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As late as last May, the major news services were all abuzz about supercavitation technology and the Kursk — everything pointed in the direction of Shkval, Russia's supercavitation torpedo that's been in development for the past couple decades and which is supposed to go in excess of hundreds of miles per hour under water inside an envelope of gas it generates.

Why haven't we heard anything more since? Even if it turns out not to be true, it's nevertheless intriguing and worthy of as much speculation as the rest of what we've been hearing (in the absence of any real news to report these past months on the subject). When they bring the Kursk back up, it's bound to be missing large chunks where classified hardware was stripped out in the intervening months.

If the media fail to titilate us with wild speculation about sexy technology, then they're not the media we've come to know and love. I for one am still waiting on baited breath.

Your clarification is only partially correct. Under some very limited conditions, superluminal (faster-than-light) speeds are possible. I remember reading about this in The Dancing Wu Li Masters (very good overview of relativity for the non-physics types out there). A quick search for "superluminal" in your favorite search engine will generate links such as this Scientific American article about the very limited conditions necessary for superluminal speeds.

I wish to point out that a smart ranking technique based on hyperlinks, similar to that used by Google, but more complex, has been proposed years ago by the IBM's "Clever" Project.

You can find a description on Hypersearching the Web, Scientific American 6/99.

The article cites also Google, with the differences in respect to Clever.

In particular, while Google limits hyperlink ranking to links pointing _to_ a page, Clever identifies two scores, "authority" and "hub" : "...a respected authority is a page that is referred to by many good hubs; a useful hub is a location that points to many valuable authorities".
Values are calculated in an iterative way, depending also on the query.

It's an interesting field of research, and Google demonstrates that it is also fruitful.

one key point they make is how the buildings in the financial district are possible because bedrock is relatively (30-80') near the surface.

read the whole article here:

http://www.sciam.com/2001/0901issue/0901scitravel. html

Scientific American devoted most of the September issue to nanotechnology. Including specific topics such as medicine, computer circuitry, and nano-scale machines (a.k.a., nanobots)

http://www.sciam.com/nanotech

Scientific American devoted most of the September issue to nanotechnology. Including specific topics such as medicine, computer circuitry, and nano-scale machines (a.k.a., nanobots)

http://www.sciam.com/nanotech

Scientific American devoted most of the September issue to nanotechnology. Including specific topics such as medicine, computer circuitry, and nano-scale machines (a.k.a., nanobots)

http://www.sciam.com/nanotech

Scientific American devoted most of the September issue to nanotechnology. Including specific topics such as medicine, computer circuitry, and nano-scale machines (a.k.a., nanobots)

http://www.sciam.com/nanotech

Scientific American devoted most of the September issue to nanotechnology. Including specific topics such as medicine, computer circuitry, and nano-scale machines (a.k.a., nanobots)

http://www.sciam.com/nanotech

Scientific American devoted most of the September issue to nanotechnology. Including specific topics such as medicine, computer circuitry, and nano-scale machines (a.k.a., nanobots)

http://www.sciam.com/nanotech

They also posited that the Sprites may be weak enough that they could have caused life to form. Other theorists had thought that lightning might have caused life but the power from regular lightning is too strong; however, this new form of lightning is weak enough that it might do the trick according to the researchers.

The blue jets that emanate from clouds and rise up into the upper atmosphere are supposed to be extremely powerful and are considered a danger to stratospheric aircraft, rockets and the space shuttle.

All in all it seems to be very strange phenomena. Add ball lightning to the mystery.

A Scientic American link on Sprites and Elves.

Actually, here's a story on how we narrowly averted an apocalypse, thanks to the wonders of the laws of physics.

Something these critters body parts may help with is: "One of the problems optical computers have faced is a lack of accuracy; for instance, these devices have practical limits of eight to 11 bits of accuracy in basic operations. "

But this still won't give us routing solutions for optical packets through multiplexors!

-AD

Well, here is ONE possible place.
And here is another Sci-Am article about space seeding.
And of course, there is also a meteorite, like martian-meteorite with life on it, as a vessel.
Or an alien race which is humanoid could have developed, then seeded the entire galaxy with humanoids who can all breed with each other, have the same number of fingers, speak vocally, have male and female and a variety of forehead structures. They also could have put a puzzle in the DNA of certian life on certian worlds. This would then make a hologram appear to talk to the assembled life forms about how cool they are and how nice it is that space travel was acheived by their offspring.

