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Well one approach would be to not do anything and live with a reduced yield, i.e. 1kt-3kt (depending on who you believe) rather than 10kt.

http://www.ccnr.org/plute.html

Designing and building an effective nuclear weapon using reactor-grade plutonium is less convenient than using weapon-grade plutonium, for several reasons.

Some nuclear weapons are typically designed so that a pulse of neutrons will start the nuclear chain reaction at the optimum moment for maximum yield; background neutrons from plutonium-240 can set off the reaction prematurely, and with reactor-grade plutonium the probability of such "pre-initiation" is large. Pre-initiation can substantially reduce the explosive yield, since the weapon may blow itself apart and thereby cut short the chain reaction that releases the energy.

Nevertheless, even if pre-initiation occurs at the worst possible moment (when the material first becomes compressed enough to sustain a chain reaction) the explosive yield of even a relatively simple first-generation nuclear device would be of the order of one or a few kilotons. While this yield is referred to as the "fizzle yield," a one-kiloton bomb would still have a radius of destruction roughly one-third that of the Hiroshima weapon, making it a potentially fearsome explosive. Regardless of how high the concentration of troublesome isotopes is, the yield would not be less.

It's possible that the North Koreans did this. In fact they messed up even more because they got less than one kt.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=kims-big-fizzle

Soon after the news broke that North Korea claimed to have conducted a nuclear test, experts realized that the blast had been much smaller than is usual for a first device. Nuclear explosions are measured in kilotons, an energy release equivalent to that of thousands of tons of TNT. Most countries' first tests range from five to 25 kilotons. For example, the U.S.'s 1945 "Trinity" test had a yield of about 20 kilotons. Yet estimates of the North Korean test clustered around half a kiloton. Reportedly, North Korean officials had told China to expect a blast of four kilotons.

Sci am speculates they used reactor grade plutonium and didn't do anything clever or that they got the implosion design wrong. Or maybe both.

Scientific American just had an article on fast neutron reactors that get around the waste issue and don't create any weapons grade material: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=smarter-use-of-nuclear-waste&page=1

You might find this article at Scientific American interesting.

Scientific American http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-latest-face-of-creationism recently had an article illuminating the intent behind such policies. A couple choice quotes: "The real purpose of the law-as opposed to its ostensible support for academic freedom-becomes evident on analysis. First, consider what the law seeks to accomplish. Aren't teachers in the public schools already exhorted to promote critical thinking, logical analysis and objective discussion of the scientific theories that they discuss?" "Thus, despite the lofty language, the ulterior intent and likely effect of these bills are evident: undermining the teaching of evolution in public schools-a consequence only creationists regard as a blessing."

Coal plants emit more radioactive material and also kills more people yearly from respiratory diseases than people died in Chernobyl.

I remember reading about the same proposition in a Scientific American article about 3 years ago (I used to read my national edition and there is a lag). However, they were basing the proposition on the analysis of the thermodynamical properties of black holes. Apparently the maximum entropy of a system is determined by the surface area of a sphere that encloses it. Above this limit the matter collapses into a black hole, which has an entropy proportional to its surface area.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=information-in-the-hologr-2003-08

Well, planting the trees would work better. ;) Anyways, if you want to spend the money, spend it on planting tree, bushes and anything else that can consume greenhouse gases in cities and other Urban environments--like on top of buildings in New York City. Scientific American did an article (this) on it, or if you prefer this article from wikipedia. This would be more productive than falling for Al Gore's scams!

Toxic yes, however nobody can find the radioactive waste. That is an assumption of pollution controls as a simple black box from a paper in the 1970s among other flaws.

Thorium and uranium aren't radioactive?

ORNL report (ORNL = government funded nuclear research lab)

Trace quantities of uranium in coal range from less than 1 part per million (ppm) in some samples to around 10 ppm in others. Generally, the amount of thorium contained in coal is about 2.5 times greater than the amount of uranium. 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.

The concentration of fissionable uranium-235 (the current fuel for nuclear power plants) has been established to be 0.71% of uranium content.

Total U.S. releases in 1982 (from 154 typical plants) amounted to 801 tons of uranium (containing 11,371 pounds of uranium-235) and 1971 tons of thorium.

