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You can not patent the "sequence" of a gene. The whole genome sequence is freely available to the public.

In simple terms what you could patent is the discovery that "this piece of sequence does that" or how it functions in nature and how can it be utilized.

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome /elsi/patents.shtml

Driver deaths per million registered passenger vehicles 1-3 years old, 2003
Vehicle size Rate
Car -- mini 142
Car -- small 108
Car -- midsize 66
Car -- large 61
Car -- very Large 70
Pickup -- small 124
Pickup -- large 115
Pickup -- very large 102
SUV -- small 75
SUV -- midsize 70
SUV -- large 64
SUV -- very large *

This seems to contradict your assertion about average miles per commute, a much more reasonable 11 miles (probably more since then since the data is old). This article seems to say that this person gets 110 miles per gallon in his Hybrid.

Also, it is a new technology whereas your Geo and the internal combustion engine has been around for quite a while. The Geo is extraordinarily tiny for a normal person to fit in. The Prius is more normal.

Also, the smart car is fundamentally more for European culture and streets. Canada is not simply America up north and they may not necessarily work here.

They could do blown in or fiberglass too (mixing some old technology with new?) More types of insulation could be used too.

Re: Your sig, not to crap on it, but the human genome is 3 Gigabytes according to the project page.

"Since the human genome is 3 billion base pairs long, 3 gigabytes of computer data storage space are needed to store the entire genome." (pops)

Wouldn't that mean it would be around 25.8 (rounded) gigabits?

Not being a troll, just thought something was a bit (haha) off.

For reference, "much" means 1/3. Ethanol is 21MJ/L, vs. 32MJ/L for gas.

On a flex-fuel vehicle, such as those dominating the market in Brazil, one would expect to travel 2/3 as far on a tankfull of ethanol as on a tankfull of gas. To get equivalent mileage, one would need to store 50% more ethanol than gas. Considering all of the current infrastructure can be used as-is, that's really not such a big deal.

It's certainly less of a big deal than with hydrogen, which not only needs an entirely different infrastructure, but has only one quarter the energy content per litre that gas does, and that doesn't even count the volume, weight, and energy requirements of the cryogenic storage system needed to liquify it.

Biodiesel is a good option; however, the key advantage that ethanol has is that it can be used to replace gasoline in situ---the economy can go from 100% gasoline to 100% ethanol in tiny increments, and---provided new vehicles are flex-fuel (which are no more expensive than the 10%-max engines we use now)---there will be no shock or disruption of any kind. Changing all the vehicles and fuel stations over to diesel, on the other hand, would be a massive and disruptive undertaking.

There is more energy in the uranium and thorium spewed out from the black belched smoke in a coal power plant than in the coal which it burned. We are literally pissing gold away.

Nuclear power is the safest way of generating electricity per GWhr we have.

Nuclear fission power alone could fullfill all our present energy requirements. Of course, this is not what would happen in the real world. For example, France uses hydro power for most of the other 24% of the electricity they require. Wind power is also economical in the right places. I have little doubt we will eventually turn to biodiesel for transportation, even if for no other reason, it is energy dense and works on current internal combustion engines. But trying to devise an economy without fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, petroleum) using existing technology without putting nuclear power into the mix is *not* going to work.

About coal being worse than nuclear, I have not the best references, but here are a few:

http://geology.cr.usgs.gov/energy/factshts/163-97/ FS-163-97.html
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html
http://yarchive.net/nuke/coal_radiation.html

At first I thought you were crazy when you said that coal power has radioactive byproducts. But you were right.

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html

PVM offers both the spec and the implementation, MPI offers a newer spec with several solid implementations. But no, NIH-syndrom prevails and another piece of half-baked software is born.

Where I work, the monstrosity uses Java RMI to pass the input data and computation results around -- encapsulated in XML, no less...

It is very hard to fight -- I did a comparision implementing the same task in PVM and in our own software. Depending on the weight of the individual computation being distributed, PVM was from 10 to 300% faster and used 5 times less bandwidth. Upper management saw the white paper...

Guess, what we continue to develop and push to our clients?

tm

The calutrons were basically a FAILURE ...

