they will know the truth? Do they want to steal investment money from Slashdot readers?

The Jewish culture has a 3,000 year history of making itself unpopular. Jews are even unpopular with each other. Read the story. It is an example of Jews being seriously anti-Jewish. "The parents follow strict religious codes and do not allow influences such as ... the internet in their homes."

How is nuclear better for the environment than wind?

For one, it kills fewer animals and people. Tower climbing is an extremely dangerous job (alongside bridge maintenance), and giant windmills are no exception. Among solar / wind / hydro / coal / nuke, wind power has one of the highest worker-deaths-per-kilowatt-hour ratios. I would have to double check to find the actual numbers, but I believe nukes are by far the lowest death rate (even including Chernobyl). More info.

Then of course there are the animal conservationists who are upset about wind turbines killing off eagles in places like Altamont. Pro-wind advocates often claim that wind turbines kill no fewer endangered animals than dirty coal plants, but they don't compare the technology to other low-emissions technology such as solar or nukes. Even if wind power annually only kills off a dozen or so endangered animals (compared to several dozen from coal), it's still more than nukes.

Nukes are also more efficient for the materials that it takes to construct the reactors, providing more energy value with fewer raw materials.

On the whole, nukes are cheaper and safer than wind, and just as good (if not better) for the environment. The biggest thing holding the public back from accepting this technology is fear out of ignorance.

They go up yet again if the perpetrator is a sibling. 1 in 36 billion is pure bullcrapola, the equivalent of NASA saying Challenger had a 1:10000 chance of failure (or whatever the nonsense was). http://depletedcranium.com/?p=2263#comments "Two distinct DNA profiles were developed, one from the stockings and the other from the spot of blood. Both turned out to be in the database of arrests in the state. The drop of blood, which had been swabbed from the victim's hand matched a convicted killer who was already in prison and smudge from her stockings matched a man who had been arested on drug charges after he became addicted to pain killers. The individual in question didn't have any convictions (charges were dropped as part of an agreement to get treatment) and he had history of violence. It would seem that the obvious suspect of the two would be the convicted killer, a John Rueles. But at the time of the murder, Rueles was only four years old. He also lived on the other side of the state. Thus, Gary Leiterman, the individual whose dna was matched to the sample on the victims stockings was arrested, tried and convicted. To be fair, there is some circumstantial evidence that Gary Leiterman may have been in the same area and may have owned a gun similar to that used in the murder, but the state never explained how the other DNA could have ended up on the victim."