Feel free to argue specific numbers, but here are the facts:
1. Coal contains thorium and uranium
2. Burning coal releases coal ash into the air
3. Coal ash contains (surprise!) thorium and uranium
4. Thorium and uranium are radioactive
5. Therefore, burning coal releases radioactive waste into the environment.

We've had more than thirty years to try to find the stuff. So much for "definitely".

We found it in 1978. And 1982. And 1984. And in the 1990s. Yes, coal definitely contains thorium and uranium.

We've had more than thirty years to find radioactive elements in coal, and every time we look, we find them!

A lot of these studies are old mostly because there's no real reason to do them again. Coal emits both toxic and radioactive waste into the environment. We know this. We (mostly) don't care.

As I keep saying in different ways, people die from the use of coal by various real events so we don't have to make new ones up. This bullshit was just a "why worry about nuclear waste, coal is nuclear waste too" stunt by a PR firm that should have known better (it didn't help the nuclear lobby either) and unfortunately it stuck in people's heads

PR stunt or not, it is correct.

Here's some more reading:
"Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste" from Scientific American.

I can find tons of screaming eco-freak sites about coal radioactivity, but I've tried to stick to rational, scientific sources.

Coal ash is (very slightly) radioactive due to it containing trace amounts of thorium and uranium. It's not actually a big deal overall, unless you happen to live near a coal plant - which some people do. Oops. Sucks to be those people!

The irony is that a Coal Plant is actually MORE radioactive than a Nuclear Plant!!

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

Hint: It in the ashes and it affect 1 mile around it. Don't eat stuff from your garden!

Um, actually the most recent research shows that starvation before chemo therapy DOES in fact help with recovery, it's not new-agey at all =) It helpded my former VP significantly with her ability to work a couple days after receiving her chemo treatments.

There was a good overview in SciAm 2 years ago: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secrets-of-supervolca

Maybe not for much longer

Here is a video on how they work http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7425960.stm
for text try http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=getting-a-handle-on-space

This was in a recent Scientific American. There aren't easy solutions to climate change.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=geoengineering-how-to-cool-earth

We'll see how bright they are then...

I know that I am piggybacking but I thought that the educational world had moved on from the terms bright, gifted and related words.

A good read, if nothing else.

This guy seems to disagree with the greatness of reprocessing. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=rethinking-nuclear-fuel-recycling

I read in *2004* a Scientific American article about "virtual snow therapy" for burn victims developed by Univ. of Washington. Sorry I can't find the full article online but here's SciAm website's preview: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=virtual-reality-therapy (fee required for registration)

Nuclear is not especially unsafe.

Fun Fact: You get more radiation from coal plants in the form of heavy metals found in coal fly ash than you get from a nuclear power plant. Super Fly

With second cycle fuel processing plants there is very little waste left over from the nuclear process.

People point to Three Mile Island as a big scary reason to avoid nuclear, but the fact of the matter is while the plant was tripped at TMI there was no radiological leakage. The safety measure in place made sure that there was no breach of containment. And that was a plant designed over 30 years ago, there has been much learned since then.

Sure Chernobyl sucked, but that was a plant poorly designed and operated.

The burning graphite moderator increased the emission of radioactive particles. The radioactivity was not contained by any kind of containment vessel (unlike in Western plants, Soviet reactors often did not have them[9]) Soviet Piece of Junk

Yeah... Modern, and even then western power plants don't have COMBUSTIBLE material in the CORE.

I was thinking exactly the same thing - I'm still sceptical, certainly, but the Scientific American story that's linked from the one above does say that "it will process 1,500 tons of garbage a day, sending 60 megawatts of electricity to the power grid (after using some to power itself).". They're definitely trying to claim that they've found a way to use random waste as a fuel source, which would be a breakthrough if true.

Using random waste as fuel source has been done already. Using random waste as a clean fuel source, now that's really a breakthrough. And if this process works the way I think it does, it should be pretty clean, no matter what you throw in.

Except for CO2 probably, which is kinda hard to prevent, and rather a big issue lately. I hope they can capture it in something safe. And if they can't, well, CO2 is still quite a lot better than dioxins.

I was thinking exactly the same thing - I'm still sceptical, certainly, but the Scientific American story that's linked from the one above does say that "it will process 1,500 tons of garbage a day, sending 60 megawatts of electricity to the power grid (after using some to power itself).". They're definitely trying to claim that they've found a way to use random waste as a fuel source, which would be a breakthrough if true.