Unlike most ChemE, where research leads to pilot plant which leads to production plant (step 4, profit), the Manhattan Project often skipped the pilot plant stage and went directly from research to production facility. Small pilot plants allow you to determine which of several alternatives might be the most economically feasible. The Manhattan Project did not have the time to figure out which way was best, so they simply built all of the alternatives as full scale production plants (OK, they also had nearly unlimited funds). In the end, IIRC, the calutrons were used as a first stage feeder plant to the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant. Today, the ORNL Fusion Energy Division is physically located in Y-12 since it needs huge amounts of electricity for its experiments and Y-12 was wired for it in order to run the calutrons.

As to the pollution, John Googin used to argue that the arsenic coming out of the coal mines in the Cumberland Mountains above Oak Ridge was probably a greater threat than the what was escaping from Oak Ridge.

Just MHO but his would be one of the LAST places on Earth I'd care to visit.

I grew up in OR. It has a 1st rate school system and very reasonably priced housing (a home that might cost 3/4 mil in the Bay Raea can be had for <150K in OR). Within an hour of OR in almost any direction is some of the best backpacking, climbing, caving, canoeing, and mt biking in the Eastern US. If there were any jobs, I'd move my family back there in a heartbeat.

I also grew up in a community surrounding Oak Ridge. The government facilities there provided many jobs for my grandfather and his generation after they returned from WW2. These jobs had an extreme impact upon the surrounding communities in that they provided the very poor families in East TN jobs and the ability to escape poverty and move up to middle class status. This opportunity has lasted even until now. My grandfather and others like him died from exposure to the materials produced in Oak Ridge. The government is now providing families of those men and women restitution for their services. My wife's family alone recieved well over $200k from the government. Not only did the work that went on in Oak Ridge put an end to the greatest war ever waged, it also gave many families a chance for survival. Now ORNL is working on many things, even Glassy Steel! http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/v38_1_05/artic le17.shtml

The average temp in the arctic has risen 1.2 degress per DECADE

Have any references for THAT. Although it still wouldn't prove global warming, just Arctic warming at one weather station. Seriously. Where can I find that data? Do you have an Arctic weather station I can search for data at GISS?

Or maybe some data I can request from CDIAC. Nice chaps. I'm sure they would be willing to help.

In any case, I was talking about GLOBAL average temperatures not arctic ones. Interesting that you didn't respond to that.

Truly ignorance is bliss.

ad hominem attack. You are calling me ignorant. You realize that you are acting just like the stereotypical environmentalist?

Its people like yourself who make excuses like, you don't understand climate change and you think the instruments scientists are using aren't accurate

Here's yet another semi ad hominem attack. In a roundabout way you are trying to make the whole idea of instrument accuracy as far back as the 19th century seem ludicrous. It is not. Go find me a thermometer that I can buy even in 2005 that is designed for measuring air temperature. You will see that most of them are only accurate to +/- 0.5 deg celsius at best and then only within a narrow temperature range (if you read the fine print). This is not accurate enough to detect temperature changes of only 1 degree. Remember we are talking about 2005 here. Not 1865. What were the temperature gathering devices like in 1865? Do you have to research it first? Who's the ignorant one?

Burry your head in the sand like most people do

Ad hominem. Why are you all so predictable?

The Vostok Ice core evidence begs to differ. Study some geology and you will see there is only one constant - change. The thing that geology tells us is that the steady state is a fleeting dream upon which we build our fleeting civilisations. There is statibility, but it is a "dynamic" stability. The stability of the earth is as a result of the biosphere managing to balance the atmospheric gases so that system fluctuations eventually are corrected. You are correct in that now anthopogenic (yes we are really part of the biosphere but with tools to break balanced systems) change means the earth is operating out of it's normal parameters. When I say normal, I mean within the past million years. Some would argue more strongly than that.

Naaa...there was no stereo satellite imagery before 1995.

the human genome data would exist celera aren't the only ones who were doing it, and unlike celera the others weren't doing it to make a quick $.

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome /home.shtml

oh look. .gov paid for by tax $$$

The ideal purpose of GM (ie, when its not some company using it to sell farmers their "special" chemicals like the roundup-ready series) is not to create more food per acre, its to use less resources doing it.