Well, here is ONE possible place.
And here is another Sci-Am article about space seeding.
And of course, there is also a meteorite, like martian-meteorite with life on it, as a vessel.
Or an alien race which is humanoid could have developed, then seeded the entire galaxy with humanoids who can all breed with each other, have the same number of fingers, speak vocally, have male and female and a variety of forehead structures. They also could have put a puzzle in the DNA of certian life on certian worlds. This would then make a hologram appear to talk to the assembled life forms about how cool they are and how nice it is that space travel was acheived by their offspring.

Read it in last month's print version; here it is online:

http://www.sciam.com/2001/0801issue/0801scicit4.ht ml

You may find an expanded copy of my letter to the editors here.

Whitesides is a chemist and while he has made huge contributions to that field, particularly with his nano-imprint lithography, for which he won a Foresight Prize several years ago, he is not, unfortunately, someone who understands molecular nanotechnology. For that you have to read Drexler's take from the same issue which is here.

Readers of scientific literature must do "reputation" analysis. Would you trust a life-time COBOL programmer to comment on whether or not your JAVA code was well written or crap? I think not. One should judge the Whitesides article from the same perspective.

You may find an expanded copy of my letter to the editors here.

Whitesides is a chemist and while he has made huge contributions to that field, particularly with his nano-imprint lithography, for which he won a Foresight Prize several years ago, he is not, unfortunately, someone who understands molecular nanotechnology. For that you have to read Drexler's take from the same issue which is here.

Readers of scientific literature must do "reputation" analysis. Would you trust a life-time COBOL programmer to comment on whether or not your JAVA code was well written or crap? I think not. One should judge the Whitesides article from the same perspective.

The Scientific American article you're thinking of is from January 2001, "The Mystery of Damascus Blades". The article was by John D. Verhoeven, the same guy as in the Chicago Tribune article. This is rehashing old news.

If you want to cite related but even older news you could peruse the Slashdot article concerning this Wired article about the Dragonslayer project.

had an excellent article about Verhoeven and Pendray in the Jan 2001 issue, but I can't find a good link on their website

To quote: "When you have a patent on a particular gene, it's made up of a series of nucleotide sequences called exons that code for a particular protein. Let's say you have six blocks of exons that came together to express a particular protein. Under a different condition in that cell line, maybe all six of the exons don't function. So now there are maybe four blocks of exons that come together to express a totally different protein. That new set of exon blocks would be a separate patentable invention, and the people who had the patent to the first six would not gain exclusive rights to the protein expressed by the four new blocks of exons."

Derek

Actually, patents are only granted on genes as chemical compounds - not on anything as they exist in nature.

If a drug company decodes a gene to the point that they can come up with a nifty test to detect a genetic disorder, it's patentable.

And apparently the USPTO is raising the bar for getting genetic patents approved as well. (See the new criterion for "utility").

http://www.sciam.com/2000/0300issue/0300zubrin.htm l

Try http://innovations.copper.org/1998april/cable_evol ution.htm. Or search Google for "underwater cable".

In the James Burke series, "The Day The Universe Changed", one episode includes a part on how the ship which was first used to lay trans-Atlantic cable ended up doing that (hint: it wasn't built for that). Of course, you could also go here: http://www.oldcablehouse.com/cablestations/history .html. BTW, you can read James Burke "Connections" pieces at Scientific American (http://www.sciam.com or in the magazine each month.

woof.

Quit all the whining about moderation! Don't like how it works? Tough. I don't like your variable declarations, but I'm not pissing about them, am I? Oh wait, I just did.

Raising ships with ping-pong balls

Solar sails for spacecraft

Laser-powered spacecraft

Supersonic speeds underwater

Fake breastesses

Sometimes it feels so good to be a human being :)

"Has sensational journalism gone too far? Find out at eleven!" - John Stewart

The way I see it is this: Passport is trying to be "the" authentication server of the future of computing, and this is dangerous.

Look at the current (*nix) system. For clients (ie. users and their programs) to get access to devices, or make use of the services provided by another user's programs, they have to be authenticated somehow (I'm not incredibly knowledgeable on authentication/security) using the centrally located passwd/shadow file in /etc.