What worries me is a quick Google of the company. One of the top links is this interview with the company president. The fact that he keeps talking about "megawatts of energy per hour" puts my cynicism into overdrive - sure, it's not entirely damning; maybe the engineers are sitting hanging their heads at how the president doesn't understand what they're doing, but when the likelihood of their claims actually being what they say they are is this low, that really isn't who they need at the helm.

Psychology studies of the effects of playing video games have found emotional responses and physical reactions associated with reinforced violent and anti-social attitudes. It is not clear, however, whether these markers are associated with increases in one's preferences for anti-social behaviors or whether virtual behaviors act to partially sate one's desire for actual antisocial behaviors. Violent or criminal behaviors in the virtual world and in the physical world could plausibly be either complements or substitutes. A finding of one versus the other would have diametrically opposing policy implications. I study the incidence of criminal activity as related to a proxy for increased gaming, the number of game stores, from a panel of US counties from 1994 to 2004. With fixed county and year effects, I can examine if changes relative increases in gaming in an area are associated with relative increases or decreases in criminal activity. For six of eight categories of crime, more game stores are associated with significant declines in crime rates. Proxies for other leisure activities, sports and movie viewing, do not have a similar effect. For confirmation, I also find that mortality rates, especially mortality rates stemming from injuries, also are negatively related to the number of game stores.

Video Games, Crime and Violence by Michael R. Ward, University of Texas at Arlington - Department of Economics

There is no epidemic of youth violence in America.

The whole concept is a lie manufactured, distributed and perpetuated by the media. Kids are not killing each other more frequently than they used to. In fact, it turns out the opposite is true.

CAUTION: Childen at Play - The Truth About Violent Youth and Video Games

Overall results of the study found that although violent video games appear to increase people's aggressive thoughts (which it would not be surprising that people are still thinking about what they were just playing), violent games do not appear to increase aggressive behavior.

This as true for both correlational and experimental studies. Also it was found that studies that employed less standardized measures of aggression produced higher effects than better standardized measures of aggression. In other words, better measures of aggression are associated with lower effects.

Researcher Finds Scant Evidence Linking Violent Games With Aggressive Behavior

"It's a natural behavior and it's surprising that the idea that children and adolescents learn aggression from the media is still relevant," says Richard Tremblay, a professor of pediatrics, psychiatry and psychology at the University of Montreal, who has spent more than two decades tracking 35,000 Canadian children (from age five months through their 20s) in search of the roots of physical aggression. "Clearly youth were violent before television appeared."

Taming Baby Rage: Why Are Some Kids So Angry?

The BBFC has accepted there is no proven link between anti-social behaviour and violent videogames - but said more research is required to conclusively rule any connection out.

No evidence connecting games and violence, says BBFC News

Everyone might want to stay away from the paper shredder with these - It will either destroy the blades or make some pretty nasty, toxic dust.

Might do both. :)

Those Hindus may not be far off:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=big-bang-or-big-bounce

If you want to actually do some good and contribute something constructive, I'd suggest The Open Prosthesis Project. There's an excellent write up on the project in both the treeware and on-line editions of Scientific American.

Cheers,
Dave

According to Scientific American, the plan is to power the cars with "wind turbines and other renewable sources (when possible)". Take it as you will.

Let's all date our cousins everyone, then we can look the same for generations to come!

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=when-incest-is-best-kissi

Speaking as someone who has years of experience dealing with "the sex offender issue," I can tell you that this law (like many others proposed at the state level) will be counterproductive. Some states and the Federal Government currently have the ability to keep dangerous individuals locked up indefinitely. It's called civil commitment.

Recently, in Missouri, several state senators have begun speaking up about more intelligent legislation regarding sex offenders. The unintended consequence of having harsher laws is that they further remove an individual from society. It is that removal and isolation that prompts them to delve deeper into deviancy.

We need laws that allow for tracking, but that do not create further punishment where no more criminal acts are involved. Also, about 4-5% of "sex offenders" are the really heinous ones we hear about on the news. The other 95% are unlikely to commit another sex crime.

For more accurate information, see the article "Misunderstood Crimes" by Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld, featured in Scientific American Mind, April/May 2008, page 78-9.