Increased yields is one of the reasons proponents use for allowing genetic engineering:

GM Products: Benefits and Controversies

• Increased nutrients, yields, and stress tolerance

Genetically Modified Foods and Organisms

Additionally in regions where there is a distribution problem, imagine being able to grow food in town, despite the poor land quality.

City farms? City farms are increasing throughout the world, many using organic methods:

City farms

-- "The key to the future of the world lies in gardening. One individual with a digging fork and a small garden can make a difference" -- from the Foreword, "Gardening For The Future Of The Earth", Seeds of Change, 2000

That might sound very idealistic, and indeed it is, but consider these facts:

City farming is spreading fast -- city farms contributed 15% to world food production in 1993 and it's expected to grow to 33% by 2005. Some 800 million people worldwide were involved in urban agriculture in 1996, according to the UNDP, growing fruits, vegetables, and herbs, as well as raising livestock.

More than half of the poor people in developing countries now live in urban areas, up from about a third in 1988 -- only 12 years ago -- and still increasing.

Poor people in cities farm scraps of ground wherever they can grow something to provide some food and make some money -- and they save money they would have spent on food. City farming makes a hefty contribution to the fight against poverty and hunger.

It also makes a hefty contribution to environmental and public health. Every year 5.2 million people, including four million children, mostly in cities, die from diseases caused by unhygienic sewage and waste disposal, and urban waste production is growing even faster than urban populations: by the year 2025, urban waste production will have quadrupled.

City farmers play a major role in waste recycling, creating a closed system in which organic wastes -- from food, manufacturing and sewage -- are reused instead of festering in dumps and polluting waterways. Human waste is turned into compost, domestic wastewater safely irrigates many crops, and aquaculture stabilizes animal manure. In Mexico City many families keep pigs -- urban pig farmers recycle up to 4,000 tons of the city's food wastes every day.

And city farming empowers women, which benefits everyone. Women in a vegetable-growing cooperative in Bogota, Colombia, earn three times more than their husbands do.

Expansion

Cities cover only 2% of the Earth's surface, but consume 75% of its resources. Cities are black holes, they're swallowing our planet. But, more and more, they're turning green.

Jac Smit, President of the Urban Agriculture Network and co-author of "Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs, and Sustainable Cities", paints a vision of what the world would be like if cities were nutritionally self-reliant: "As we consider a dominantly urban Earth early in the next century, in a world with less land and water per-capita, the return of agriculture to where we live presents us with a new paradigm.

"What if 'waste is food' and sewage and garbage were prime inputs to food production? What if the urban landscape were edible? What if vacant, waste land in cities were productive and enhancing the environment for living? What if urban areas were increasing biodiversity rather than diminishing it?"

It's happening. Growing your own food in cities has long been the way in Asia, and it's expanding enormously in Africa, Latin America, and all over the world.

All over the world urban food production is growing more rapidly than urban population -- in spite o

Percy Schmeiser, a Saskatchwan farmer, was sued by agribusiness Monsanto...when the "roundup-ready" canola was found on Schmeiser's farm - blown there by the wind. Although Schmeiser didn't want the plants, and tried to get rid of the plants, he lost the lawsuit.

Without a renewed license, Iraqi farmers cannot replant each year's seeds, like 97 percent of them currently do. Also, they cannot sell or trade the seeds - because the genetic materials of the crops are patented.

First, you are comparing an ash (nuclear waste) against a fuel (coal dust and carbon). Secondly, a bucket of coal and a bucket of nuclear fuel differ in available energy by roughly a factor of one million. Your question is poorly posed on two counts. A bucket of nuclear fuel comparable to a bucket of coal would weigh 1 millionth the amount of the coal bucket. So either bed would be safe to sleep in - though ironically both buckets would probably contain about the same amount of radioactive material: "Coal Combustion: Nuclear Resource or Danger"

A far better link is this. Reading that, you'll see that it's much different from a window or solartube.

hmm, 'no officer, i was using this hybrid system to light my house, not grow hybrid plants! ;)

You're missing the critical point. Feeding light down into a building is not innovative. Collecting the light, feeding the visible light down into the building, and using the infrared energy from the light to produce power, is the new development. As the site states, " Independent cost and performance models suggest the overall affordability of solar energy could be doubled or tripled using this new hybrid approach." That kind of improvement in cost-effectiveness could make solar energy a lot more viable as an alternative to conventional power sources.

