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An excellent and inspiring article from a versatile and eloquent organic and computational chemist and it is delightful to see fun mentioned in the annals of the stuffy Nobel-folk. Fun hardly ever survives the peer review process these days.

But. From TA,

An early design invented by Admiral Hyman Rickover -- suitable for submarines but hardly optimal for efficient land-based power stations -- was frozen and applied to hundreds of reactors around the country.

Oh yes oh best beloved, Admiral Rickover was the Father of the light water reactor, the Naval taskmaster who imperiled his military career to apply direct agitation to his superiors -- on the idea that a nuclear reactor might some day power great submarines and ships. He slew the Lernaean Hydra that was the military establishment of the day, not the whole thing, just a few heads that got in his way. He seized the reins and cracked the whip, mustered the almost-Hippies of Los Alamos to yoke them as Oxen of Science. In toil, occasional obscenities and hot water... the Light Water Reactor was born! To become the fiery horse with a speed of light, a cloud of dust, the USS Nautilus! Even Walt Disney was impressed.

But Rickover did not invent the thing. In fact, he was also kind of a jerk.

On US Patent 2,736,696 you will see four names: Eugene P Wigner, Leo A Ohlinger, Gale J Young, Alvin M Weinberg. Weinberg was rightfully proud of his contribution to help solve the Navy's propulsion problem, but as a protégé of Wigner he had also learned that in the thermal spectrum Thorium was a good performer and with the right chemistry it could breed a self-sustaining fissile reaction. So with several chemists they began work in that direction (nuclear airplane yadda yadda) built what non-chemists called, 'the chemists' reactor'.

Fast forward to 1973. Two prototypes of Uranium molten salt reactors had been built to prove that fission and breeding could occur in this 'dry' chemical environment that would have amazing inherent safety advantages, especially for widely deployed commercial reactors.

But Weinberg had become obnoxious. His conviction that Light Water Reactors had unresolved safety issues prompted him to remark on the topic publicly, and it created a bit of a stir amongst those who had thought that Atoms for Peace was a unified voice, and we were harnessing the atom in the best possible way.

But privately all he wished to do was complete his work on the Liquid Salt Thorium Breeder and present it. He was sure that the wisdom of this approach would be obvious to all, especially when it had become reality.

In 1973 Admiral Rickover was given his fourth star and was everyone's Nuclear Darling. He had his Nuclear Navy, he had his Liquid Metal Fast Breeder and the ear of President Nixon.

It would have been a most appropriate time to honor the contribution of his former colleague Weinberg, whose diligent work had helped bring him to the pinnacle of his career. You could buy a billion dollars' worth of stuff with a few hundred million in those days, and the Cold War (and its chilly cousin Atoms for Peace) were integral essential of the federal funding machine. Rickover was no idiot and his public speeches centered on the Navy's perfect record and its attention to safety. He was no idiot and was surely aware of the advantages of using molten salts. A single phone call would have been all it took.

But he was a jerk.

Admiral Rickover it was who took the fun out of building nuclear reactors.

Next question?

For the rest of the story, and it is an amazing one, strap yourself down and clamp your eyes open for two hours to endure Tho

Political correctness has no place in science, and neither does 'dumbing down'.

Neither does rampant misogyny.

It's interesting that you point all the fault of the paper at one "brainless female," when the paper had 11 authors, 7 of which were male, including her post-doctoral adviser, Dr. Ronald Oremland, who is a noted expert on the metabolization of toxic elements. Dr. Wolfe-Simon was the lead author on the paper, but it could not (or at least should not) have gone forward with those 10 other names without each of them approving. And if any of them were so much smarter and better than someone "only employed for reasons of political correctness, then why did all of them sign onto the "rebuttal" paper in response to criticisms of the original paper? Why does only she get the blame for this and none of them, and where do you get the notion that all of these people worked under her (much less were forced to do so for political reasons)?

One would also suspect, given her list of published papers on biochemistry, that she knows a wee bit more about chemistry than some AC blowhard on Slashdot, despite having been very wrong about GFAJ-1. The ability of arsenic to substitute imperfectly for phosphorus is in fact the very reason it's toxic. It's not impossible that there would be some biological use for arsenic, though it seems highly unlikely given the relative abundance of the two elements and the havoc that arsenic causes because of its similarity. The follow-up research in the wake of this is proving fascinating. At the very least, she's kicked off a whole new interest in arsenic biochemistry.

So, while you pat yourself on the back on your true "scientific understanding," it's clear that you haven't done ANY real research on this subject matter and are just relying on snap judgments -- not surprising considering the sheer hatred you seem to be able to call up for an entire gender. Speaking of which...

It turns out that the liquid state of carbon is mostly an unknown due to the temperatures and pressures required, but there's been a recent consensus that it acts very differently at "low" and high pressures. Computer simulations and experiments have suggested that under high pressures, carbon orders itself into an irregular but still recognizably diamond-like structure with four neighbors for each atom. In fact, high pressures make the formation of solid diamond when the liquid cools more likely as a result. At low pressures, it's more like graphene or strings of carbon, with bonding to neighbors in 2's & 3's instead of 4's. At even higher pressures it develops into a metallic structure. So the term "liquid diamond" actually has significant meaning and isn't just media buzzwords.

(which is true, we see a rise again today; one cannot be racist but it is perfectly acceptable in polite society, politics and academia these days to demonize all Israelis without considering individuals - if you are doing this you are in fact a racist; please stop being racist).

Uh... no. Please quit abusing the English language in this way. The word you're looking for is "bigoted". The word "racist" is much more narrow, and has exactly one meaning—prejudice against a race. Demonizing Israelis cannot be considered racist because:

• Israeli is not a race; it's a nationality. So demonizing people from that country is not racist. It is nationalist.
• Jewish isn't a race, either. It's a religion.

That last point bears further explanation. Although Israelis are predominantly from a single racial group, that racial group also contains a lot of people who are not Jewish. Israeli Jews are genetically very similar to the Palestinian Arabs (source: fieldofscience.com), Kurds (source: haaretz.com), Turks, and Armenians. So if you're talking about people who hate all Jews, Palestinians, Kurds, Turks, and Armenians, you might legitimately use the word "racist". Otherwise, that's definitely not the right word. :-)

We know that vaccines work.

They have worked ever since Jenner did his smallpox vaccine.

The science is indisputable.

I suggest you go to an anti-vaccine website and look around. Just pick one, and then go to a few more. It's not just anti-vaccine stuff.

Anti-vaxxers as a whole are anti-science.

And not only that, they are dangerous. They kill kids.

http://genome.fieldofscience.com/2012/07/anti-vaccination-propagandists-help.html

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BMO

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BMO

In actual fact, Arabs and Jews are genetically the same people:

" What they revealed was that Arabs and Jews are essentially a single population, and that Palestinians are slap bang in the middle of the different Jewish populations (as shown in this figure)." http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2009/01/shared-genetic-heritage-of-jews-and.html?m=1

If anybody knows the academic research behind this (without the politicking) that would be really useful.

Summary and citations.