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Since 1986, more and more fuel storage pools have approached their maximum holding capacity (Figure 4). By 2017, all but one site (which was constructed with sufficient pool storage capacity to accommodate all of the spent fuel produced during the reactor’s lifetime) will be at capacity, necessitating the greater use of dry storage.

and more here: http://www.nae.edu/Publication...

On site storage is not a viable or better long term solution. We are only now hitting a point where reactors are starting to be retired. Do you think that the utility companies running them will have the same committment to the storage 10, 50, 250 years later? The same can be said about security. Even regionalizing above ground storage poses risks and certainly increases the political drama

As another poster notes, some of it could be reprocessed for further use but ultimately there is waste to deal with. And it is true that MOX does not itself pose any terrorist type risk, the risk comes from having too many reprocessing locations where materials can be "lost". Done properly reprocessing could buy some time to deal with the longer term needs.

Why would any respected organization or individual response to this guy's drivel. Plenty out there to read, that is credible and provide a glimpse at some of the issues. Here's some stuff to start with to give you a sense of what needs to be considered, not overlooked. https://www.nae.edu/Publicatio... http://www05.abb.com/global/sc...

Not to mention that California did have retail caps on the price of energy, and the way they implemented that ("soft caps") was part of the problem of their energy crisis. Once they became an importer of energy (while allowing exports!), all those nonsensical regulations became a weapon to be used against them.

The regulation apologists want you to think that the crisis was a manufactured financial one, rather than a over-regulated supply one. In reality it was both, with one enabling the other.

"Antipersonnel landmines used by the United States, with the exception of those now warehoused for use in Korea, do not have long-term residual effects because they are self-destructing and/or self-deactivating"

Reference here

On August 31, flood levels started to subside. The water level in the city had reached that of Lake Pontchartrain, and as the lake started to drain back into the Gulf, some water in the city started to flow into the lake via the same levee breeches they had entered through. In 19th century lake floods, the water soon flowed back into the lake as there were no levees on that side.

as humans, what makes us special is not just our ability to adapt, but to adapt the environment around us. If we never lived anywhere there was a threat of disaster, I am not sure where you could live(definitely not Texas, or a few other places. And those maps don't even include floods (the most common natural disaster), for that threats see this map of flood hazards for the US.

I find it unimaginable that people would attempt to implement a technology that is not fully understood.

This is precisely why this kind of algorithm has remained undiscovered over such a long period of time that people have begun to speculate that the human brain employs a quantum magician behind the curtain. Not so. We're just slow on the uptake. (I find this amazing: against the backdrop of our intellectual failings, we manufacture glory for our miraculous cognition.)

Compositions of non-linear components tend to defy traditional explanation. We've done a pretty good job of mining the ore where our preferred mode of understanding serves us well. This campaign is presently stuck in the mud halfway between chess and Go: computers rule the chess trench, neurons rule the Go trench; there's a large no man's land in between, with the computers gaining a few hundred yards a year, though we don't yet know how far apart these trenches lie. Reminds me of the quote: "Never mistake a clear view for a short distance." -- Paul Saffo.

There seems to be a wide range of applications remaining where mother nature--unhindered by our need to shoehorn systems into our preferred mode of explanation--gets better results at less expenditure. The most interesting feature of this discovery is that it computes well within our existing computational regime. A computational factor of 10,000 means that this algorithm running on a 486 circa 1990 would not have been out of the question (see also: slow uptake; we had the hardware, no one knew how to best use it).

There's a lot we don't yet understand about non-linear systems. I'm not in the camp where I throw up my hands and go "this is so difficult, the best we can do is discover these systems through content-free genetic algorithms". There's an entire intellectual discipline yet to be established half-way between our traditional mode of analysis (understanding things before we build them) and content-free genetic algorithms.

The deep work lies at the bionic boundary: how to interface the analytic system (in chess, this is tree search) with non-linear systems (inspired by neurological models or other forms of stochastic algorithm) to get a result greater than the sum of its parts. It's extremely difficult to synthesize the opaque, so this should present some gnarly challenges.

BTW: Kurweil has been projecting great progress in reverse engineering human neurology for quite a while. He usually hauls out as his example some work by Lloyd Watts (and others, I'm sure). This paper covers a lot of ground in acoustics and vision.

Commercializing Auditory Neuroscience

Providing insurance costs, for example and to begin with the insurer have to maintain an allocation (reserve). To think otherwise is to deny the vast amounts of money involved in the insurance biz.

> Every claim against the nuclear energy industry, ever, has been paid out of the funds that are paid into by the industry.

Claims are only part of the big picture, and there are numerous cases of spent taxpayer's money. Secrecy hides many tricks, but not all.

The trick is simple: underestimating costs, then letting taxpayer's money pay the difference and compensations to the industry. If a real cost appears the company involved is no more around to pay.