But current quantum theory has no way of stopping the falling matter. If space is smooth there is nothing to keep the density from growing beyond any limit.
OTOH, if space is quantized there is a way of handling that. There's a recent article in SciAm applying it to the whole universe - the same thing would limit the density in a black hole.

One of the competing hypotheses for a Theory of Everything is quantum loop gravity. It postulates that space is not continuous but discrete, composed of planck-scale atoms. In a recent Scientific American article, (it might be http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=big-bang-or-big-bounce but I'm having trouble getting the site to respond) one of the curious effects of atomic space is that light of different wavelengths travels through space at different speeds. So it is conceivable that, if this model happens to be correct, that everything far enough away to be affected by atomic space would appear to be red-shifted, thus appear to be moving away from us at the same speed in all directions, simply because red light traveled in a more straight path than the blue light. This would be akin to light refracting off of water molecules in the air causing the sky to be blue (blue light is scattered) whereas the red colors of longer wavelength ignore the water and come straight at us.

Actually, if it's radiation you're concerned about, being next to a dirty-ass coal plant would be a problem, because coal is slightly radioactive, and after ignition, some of that radioactive dust is emitted. see http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

There was an excellent article in a recent issue of Scientific American that discussed updated theories of planet formation based on not only our solar system, but observations of other systems as well.

The short version, IIRC goes something like this:

* Star forms. The remaining disk around the star consists mainly of grains of dust, which slowly clump together under their own gravity.

* As clumps get bigger, they create a gravitational "wake" of particulates in the vicinity of their orbit. The wake closer to the star orbits faster and therefore its mass provides a "forward pull" on the object, whereas the part of the wake farther out orbits more slowly and provides a "rearward pull" on the object. The disk gets bigger as you go out (geometry!) and therefore there is more material in the outer half of the "wake," so the "rearward pull" is stronger than the foreward pull. This slows the object slightly and causes it to spiral inward towards the star.

* At a certain distance from the star (the "snow line") water ice converts to water vapor and the "rearward pull" on our orbiting object goes away. (I'm still not clear on why this is the case, BTW.) So inward-spiraling objects tend to stop at the snow line, and this is where a gas giant planet is most likely to form.

* Jupiter's wake at the snow line leads to the formation of Saturn as Jupiter's large mass starts throwing nearby things into a higher orbit.

* "Ice giants" like Neptune and Uranus can't grow as big as Jupiter because their local environment is depleted as they formed later than Jupiter & Saturn and mostly benefitted from more throw-offs by Saturn.

So to see an 8-Jupiter-mass gas giant orbiting 330AU from a sunlike star seems extremely unusual and it ought to imply that it was ejected into a higher orbit by something else because there's no reason for it to form there.

Again, IANAastrophysicist or planetary scientist, but I really get off on this stuff. ;)

Even storing 1 PB isn't easy - which is why it's connected to the internet: for distributed storage.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-lhc-may-change-internet

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-lhc-may-change-internet The LHC produces 15 Petabytes of data each year, analyzed at hundreds of centres around the world. Are you going to suggest (as some genius did below) that they copy the data to 15,000 x 1Tb drives, and then fedex it around the world?

Nonsense

brain researchers using imaging technology have shown that, like the body's muscles, most are continually active over a 24-hour period.

It's a tired myth used by peddlars of supernatural crap.

From Star it appears that the theoretical minimum is about 75 times the mass of Jupiter, and the smallest observed stars were about 87 times the mass of Jupiter. I think we're safe.

Also, this article claims that Jupiter's formation wasn't in line with proper star formation. Stars form from coalescing gas and little else. Jupiter required a core of denser planetoids and rock to acquire enough gravity to attract its gaseous shell. There simply wasn't enough matter left over from the formation of the Sun to form another star.

Ding ding ding! Give Qzukk a medal for bringing that up. The latest Scientific American Mind edition has an article about the benefits of tinkering with your hands, and the long term costs of not doing so, which may include clinical-grade depression.

The article's gated, but the summary gives most of the important stuff. Basically, by having so much stuff automated, we miss out on chances to use our bodies (especially hands) and see the progress that results. This cycle that we're missing out on, is what our human psychology was adapted for in the ancestral environment, so when you don't get it somehow today, your body can become, in a sense, convinced it's useless and start to shut down.