Now... fast forward to the future (== zoom out to the internet). Personal computers will be a sort of "agent" for their owner (see the article "The Semantic Web" in the May 2001 issue of Scientific American), along with portable devices. These will need an authentication server that spans the entire network, seeing as "The Network is the Computer."

There is where the danger lies. Microsoft is the only commercial entity in position to controll this authentication server--using passport. And the only other entity in existance that has a chance to create this server is the open source community. There is proof of that in the very existance of the internet itself.

If Microsoft can get a large number of open source developers (or just influencial entities such as Ximian) using .NET, the likelyhood of all those open source developers using Passport/Hailstorm is high. This is because of our hatred for "re-creating the wheel," or just our love for software re-use. This is very bad, because Microsoft will then have taken all the competing developers away from any competition that might have otherwise come to be.

I believe .NET is good, and will enable the next generation of networked computing. I also believe that Microsoft knows this, and intends to use its new found "openness" to attract it's only competition (open source developers) to work on .NET, and thereby prevent these same developers from creating a free and open alternative that will allow people to use computers as they see fit.

I urge Ximian, if not some other group, to begin creating the alternative to Passport/Haistorm.

Just my 2 cents...

The IBM Clever Project looked pretty cool, but I do not know if anyone ever licensed the technology from IBM.

Scientific American had a write-up of the Clever project, titled Hypersearching the Web

The IBM Clever Project looked pretty cool, but I do not know if anyone ever licensed the technology from IBM.

Scientific American had a write-up of the Clever project, titled Hypersearching the Web

Anyway, none of the ideas used by Google and now Teoma are really new -- academics have been doing this stuff for a while now.

It's an interesting thought, but I think you're missing the point of supercavitation. Supercavitation is only truly effective (and truly possible) with vessels that are completely submerged in water (eg. submarines, torpedoes and the like). It works by creating a renewable pocket of air around the vessel, so that very little of the liquid touches the surface of the vessel. This reduces the vessel's viscous drag (bearing in mind that the resistance of water is somewhere in the order of 1400 times that of air) and allows it to travel much faster. This isn't the sort of thing that can't be done with a partly submerged vessel, as is the case here.

If you're interested in learning more about the specifics of supercavitation, then is an article on the Scientific American website and two articles on Slashdot (here and here). It should be interesting to see what the possible future applications of this technology would be. As always any constructive criticism is welcome.

Self Bias Resistor

Of course that doesn't take into account the geographical separation of the human species and that the chromatic dispersion increases dramatically over even short distances. All 6.5B of us would have to live within a few kilometers of each other. Too crowded for my taste. More can be found at SciAm and at a previous Slashdot story

A number of storage manufacturers have been working on holographic storage along with DARPA and many universities. DARPA has the the Holographic Data Storage System (HDSS) consortium and the PhotoRefractive Information Storage Materials (PRISM) consortium, and IBM, Rockwell and another companies have been working on this. Here is a Scientific American blurb about it:

http://sciam.com/2000/0500issue/0500toigbox5.html

Also here is IBM's page about it:

http://www.almaden.ibm.com/st/projects/holography/

bbh

A more technically detailed article can be found at Scientific American. This is not really new news.

If we hit the limits of current technology in 5 years, and the new stuff is 10 years away, we'll just have drives getting bulkier for 5 years. No big deal.

A more technically detailed article can be found at Scientific American. This is not really new news.

If we hit the limits of current technology in 5 years, and the new stuff is 10 years away, we'll just have drives getting bulkier for 5 years. No big deal.

Galaxies collide all the time. It's not a real destructive process. Look at the distance between stars. A "collision" of galaxies is like the collision of dust particles in a wind. There are very few stars that actually come into contact with each other, it simply increases the mass of the galaxy as a whole. We add a lot more stars to the galaxy and that's pretty much it.

Never mind the fact that, unless we start to migrate to other star systems in the next few hundred years, there's little chance that any of our descendants will be around to see it.

We're at a very delicate time in the history of our race. If we don't begin to migrate to other planets and other star systems soon, we'll be doomed. Overpopulation, biological warfare, mutating viri. All these things can lead to the destruction of all life on this planet. Then there are the less likely scenarios: Asteroid collisions, comet collisions. These too will happen, it's just a matter of when.

But the actual collision of the galaxies, as I see it, is just another opportunity for us to have more planets to colonize.

It also raises the possibility of us finding other life out there.