Cluster computing is meant to address your situation (really). More processors may be able to do your conversions faster.

Of course, this adds communication overhead.

On a recent bio analysis project, I found that hyperthreaded processors were able to achieve super-linear speedup. In other words, N processors were more than N times faster than a single processor for this computation. My hypothesis is that the communication overhead was absorbed by the hyperthread, and the addition of more cache and RAM (on the additional processors) lead to the super linear speedup.

This was using PVM http://www.csm.ornl.gov/pvm/pvm_home.html/

e

Or does one need to re-write her/his software to use their own?

I don't know if you read my other postings, but I hope you read this.

Would you mind putting correct data in your table ?

http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/l8.html
and
http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/pns/current_ghg.html

How can you say that the man-made methane is 0.066% of the present methane concentration if it raised from 700 to 1730 ppt ?

Or that man-made CO2 is 0.117%, when the CO2 concentration is presently 375 ppm against the 280 ppm that were in the pre-industrial times ?

Sorry, the data in your page is utterly wrong.

Actually, you can patent a gene fragment.

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome /elsi/patents.shtml/

Wikipedia says volcanoes produce 145 million to 255 million short tons of carbon dioxide each year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanoes#Gas_emissio ns
The US Department of Energy says in 2000 humans produced 6611 million metric tons of carbon.
http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob.htm

It looks like one is only 2-4% as much as the other. Did it occur to you that all these scientists spouting off about global warming have though about the obvious answers already? Or maybe you're just so much smarter than them?

Humans are quite capable of changing and destroying the ecosystem, and have been since at least 1945. The only question currently is if we want to do it slowly or fast.

Surur

According to the oft quoted ORNL report, there is 0.00427 millicuries/ton of coal, and each ton releases 6150 kilowatt-hours(kWh)/ton. This is therefore 6.9431e-7 mCi/kWh. The DOE's Energy Information Agency gives the world total of energy production for 2002 as 4.0512e17 BTU or 1.18699e14 kWh. Since only 9.756e16 BTU or 24.08% of the world energy production is coal for 2002, we can come to a total of 19.85 MCi/yr. Some estimates for Chernobyl put the radiation released at 1.2e19 Bq or 320 MCi. It would take coal plants at the 2002 rate of production 16 years to equal the release from Chernobyl. On the 26th of April, it will be the 19th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident! Is it really that intelligent to put the noose around the neck of our nuclear industry because a near bankrupt Cold War enemy with a poorly designed reactor had an accident that almost certainly could not happen with US reactors?

In blade runner, the limited lifespan was a design decision.

Our gene therapy technology already outstrips the fictional tyrell corporation's state of the art, because we can revise a person's genome after they've fully differentiated in to a complete mature human being.

From the ORNL:

Americans living near coal-fired power plants are exposed to higher radiation doses than those living near nuclear power plants that meet government regulations.

I first heard this fact from a professor of mine, and it made sense at the time as coal is ultimately a source for uranium as well as radium. (That's where the Curies got their uranium from, after all.) This is the first time I did a web-search to verify his statement, and I wasn't surprised to see that it agrees with other people's calculations (Google for "coal radiation").

2. Water vapor is by far the primary contributor of the greenhouse effect, accounting for 96 to 99%. CO2 accounts for 1 to 3%. Methane and others trace gasses account for less than 1%. The greenhouse effect lets solar radiation in, but, like a blanket over the planet, absorbs some IR heat that would otherwise radiate out. This keeps the Earth's mean temperature somewhere around 15 C, instead of roughly -15 C. This vital 30 C swing is the reason that the Earth is habitable.

3. During the current interglacial period, the Earth has been about 2C cooler (The "Little Ice Age" around 1600-1700, when the Thames regularly froze over), and it has also been about 2C warmer (The medieval warm period around 1000 - 1200, when Greenland was colonized by the Vikings.) We are currently about in the middle of this natural variation, which occurred without manmade CO2.