Upon reading that article in a bookstore, it occurred to me that this is exactly where video games get their appeal: they get you to use your hands to work toward something, and give you constant feedback indicating that you're making progress. (World of Warcraft, anyone?) But then, they don't do a lot to stave off depression, do they? Hm.

How long before the fabled Northwest Passage is a reality?

From what I read the other day, it is open now...

The February Scientific American had an article that treated prediction markets with skepticism. Some of the evidence that people have been quoting in favor of prediction markets is apparently bogus, and nobody has the faintest clue how they really work.

Well the basic idea behind the Iowa Electronic Markets is that people, anyone, can bet money (a limited amount) on who they think will win an election. Basically, polls ask people who they want to vote for, but arguably you'd have a better idea of the outcome of an election if you ask people not who they want to vote for but who they think will win. It's called the wisdom of crowds. Show a certain amount of people a jar full of pickles and they'll tell you about how many pickles are in, the more people you ask the more precise the results get (if I'm not mistaken under ideal conditions with a lack of a bias in their judgment 100 times more people should get it 10 times more precisely, that's like coherent averaging).

That's the idea behind the IEM. With a twist, instead of just asking people who they think is gonna win, they make them bet on it, as becoming more interested in it makes them be more serious about it. And in case you're wondering, Obama is so winning!

They say prediction is difficult, especially about the future. Yahoo has a "political dashboard" (flash app) that tries various things to predict the outcome of the presidential race. One technique they use is prediction markets, which are sort of similar to this thing about the wikipedia edits: instead of asking people their opinions, you watch their actions. In the yahoo dashboard app, you can click to switch between a map based on opinion polls and one based on prediction markets. One interesting thing is that the polls show Ohio leaning to McCain, but the prediction markets show it going to Obama. One thing that's really tough about predicting this election is that historically, racist white people have often lied to pollsters about their race-related opinions. Even though Obama is ahead in the polls, I'm kind of expecting that McCain will win, simply because the polls are likely to have this systematic error in them. OTOH, some people say that this racism-hiding effect in polls is no longer as strong as it used to be. The February Scientific American had an article that treated prediction markets with skepticism. Some of the evidence that people have been quoting in favor of prediction markets is apparently bogus, and nobody has the faintest clue how they really work.

If mankind has evolved from apes, how come in the 5,000 years of recorded history

There are more than 5000 years of recorded history. History recorded dinosaurs 65 million years ago. As I told the reply above yours, the Clovis culture in North America is dated as around 13,000 years ago however the archaeological site Monte Verde on the southern tip of Chile is dated 1000 years before Clovis. Cro-Magna paintings in southwestern France are dated as being 20,000 to 10,000 years ago. Aztecs invented the calendar around 4236 B.C thus putting it as 6000 years ago.

If evolution is an on-going process, why are there not monkeys constantly evolving into hominids?

Why should primates only evolve into homos? Why can't they evolve into other species? Look at a tree of life, evolution loves diversity.

Shouldn't there be a continuum of species?

There could be one but a record may not be possible. A dead body left in the Florida Everglades won't last very long, not even the bones even if it's human. Guess what? They embalm people when they die to preserve the body. Even then though those bodies may not last thousands of years.

To me, this is just like the global warming scam

Here we go again. Another person who thinks they are more qualified than the thousands of climatologists who have concluded Global Warming is real. What makes you more qualified than all of them? Where did you get your PhD in a climatology field, and what field is it? And did you do any post-doc work?

Antartic ice shelf is about the same size as it was 100 years ago

Where's your proof? Even if the Antartic ice is the same size, and Larson B didn't break oh but it did off, that does not mean ice isn't melting elsewhere. I see your proof, if you provide any, with that from qalified scientists. For instance the Artic ice is near record lows. The glacier on Mount Kilimanjaro, which provides fresh water to millions of people in Africa, have almost disappeared. As have glaciers in the Andes of South America, which also provides millions with fresh water. Then there are the glaciers in Greenland. If there isn't warming how are all these glaciers melting faster than ever?

And when you read how Mann of the famous "hockey stick" chart cherry-picked and manipulated his data, and then refused to release the data for a number of years - well, that doesn't sound like science to me.