Scientific American ran a great article here about how the chances are, we're the most advanced species in our galaxy and why. It makes a great deal of sense. A collision with Andromeda could change that, and that I find interesting. Especially given the time frame. If we're to migrate through the galaxy, we could be in very good shape if Andromeda itself is already populated.

But I'm just wandering off into all kinds of stuff completely unrelated. Sorry... I love this stuff, though.

I am a scientist, and people mistake the issues here constantly. The problem is not that the earth is warming. The problem is that we have too many people; we are dangerously close to the carrying capacity of the Earth, and any change in the temperature, warmer or colder, could be disasterous.

It is true that the earth goes through natural cycles. But just because they are natural, doesn't mean you shouldn't worry about them. This is something to be terribly, terribly worried about; it's far more scary than the prospect of, say, giant meteorite impacts. There is evidence that at points in the past, the entire planet was covered in ice. Think our civilization could survive that?

The earth's climate is a delicate system, and we don't know what controls it. If you don't know how your life-support system works, it's probably a bad idea to start messing with it. Right now, we are dumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. We don't know what it will do in the long term. This is a dumb thing to do.

It is recognized by most of the scientific community that humans are accelerating the trend of global warming. Granted, the Earth's temperature does fluctuate on it's own, but the point of the matter is that we are actually adding to the trends. Ever spin a bottle? Sometimes if you spin it a little, it will wobble about and maintain it's upright orientation. If you spin it a bit too hard though, the bottle might lose control and fall down. The way I see it is that we are adding to the natural fluctuations of the Earth - and that perhaps we may be instigating a dramatic climate change that would not happen in the natural cycle of things.

Reversing human impact on the environment is something we need to start taking seriously. Never in the history of man (that I know of anyways) have we possesed technology that could alter the nature of our planet to such a degree. To argue that we shouldn't take this seriously because other countries haven't is a very naive way of looking at things. Granted, the Kyoto Treaty is not really a solution, but it is a beginning, and by refusing to sign it we are giving all the rest of the countries incentive to follow in our footsteps - after all, if it isn't good enough for the US, then why should it be good enough for the rest of the world?

Global Warming must be approached scientifically, not by opinion and government policy that is rooted in economic development.

Some links:

• Recent Temperature Measurements
• Global Warming and Health

It is recognized by most of the scientific community that humans are accelerating the trend of global warming. Granted, the Earth's temperature does fluctuate on it's own, but the point of the matter is that we are actually adding to the trends. Ever spin a bottle? Sometimes if you spin it a little, it will wobble about and maintain it's upright orientation. If you spin it a bit too hard though, the bottle might lose control and fall down. The way I see it is that we are adding to the natural fluctuations of the Earth - and that perhaps we may be instigating a dramatic climate change that would not happen in the natural cycle of things.

Reversing human impact on the environment is something we need to start taking seriously. Never in the history of man (that I know of anyways) have we possesed technology that could alter the nature of our planet to such a degree. To argue that we shouldn't take this seriously because other countries haven't is a very naive way of looking at things. Granted, the Kyoto Treaty is not really a solution, but it is a beginning, and by refusing to sign it we are giving all the rest of the countries incentive to follow in our footsteps - after all, if it isn't good enough for the US, then why should it be good enough for the rest of the world?

Global Warming must be approached scientifically, not by opinion and government policy that is rooted in economic development.

Some links:

• Recent Temperature Measurements
• Global Warming and Health

Can you give me some examples of Japanese inventions?

OTOH, this Scientific American article says that he left Japan for UC Santa Barbara because he considers the Japanese industrial R&D system as "communist". "Here I can start a venture company-in five or 10 years, if I could invent a new device. I want to achieve the American dream."

Sufficient testing means that accountable testing by a responsible third party. If you look around, there actually are some well-reasoned articles, and opinions out there describing the fact that the studies done by the biotech firms on their own product, not publicly available or accountable, are not spectacularly reliable.

Also, please note that the third link opens with an example of how traditional breeding *have*, in at least one case, produced dangerous alergens. They should probably be tested too. This is food, and it is commercially produced by giant corporations and distributed widely. An accountability structure needs to be developed beyond what exists today, because companies have no financial motive to make things safe, if they can make them cheap instead.

Sufficient testing means that accountable testing by a responsible third party. If you look around, there actually are some well-reasoned articles, and opinions out there describing the fact that the studies done by the biotech firms on their own product, not publicly available or accountable, are not spectacularly reliable.