4. The 500k year Vostok ice core data: http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/co2/vostok.htm shows CO2 either in phase or lagging temperature by up to 1000 years, over four temperature oscillations. This means the CO2 does not drive temperature, but that temperature drives CO2. The most likely explanation is that the ocean outgases and releases more CO2 when temperature increases, and holds more dissolved gasses as the oceans cools.

5. I'm not disputing the Earth may be getting relatively warmer (as we are coming out of the little ice age). One reason is likely the unusually active Sun. This report: http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/aah4688.pdf shows that over the last several centuries, solar activity is at its highest levels. The IPCC determined that the Sun's variation in energy output were too small to explain global warming. They dismissed the sun as a likely source of Earth changing climate!. Here is a link to a recent study showing how the sun's variation could have a feedback that would drive earth's climate change: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2333133. stm The theory goes like this: When the sun is highly magnetically active, the increased solar wind shields us from cosmic radiation. Low levels of incoming comic radiation reduce cloud formation. Reduced low level cloud formation reduces reflectivity (i.e., the Earth's albedo). More energy is absorbed instead of reflected, and the temperature increases. The difference from an active Sun to an inactive Sun was about 3% global cloud coverage. The correlation in the study is remarkable. The jury is still out, but it could explain the correlation between the Maunder minimum of the 1600's and the little ice age, and account for the warming in the last 3 decades that corresponds with unusually high solar activity at the same time.

6. In November 1991, Danish scientists Eijil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen, startled the climatological world with a paper in "Science" describing a 0.95 correlation between solar cycle length and global temperature (IPCC version). "Science" writer, Richard Kerr described it as "one dazzling correlation". The blue line is temperature, the red line is solar cycle length.) As can be seen, global temperature has tended to increase in lockstep with shortening of the solar cycle length (ie. solar maxima becoming more frequent) I hope you follow the link, because one look at it, and you are forced to say, "Its the Sun, stupid." The graph is at the bottom of this link: http://web.dmi.dk/sol-jord/projekter/rum_vejr/over sigt.html

7. The best protection against climate chan

(sorry, no link. Too lazy.)

Too bored. Here's the link:

ORNL

Google also turned up this gem:

Canadian Agricultural Energy End-Use Data and Analysis Centre (Ethanol Page)

Enjoy!

• R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda, mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib, qtl, dbi, rmysql), out-of-the box support for the powerful ESS modes for XEmacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program;
• A complete teTeX, TeX, and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing, along with TeXmacs and LyX for wysiwyg editing;
• Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, Lua, and Scientific and Numeric Python;
• The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as Gnumeric, kate, Koffice, jed, joe, nedit and zile;
• Octave, with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk, and matwrap;
• Computer-algebra systems Maxima, Pari/GP, GAP, GiNaC and YaCaS;
• the QuantLib quantitative finance library including its Python interface;
• GSL, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) including example binaries;
• The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers;
• the OpenDX, Plotmtv, and Mayavi data visualisation systems;
• it includes apcalc,aribas,autoclass,

according to Alex Gabbard

For comparison, according to NCRP Reports No. 92 and No. 95, population exposure from operation of 1000-MWe nuclear and coal-fired power plants amounts to 490 person-rem/year for coal plants and 4.8 person-rem/year for nuclear plants. Thus, the population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants. For the complete nuclear fuel cycle, from mining to reactor operation to waste disposal, the radiation dose is cited as 136 person-rem/year; the equivalent dose for coal use, from mining to power plant operation to waste disposal, is not listed in this report and is probably unknown.

For a large number of coal samples, according to Environmental Protection Agency figures released in 1984, average values of uranium and thorium content have been determined to be 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively

And a 1,000 megawatt plant uses 4 million tons of coal a year, resulting in the release of 5.2 tons of Uranium and 12.8 tones of thorium.

A 1000 megawatt light water nuclear plant of the type used in the USA uses about 25 tons of uranium a year.

If you're willing to use breeder reactors and their ilk, you can actually get more power out the the uranium in the ash than you got burning the coal!

There is no reason to sign the treaty.

Aside from impending climate change, of course.