Here is an application: the only potential solution for nuclear waste is now the "Yucca Mountain Repository". It is studied since nearly 30 years, scheduled since 20 and can only "solve" the problem (there is no consensus about this), at the current rate of waste production up to 2014. Worse: after many postponings it will not open before 2017 and most people concerned simply don't want this to happen and even citizen not affected by the "Not In My Backyard" syndrom don't want anyone to coerce them.

The DOE has to cope with the waste by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which says "the DOE will cope with waste, thanks to money paid by the nuclear industry" (leading to the Yucca Mountain project).

We are talking about big bucks, there: a GAO report (established for the Congress), stated in 2001 (page 2) that "Estimates of the potential damages vary widely, from DOE's estimate of about $2 billion to the nuclear industry's estimate of $50 billion.". The footnote 11 (page 19) is also interesting: then (2001) "concluded that DOE's schedule for licensing, constructing, and opening the repository by 2010 was optimistic by about 2 years and that DOE's estimate of the total cost of the program over its 100-plus-year lifetime--$58 billion (2000 dollars)--was understated by about $3 billion.". Remember: the opening date is now 2017. This imply new costs/risks (project failure)/claims/temporary storage/... Don't worry: taxpayer's money will, as usual, pay!

And here is a case: during "Maine Yankee" nuclear power plant decommission, for example, there was a lawsuit: Maine Yankee owners tried to get the DOE (dept. of Energy) pay (isn't this a "claim"?) for part of fuel removing (by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act), and won (approx 75M bucks). Isn't DOE's money taxpayer money? Better: two companies exploiting the plant were also awarded, for a grand total of 152 million. Granted, those companies payed during years for temporary storage because DOE failed to tackle the task (which has an explanation: failure to receive approvals for Yucca, which postponed it and added to the costs), but AFAIK the balance between their temporary storage costs and those earnings is positive: Maine Yankee wins taxpayer's money because the DOE promised to take care of the waste, and failed. Here is the best part: the DOE will very probably, beyond the awards, be coerced into removing the fuel. Yep, the taxpayer (again) helps some easy accounting write-offs. Anything "costs less" when taxpayer money discreetly pays!

Moreover this decommissioning seems to be done by rubblization which "is in fact a serious abrogation of law and environmental policy as currently evidenced by Maine and Connecticut legislation mandating that there will be no "low-level" radioactive waste

All of this research was done a long time ago. The laser delivers its power in such a burst that no amount of mirroring or spinning will make a difference. As to the atmospheric attenuation, that's what the laser's adaptive optics are for. It's kind of like a telescope in reverse. In any case, this sort of thing was tried for short-range defense in the 70's, and even a small laser was capable of shooting down Sidewinders (mounted on a KC-135.) We're talking about serious firepower here...this thing was tested at a low-altitude range of 50km, and worked fine...up in the high atmosphere where they hope to catch boost-phase weapons, it should be much easier. It's not like the things can evade or maneuver, after all, they're called ballistic missiles for a reason.

http://www.nae.edu/nae/bridgecom.nsf/weblinks/MKEZ -4ZPQHJ?OpenDocument

In the eyes of most environmentalists, (or at least the environmental lobbying groups) nuclear power is more of a threat to the environment than global warming.

Possibly, but there simply is no alternative. It might be possible to set up vast areas of desert or ocean as solar collection points, but that would not be 100% environmentally neutral.

An hour with the Internet and a calculator will convince you that even an extremely efficient biomass program cannot replace current fossil fuel consumptions. Renewable resources such as wind and hydroelectric power can help, as can reduced consumption, but in the end we need nuclear power.

Rather, we need nuclear power if we want to continue the standard of living of the small fraction of the world's people that live in the west. The world needs it even more if it wants all of humanity to live in safety and comfort. (Unfortunately this is not really a primary goal for religious people, or for self-interested or nationalistic people, but it should be!) :)

Some estimates are that fission would supply us with power for thousands of years. The main issues with fission are that you can build really scary weapons with the technology, and it produces waste that lasts effectively forever. These can be addressed, but I really believe that fusion power is the ultimate answer.

A more detailed timeline for the awards is available here

Alltogether there are five of them, the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize, the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education, the Founders Award, and the Arthur M. Bueche Award

Somewhat off topic, but what grabbed me from the article right off the bat is the classic cool kids picking on or bulling the geeks and the nerds. Which simply boils down to Americans and their understanding of technology and science and the kids not having a role model to look up to in this area?

The Gallup Organization conducted the first-ever public poll in the United States on technological literacy. The poll tested the conceptual and practical understanding of technology, as well as opinions about the importance of studying technology. The results show as a rough gauge of how-or whether-the level of technological literacy changes over time. The results of the poll revealed that most Americans have a very limited view of technology and science. The results emphasize my point that we as a society don't instill enough science and technology in the younger generation as we should. Which leads to again the classic cool kids bulling the geeks scenario.