Also, please note that the third link opens with an example of how traditional breeding *have*, in at least one case, produced dangerous alergens. They should probably be tested too. This is food, and it is commercially produced by giant corporations and distributed widely. An accountability structure needs to be developed beyond what exists today, because companies have no financial motive to make things safe, if they can make them cheap instead.

Sufficient testing means that accountable testing by a responsible third party. If you look around, there actually are some well-reasoned articles, and opinions out there describing the fact that the studies done by the biotech firms on their own product, not publicly available or accountable, are not spectacularly reliable.

Also, please note that the third link opens with an example of how traditional breeding *have*, in at least one case, produced dangerous alergens. They should probably be tested too. This is food, and it is commercially produced by giant corporations and distributed widely. An accountability structure needs to be developed beyond what exists today, because companies have no financial motive to make things safe, if they can make them cheap instead.

Mad Cow Disease has nothing to do with DNA. It is a prion which induces the disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Basicly, it is a self-replicating protien - very well the same sort of thing which may have started life in the first place. In evolutionary terms, it is a transient - it cannot adapt or even defend itself from other things that adapt to it - but, meanwhile, it can run rampage. It causes damage by burrowing into nervous tissue, actually leaving visible holes in the brain. "Feeding beef to beef for a few generations" doesn't create the prion - but, it enabled it to spread, as the cows that ate infected cow remains contracted it themselves. It has nothing to do with genetic engineering - however, the cure possibly could.

- Rei

This will, one hopes, lead to a call for manned exploration and eventual colonization of Mars (which would be cool), but why don't we set up shop on the moon first, where we know there is some water. Let's establish a secure (and less expensive) foothold, then turn our efforts toward Mars.

I wish.

First a bit of background. Commercial nuclear powerplants and naval propulsion plants operate on the principle of nuclear fission, the splitting of very heavy atoms to yield thermal energy, which heats steam, which turns an electric turbine or propeller shaft. What the_crowbar is talking about is nuclear fusion, the slamming together of very light atoms, i.e. heavy hydrogen or helium, in a chamber of superheated (in a star's case, superdense) plasma, thus heating steam and turning a turbine.

There was a major international experiment called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER. A russian-invented device called a tokamak, or magnetic bottle, can be used to contain plasma in a doughnut-shaped chamber. These are in use at several research labs and universities, including Harvard University and Lawrence Livermore Labs. The ITER was concieved as a prototype reactor to spearhead the way for commercially run nuclear fusion electricity plants, as proof-of-concept. The reactor was expected to cost over $4 TRILLION dollars. Therefore, the U.S. Congress, not wanting to any more money than necessary to get re-elected, withdrew U.S. support in 1998, and the project is expected to fail without U.S. funding. Go to Scientific American Magazine for more information on this project.

To me, even more interesting is whether or not man killed off Neandertals. These guys were all over Europe for a very long time, and they were smart enought to fight back. A war with them would have truly been "World War One".

It's possible, but it's only a possibility among others. The only thing we know about interactions between Cro Magnon (the modern man) and Neanderthal is that they actually existed. Other than that, the evidence is scarce, and it's difficult to figure out. As of now, we think that Neanderthal were simply displaced by Cro-Magnon (modern man) immigrants who pushed them further and further, until they got "cornered" in southern Spain and Gibraltar, then eventually disappeared altogether. Interbreeding was long thought impossible, but recent evidence indicates that it was. Maybe we (white men of European descent) all have Neanderthal genes. Maybe not. We don't know.

The first genocide in history probably happened quite some time later, between two kind of people belonging to modern mankind: mongoloids and blacks: it was the destruction of Australian-like Aborigines (i.e. Blacks) by Northeast-Asians (i.e. the ancestors of what you call "Native Americans"). We have some archeological evidence, and more surprisingly, we even have documents !

However, even in this case, it is very possible that actual fighting only took a minor role, and that the first inhabitants were simply driven out of their lands further and further, up to Terra del Fuego (the island that forms the other side of the Magellan Strait).

When the number of years exceeds four figures, the only thing we know is that we hardly know anything.

Thomas Miconi

Neutrino mass at google.

On a side note I think I first read about it in scientific american. As some of the dates will tell you this isn't a new development, so I don't know the issue. Maybe this was it. A neutrino, or at least 1 flavor, tips the scales at a svelt .1 eV. I should figure out how many eV's I wiegh in at....or maybe I should have some more ice cream.