There are countries who are largely hardly even bound by it (China)

China just recently joined the WTO, but that doesn't mean we should have waited for them. If we want to be a global leader, a good way to do it would be by leading.

and it would put our sovreignty in jeapardy. [sic]

Sorry, I missed the provision of the treaty where it said that the carbon police could annex territory or replace the president if we didn't cut emissions. Could you point that part out to me?

Besides, through our own regulation we've already cut our emissions by half since about 1972.

Based on what data? Government data says there's been a 25% rise from 1972 to 2000. And as far as I know, there are no CO2 emissions regulations in the US yet. Could you point us at them?

Radioactive Thanks for playing!

I'm not belittling your opinion, but rather your determination to focus on a single article from ORNL. Not to mention your continual alteration and exaggeration of the emphasis of my statements. As I've stated before I am more than interested in any research materials you can direct me towards, but so far all you've pointed me to is EPRI. A site for an industry R&D and consulting firm which does not include any relavent articles or papers in its public sections (beyond marketing materials), but is actively promoting and assisting with the very nuclear power facilities that you decry. If you have knowledge on a subject, please do share it, but be sure to include direct links to reference materials that support your stance. It makes it much easier to have an intelligent debate.

"Yes, but the whole 'coal is radioactive too' argument is flawed and really quite stupid."

Case in point. The argument is not based around "coal is radioactive, too." Though, for the last time, it is more radioactive than regular background scatter, just not massively so. USGS data suggest a 1-5% increase in exposure when living near a coal plant; which is small, but noticeable. The original thrust of my argument was that the general public has a severely skewed opinion of nuclear power and ignores the impact of the types of power generation we have to resort to without nuclear power.

Look on google for 'stirling engine dish' and you'll find a dozen of similar projects. For instance http://www.ornl.gov/info/news/pulse/pulse_v7_98.ht m.

IMHO, VS.NET 2003 is the weakest link in the .Net story. The platform is great. The FCL is incredible. The IDE is pretty buggy and when its not buggy, its real slow. You won't run into these issues with a small project for a single developer. A lot of VSS integration problems show up with multiple developers and multiple large projects in a single solution. Don't even think of bringing up a reaonsably complex web form using the WYSIWYG editor. The real reason for not using VB.Net on large projects is the unstoppable background compile which kills your IDE.

Fortunately, all the source files are ASCII text and everything can be done from the command line. Someone went to the bother of developing an emacs major mode too. Without these points, I'd by SOL.

Regarding the original article, this is pure market-speak. Let's just cut to the chase and paraphrase the illusion in 23 words. Too cheap to hire good people? Don't worry. Buy our tool and your cheap, dumb people will be able to do the job. The reality is this. The cheap, dumb people will be able to do a quickie prototype with moderate success but the final project will fail without at least one good developer.

As a child, you may have heard the story of stone soup. A beggar got a free meal off of a village by promising them something for nothing. In this case, he promised them tasty soup from a stone. But there was scope creep as he was making the soup. Soon the villagers were adding beef, cabbage, etc, to the soup. The stone was just a gimmick. The tool vendors are like that beggar. Promising something for nothing. In this case, software without developers. Along the way, you find yourself adding expensive developers to the mix. Pretty soon, you realize that you didn't need the fancy tool after all.

You'll notice that around the year 2000, China produced approximately 800 million metric tons of CO2, and the US produced approximately 1.5 billion metric tons of CO2. Since then, China has actually managed to decrease its emissions, and I believe ours have increased.

You'll notice that around the year 2000, China produced approximately 800 million metric tons of CO2, and the US produced approximately 1.5 billion metric tons of CO2. Since then, China has actually managed to decrease its emissions, and I believe ours have increased.

I think most folks in the /. world consider IT to be the 'tech' industry. Not surprising due to the backgrounds of the people who read/post here. As for 'tech' jobs, there are quite a few in my region of the technology world:

LLNL has 20 open S&E positions.

INEEL in the middle of transitioning contractors, but will undoubtedly need S&Es to complete missions for DOE and the Navy.

LBL has 95 open S&E positions.

BNL has 7 open S&E positions.

SNL has 20 open S&E positions.