Where's your proof Mann cherry-picked his data? In this SciAm article Mann refutes some of his critics. For instance critics charge the hockey stick chart does not graph the Little Ice Age, yet that was a local not a global phenomenon and his chart was global not local. Only those who deny Global Warming continue to harp on stuff like this.

The Earth has actually cooled over the last 4-5 years

Citation.

To people like you there must be a conspiracy, however like those who deny conspiracies about JFK's assassination and 911 say, if there were a conspiracy how come someone hasn't come out and disclosed the facts? Why aren't the street lined with those assassinated because they tried to warn people?

Why should my children be denied this great history and literature in favour of "I Have Two Mommies"?

Why should my children, though I don't have any, be denied the great history in the "Analects of Confucius

Some guy at Scientific American seems to think it is a bad idea. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=rethinking-nuclear-fuel-recycling

I read in Scientific American that a researcher bought 100 hard drives off eBay. After he checked them for data, he found that one of them had been in a supermarket's MAIN COMPUTER BANK and had recorded THOUSANDS of credit card numbers. Another had been in an ATM and had recorded MILLIONS of credit/debit card numbers and PIN's. How stupid are these companies?

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=new-bytes-of-the-week-lhc-gets-its-own-rap-song

there is some C14 but it's contribution is dwarfed by radon.

Keep guessing, you're getting there. Radon, as a byproduct of Uranium decay is there, but it's the Uranium and Thorium in the fly ash that's the "horror show". The fly ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste. Still,

In most areas, the ash contains less uranium than some common rocks. In Tennessee's Chattanooga shale, for example, there is more uranium in phosphate rock.

and

...McBride and his co-authors emphasize that other products of coal power, like emissions of acid rain-producing sulfur dioxide and smog-forming nitrous oxide, pose greater health risks than radiation.

Large Study Finds No Link between Marijuana and Lung Cancer

Billions of years ago Venus's orbit was about where Earth's is now. At least one theory says it was struck by an object roughly the mass of Mars which reversed its rotation, crashed one moon and drove off the other, and presumably altered its surface composition considerably. Yes, Venus is a good candidate for a prior genesis of life. Good luck finding it though.

And no one wants a real-world Zerg rush on the nose.

Zerg detection, possibly another aspect of The Hidden Power of Scent??

Best to keep an authorized-beast-list at the door. Clothing won't help when a scent is just more than a shirt can contain.

I said per kilowatt-hour produced. Geesh... did you even pay attention to what I had to say?

Chernobyl was awful, and I don't dispute that. I also noted it was a major exception to the general rule. The one thing that makes Chernobyl so incredibly awful is due to the fact that all of the material is concentrated in one place. The reason I hesitate about how damaging it was in comparison to coal is due to the fact that Chernobyl is not only a major facility, but that it is still supplying electricity to the Grid in Eastern Europe.

It is likely that Chernobyl would beat out a coal plant using sources particularly high in radioactive elements in terms of kilowatt-hours of energy produced, but I don't think it would be several orders of magnitude higher. Keep in mind that the coal plants spew this "waste" willy-nilly all over the entire area where they are located, and over the course of decades and not all at once like the Chernobyl disaster did. I also lack all of the specific numbers to do a strict comparison.

That facility is also an example of awful engineering that simply wouldn't happen in the regulatory environment of western governments, but that is a separate issue.

As far as citations or evidence, I could give dozens here. Here are a couple that perhaps you ought to read if you don't want to believe little old me:

• http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
• http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

At least so far as some "common sense" stuff, keep in mind that coal comes from underground sources and that often that coal is mixed with a whole bunch of other elements, including nearly every naturally occurring radioactive element on the Earth. Trace amounts of Uranium alone is sufficient to spread huge amounts of low-level radiation over nearly all of the soot fall-out that comes from the burning of coal... and that goes right up the chimney.

BTW, as far as the nuclear industry being aware of this... it has been "common knowledge" for decades. They have used this argument, but very few people are really paying attention. Certainly not the "greens" that get into an uproar over the construction of nuclear power plants. This isn't in the major news media outlets because it isn't really even news. There isn't anything "new" about this sort of information, even if it may be a revelation to you.

String Theory is dead, dead, dead...

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-self-organizing-quantum-universe

Captcha = string
http://images.slashdot.org/hc/03/c392ccbffa96.jpg

You could have one universe exploring a phase space of possible states with time, in which case this research is still relevant. (SciAm)