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The converse has actually been demonstrated.
Cancer incidence in areas with elevated levels of natural radiation.

Furthermore, several studies show a significant decrease of cancer death rates in areas with high backgrounds. It can be concluded that prolonged exposure to high levels of natural radiation possibly triggers processes such as the production of antioxidants and repair enzymes, which decreases the frequency of chromosome aberrations and the cancer incidence rate.

See http://www.news-medical.net/ne... for the news blurb of a pacemaker under research in India a while ago, and http://www.inderscience.com/of... for the abstract of the paper.

For more current news, see the Telepatch: https://www.medicompinc.com/in...

Here is some science on the effect of living in high-background radiation zones and cancer;
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
http://www.angelfire.com/mo/ra...
http://www.inderscience.com/in...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

People living for generations in places like Kerala, Ramsar and Guarapari show no elevated incidence of cancer.

The study is peer reviewed. http://www.inderscience.com/in...

The abundance of calls to emergency lines during crises is dicult to handle by the limited number of operators. Detecting if the caller is experiencing some extreme emotions can be a solution for distinguishing the more urgent calls. Apart from these and there are several other applications that can benet from awareness of the emotional state of the speaker. This paper describes the design of a system for selecting the calls that appear to be urgent and based on emotion detection. The system is trained using a database of spontaneous emotional speech from a call-centre. Four machine learning techniques are applied and based on either prosodic or spectral features and resulting in individual detectors. As a last stage and we investigate the eect of fusing these detectors into a single detection system. We observe an improvement in the Equal Error Rate (eer) from 19.0 % on average for 4 individual detectors to 4.2 % when fused using linear logistic regression. All experiments are performed in a speaker independent cross-validation framework.

Taken from here. The International Journal of Intelligent Defence Support Systems web site doesn't appear to be updated with this year's 2nd volume yet. [The English is a bit clunky, but the researchers appear to be Dutch so I forgive them that, at least.]

When did nuclear power become a green solution?

If "green" means "nonthreatening to governments' fossil fuel revenues", it never can be so. But if it means safe, clean, and effective, the date of the Nautilus's safe return to port after circumnavigating the world is a good candidate to be the moment you're looking for.

If it was then we wouldn't have to warn people about the location of waste sites.

Now you understand the pro-fossil-fuel deception Beck is attempting. We do not have to warn people about the location of old waste sites.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996

We have the Gordon Lightfoot song telling us there was a cook on board -- which would seem plausible anyway -- and that suggests there might have been saltshakers on board. So is there a threat that they will leak, and render the big lake undrinkable?

Even just a few decades out, the radioactivity of nuclear waste has declined so much that it is the same order of magnitude as the saltshaker threat. Beck is lying to protect the petroleum and natural gas tax component of his, and everyone he talks to's, paycheque.

In so doing he is working to protect a real waste threat that will kill one or more real persons, with names and histories, today: carbon monoxide.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996

1. Its too expensive,

Tell that to France. They have a GREAT nuclear program, AND lower energy costs. The generate over 75% of their electricity from nuclear power.

2. Smart engineers know Murphy always wins.

Smart engineers are able to solve problems. With that type of thinking, we wouldn't have cars, airplanes, semiconductor plants, etc. "Murphy always wins" is a cop-out for not actually looking at the REAL risks involved. "Smart engineers" actually do the work to look at the REAL risks instead of just spouting slogans...they leave that to management.

3. Nuclear proliferation.

Pretty much a non-issue, I'm not a nuclear scientist but this particular point was debunked very well during the last story /. posted related to nuclear power.

4. Compared to alternative energy (solar, wind, geothermal, wave, etc.), it's less commercially viable with far more risks.

This really falls under #1. Just like #1 you're not really backing up these claims. For example, solar power is definately NOT cheaper than nuclear power on any meaningful scale.

5. Large monolithic power plants take years to build, the investment makes no sense without government subsidies

That's a policy issue not a technical one. Let the gov't build the plants then. It's not as if the gov't doesn't already subsidize utilities.

Nuclear power: old complex clunky mainframe, prone to bugs.

Pure FUD. Modern nuclear power plants are very safe. You percieve the risk to be greater than it actually is.

Solar power: wireless handheld with worldwide networking


Solar power is NOT PRACTICAL. Solar panels simply do not put out enough power per square meter to be able to meet out energy needs, period.
"To even come close to supplying our energy needs we would need about 500 plants which would require (figuring maintenance roads and access) 25,000 square miles of ground which is equal to the surface area of Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and New Jersey combined."