LANL has 107 open S&E positions.

ORNL has 28 open S&E positions.

PNNL has 36 open S&E positions.

ANL has 32 open S&E positions.

There complete list of laboratories is here. All of them have job postings in the S&E categories. These just happen to be the largest insitutions.

I haven't even started searching Monster.com

I forgot the link! Sorry:
Believe it or not!

The real problem with Yucca Mountain is the water table issue and the fact that most of these waste materials are extremely toxic. Nuclear reactors do not produce large amounts of isotopes "hundreds of thousands of times more radioactive" than "natural" uranium. And if they did, the half-life for them would be extremely short. The reason it takes millions of years for these waste materials to become functionally inert is because they are alpha emitters with very long half-lives. In other words, they do not produce large amounts of dangerous radiation. As they decay they will hit stages of greater radiation, but remember, alpha particles cannot even penetrate the layer of dead skin cells covering our bodies. A sheet of paper is strong enough shielding. Beta emmiters are somewhat more dangerous, but not significantly so. Additionally, while alpha particle radiation can still cause mutagenic aberrations if it can get passed your clothes and skin; the real danger is application to an open wound, inhalation, or ingestion of the radioactive materials. Not only does this allow the alpha particles to damage sensitive internal organ tissue, but the materials themselves are highly toxic. This is one of the reasons that radon (the end product of the uranium in the earth naturally decaying) in our basements is such a concern. Radon being gaseous enters our lungs where the alpha particles can actually do damage.

Chernobyl's problem was not the release of radiation into the atmosphere. That is disapated very rapidly by prevailing winds and does not affect the surrounding area significantly (not from a single event such as that). The problem with Chernobyl was that when the top blew chunks of radioactive debris like pieces of the graphite cooling system rained down over the surrounding countryside and got into the ground and the water supply.

Most of the deaths in Nagasaki and Hiroshima were caused by the shockwave and the subsequent fires, not the radiation. This is not to say that there weren't many people killed by radiation, there were. But those individuals dying of cancer caused by those blasts are the individuals that were present at the time of the attacks. Both areas are still thickly settled and do not have higher than normal cancer rates outside of the population of the bomb drop survivors.

Additionally, far larger amounts of the same materials used and produced in nuclear power production (including uranium 235, uranium 238, and thorium among others) are pumped into our atmosphere every day by coal burning plants. In fact, if we took all the radioactive materials we send into the air every year and put them in nuclear reactors, we'd be able to make more energy that the coal plants that put them into the atmosphere did during the same timeframe.

On top of that, if breeder and pellet based plutonium reactors were actual in service we could use the waste from standard light water reactors to feed breeder reactors whose waste would feed the pellet based reactors. Drastically reducing the amount and lethality of the nuclear waste that we'd ultimately have to store.

Uranium-238 Decay Series

Nuclide Half-Life Radiation
U-238 4.468 109 years alpha
Th-234 24.1 days beta
Pa-234m 1.17 minutes beta
U-234 244,500 years alpha
Th-230 77,000 years alpha
Ra-226 1,600 years alpha
Rn-222 3.8235 days alpha
Po-218 3.05 minutes alpha
Pb-214 26.8 minutes beta
Bi-214 19.9 minutes beta
Po-214 63.7 microseconds alpha
Pb-210 22.26 years beta
Bi-210 5.013 days beta
Po-210 138.378 days alpha
Pb-206 stable

This allowed Indonesia to be connected to mainland Asia, as well as Tasmania to Australia. I am uncertain as to the extent of the European Coast line, although it is likely certain that the English channel was dry land. There was much more land in the Bahamas. More and related info here. It is certain that some islands would disappear

And the Sahara was much more of a grassland with trees area, with plenty of people leaving rock drawings behind. So nomads with cities on the now submerged coastline is plausible as well.

Most hydrocarbon techs spew CO2 out the pipe if we were to use the process of Thermal depolymerization (anything into oil, aka the turkey squeezer) you can nearly close the carbon cycle. This same process could be used to extract problem hydrocarbons from things such as oil shale. (which by the way was supposed to be profitable at $34.00 per barrel)The question is why use standard hydrocarbons as feedstock when we generate such a large amount of organic waste? I used to think that coal was the way to go but after reading this http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html I have decided otherwise. It does make you wonder if maybe we could just lightly spew radioactive waste into the air and be done with it. Oh and don't get me started with the amounts of energy which are locked up in methane hydrates.