Neutrino mass at google.

On a side note I think I first read about it in scientific american. As some of the dates will tell you this isn't a new development, so I don't know the issue. Maybe this was it. A neutrino, or at least 1 flavor, tips the scales at a svelt .1 eV. I should figure out how many eV's I wiegh in at....or maybe I should have some more ice cream.

It is clear that AI hasn't delivered on the promises made over thirty years ago. What happened? In a preview of his upcoming book, The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky examines the failures of AI research and lays out directions for future development in the field.

I used to be a Minsky fan (I still have a copy of his "Society of Mind") but not anymore. Marvin Minsky is one of the reasons that AI still has not delivered on its promises. He is part of the old symbolic school of AI. He was the guy who, with Seymour Papert, wrote a scathing criticism of the then embryonic field of neural networks, effectively strangling research in neural networks for the better part of a decade. I am sure Dr. Minsky has had occasions to change his views since but I don't think he has anything to offer that will lead us to HAL. The following is a quote from a Scientific American article on Arthur C. Clarke's HAL.

The novel of 2001 explains how the HAL 9000 series developed out of work by Marvin Minsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another researcher in the 1980s that showed how "neural networks could be generated automatically--self-replicated--in accordance with an arbitrary learning program. Artificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to the development of the human brain." Ironically, Minsky, one of the pioneers of neural networks who was also an adviser to the filmmakers (and who almost got killed by a falling wrench on the set), says today that this approach should be relegated to a minor role in modeling intelligence, while criticizing the amount of research devoted to it. "There's only been a tiny bit of work on commonsense reasoning, and I could almost characterize the rest as various sorts of get-rich-quick schemes, like genetic algorithms [and neural networks] where you're hoping you won't have to
figure anything out," Minsky says.

The part that literally floored me is "where you're hoping you won't have to figure anything out,". All along I'm thinking that intelligence is so complex and intractable that the most plausible solution to the problem of making a human-level AI is one where we let the AI emerge, grow and learn. IOW, what we really need to understand is the learning process, which encompasses perceptual, motivational and motor learning.

But here comes Marvin Minsky, a luminary in the AI community, insisting that figuring everything out is precisely what needs to be done. Haysoos Martinez! This is the main reason why we still don't have human-level AI! I think Minsky's stance is a disservice to computational neuroscience and ANN researchers everywhere.

The man has had his day in the sun. Now it's time for the younger generation of AI researchers to come in and say "hold it! we're taking a different approach from now on. The unkept promises of AI were made by the old symbolic AI crowd. There is a new school in town. The new AI neural, it's emergent, and it's gonna to kick ass!"

Wherever the stuff is stored, therefore, needs to be signed in such a way as to:

• Frighten people away, rather than attracting them with the idea of buried treasure, archeological relics or whatever;
• communicate this in a way that is culture-neutral. In other words, the third civilisation after us, in say 50,000 years' time (after the catastrophic collapse of ours (due to massive climate change and population growth the planet can no longer support) and the next (caused by brain damage resulting from the accidental translation of a fossilised Dummy's Guide to Windows) must be able to comprehend the message of whatever markers we erect despite having very different language, religious traditions, taboos, social structures, etc etc.;
• Do so reliably for geological periods of time.

I'm sure this story will be full of posts from the pro-nuclear lobby; I'm somewhat sympathetic to that PoV, with the exception of the hand-waving that goes on with regard to waste disposal (including defunct power stations themselves.) I grew up within 20 miles of the largest concentration of nuclear power in Western Europe (Oldbury, Berkeley, Hinkley Point) - the former stations were built in the mid 60s, had a design life of 21 years, were kept up and running for 30, and are now testbeds for decommmissioning. It's going to take a century *just to get the buildings into a safe state for long term storage* - a huge block of concrete containing the reactor core, sitting right on the edge of an enormous river with the highest tidal range in Europe. Hmmmmm. Was it worth it for 30 years of slightly-more-expensive than coal electricity? Well, hindsight is a wonderful thing... I suggest we learn from it.

Incidentally the UK Govt. just approved the first UK complex of off-shore windfarms. Another interesting experiment - might work, might be a white elephant, no way of telling without trying... but at least we know that cleaning them up afterwards will be nbd.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"