1) Find (or make) a very deep hole, and dump the waste down it. Then forget about it. If the hole is deep enough, subduction will take all the nasty radioactives back where they came from. Also, use a modern, cleaner design of reactor (they do exist), rather than the 30-40 year old technology that is currently stinking up the place.

2a) Yes. Refine all the fly ash from the current coal fired power plants and recover the 1-2 ppm of uranium and 3-5 ppm of thorium that is currently either blown away in the plume or dumped on the ground. Not to mention all the other useful minerals present. Dump what's left down the hole from question 1 with the waste to dilute it. Bear in mind that a 1GW coal fired power station goes through about 4 million tons of coal per year, which represents a couple of tons of uranium and two to three times that of thorium. Also bear in mind that this means that coal power generation produces more nuclear waste/pollution that the nuclear industry by far. See http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html

2b) Yes. Just take apart the tens of thousands of warheads scattered all around the US and use the fissionables for something that isn't intended to kill millions of people.

"Americans living near coal-fired power plants are exposed to higher radiation doses than those living near nuclear power plants that meet government regulations. This ironic situation remains true today and is addressed in this article."

2. Water vapor is by far the primary contributor of the greenhouse effect, accounting for 96 to 99%. CO2 accounts for 1 to 3%. Methane and others trace gasses account for less than 1%. The greenhouse effect lets solar radiation in, but, like a blanket over the planet, absorbs some IR heat that would otherwise radiate out. This keeps the Earth's mean temperature somewhere around 15 C, instead of roughly -15 C. This vital 30 C swing is the reason that the Earth is habitable.

3. During the current interglacial period, the Earth has been about 2C cooler (The "Little Ice Age" around 1600-1700, when the Thames regularly froze over), and it has also been about 2C warmer (The medieval warm period around 1000 - 1200, when Greenland was colonized by the Vikings.) We are currently about in the middle of this natural variation, which occurred without manmade CO2.

4. The 500k year Vostok ice core data: http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/co2/vostok.htm shows CO2 either in phase or lagging temperature by up to 1000 years, over four temperature oscillations. This means the CO2 does not drive temperature, but that temperature drives CO2. The most likely explanation is that the ocean outgases and releases more CO2 when temperature increases, and holds more dissolved gasses as the oceans cools.

5. I'm not disputing the Earth may be getting relatively warmer (as we are coming out of the little ice age). One reason is likely the unusually active Sun. This report: http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/aah4688.pdf shows that over the last several centuries, solar activity is at its highest levels. The IPCC determined that the Sun's variation in energy output were too small to explain global warming. They dismissed the sun as a likely source of Earth changing climate!. Here is a link to a recent study showing how the sun's variation could have a feedback that would drive earth's climate change: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2333133. stm The theory goes like this: When the sun is highly magnetically active, the increased solar wind shields us from cosmic radiation. Low levels of incoming comic reduce cloud formation. Reduced low level cloud formation reduces reflectivity (i.e., the Earth's albedo). More energy is absorbed instead of reflected, and the temperature increases. The difference from an active Sun to an inactive Sun was about 3% global cloud coverage. The correlation in the study is remarkable. The jury is still out, but it could explain the correlation between the Maunder minimum of the 1600's and the little ice age, and account for the warming in the last 3 decades that corresponds with unusually high solar activity at the same time.

6. In November 1991, Danish scientists Eijil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen, startled the climatological world with a paper in "Science" describing a 0.95 correlation between solar cycle length and global temperature (IPCC version). "Science" writer, Richard Kerr described it as "one dazzling correlation". The blue line is temperature, the red line is solar cycle length.) As can be seen, global temperature has tended to increase in lockstep with shortening of the solar cycle length (ie. solar maxima becoming more frequent) I hope you follow the link, because one look at it, and you are forced to say, "Its the Sun, stupid." The graph is at the bottom of this link: http://web.dmi.dk/sol-jord/proj