Then why is it ok to kill and eat them? Are you saying they can consent to having their lives ended in adolescence? Can a hen consent to living its life on an area less than that of an A4 paper ?
It's hypocrisy no matter how you try and twist and turn it.
You know what. I personally think it does say a lot by our society that it's acceptable to slaughter adolescent animals simply because we think they taste well, but if you let one of them lick your naked body it's somehow animal abuse even if the creature in question suffers no ill effects.
Damn will my karma burn for saying this, but while people like to pretend zoophilia is bad because it hurts animals, the real reason it's considered unacceptable is because we have freaking problem with sex. Food does not cause the same reaction, and thus few people care that we are raising animals with the intent to kill and eat them.
Similar complete failure of logic is seen in the anti stem-cells crowd, many of which will happily eat eggs, bacon or chicken, while at the same time declaring IVF and embryonic stem cell research as unacceptable attacks on the sanctity of life.
Now go on, try to justify it. All the usual arguments basically boil down to "it's ok to kill animals because they taste nice", which does make it seem rather hollow when the same people condem zoophilia.
As it happens, I'm not actually a zoophiliac. Merely a vegan who finds it a bit twisted that we seem to consider it worse to let an animal have sex with you than it would be to kill it.
Reality: - sustainable energy: growing market, although expensive - nuclear energy: market stagnation, too expensive
First of all the article is about competition with natural gas, the cheapest form of electricity generation currently available. The reason nuclear has issues compeeting is the same that renewables don't cut it, the fossil fuels are getting a free pass emitting pollutants and greenhosue gases which would be very expensive to sequester and dealt with properly.
Secondly when it comes to replacing fossil fuels it's not a question of nuclear OR renewables, we will need both. Even MITs somewhat optimistic forecast of nuclear growth will not displace the fossil fuels within several decades, and the situation is similar for energy conservation and the renewables. It is however quite possible to get rid of teh fossil fuels if you are willing to use ALL of these techniques in combination.
So in summary, if we are to have any realistic hope of getting rid of the fossil fuels within any foreseeable future we will need a strong combination of nuclear , renewables and energy conserving technology. There's no silver bullets for this problem, and it sure as hell won't be solved by people like you trying to sound smug by deliberately misinterpreting the problem.
No, the problem of embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells is with ESCs you must destroy a (potential) life
It's not really true though. The ESCs are typically harvested from left-over fertilized eggs from fertility treatment. Normally those cells would be incinerated. Your claim makes it sound as if one is destroying an embryo which would otherwise become a human, which simply is not true. You may be true in some technical manner, depending on how you interpret your statement, but most people who don't already know what is going on will probably have quite a different reaction if they knew the details of the matter, rather than "destroy a potential life" line that you and others throw out there without much explanation of the actual circumstances.
Basically there would not be any fuss about this at all if people actually knew what was being done, and how.
I don't understand why vegetarians use meat substitutes and consume, as you say, soy and wheat germ.
Dunno about the wheat germ, but many soy products are quite nice on their own merit. Take soy milk as an example. Aside from ethical issues one may have with dairy farming, It has some advantages over regular milk. It is lactose-free (good if you're intolerant) , low in fat, and it doesn't need refrigeration before you open the package. Granted it tastes nothing like regular milk, and is very much an acquired taste. First time I tried it I thought it tasted like sweetened chalk with some almonds mixed in, but nowadays I love it.
makes it pretty hard for things to go critical even in a worst case scenario.
All power reactors in the world today go critical as part of their normal operation. That's why they can sustain a chain reaction. However, they are all designed in such a way that their criticality is not sufficient to allow the reactor to remain critical without the contribution from so called delayed-neutrons. These are neutrons emitted by the fission products some time after the fission event. It's because the release of these neutrons is much slower than the release of fission neutrons that it is possible to build a stable nuclear reactor. Without them the reactor would either be sub-critical and hence not produce any power without an external neutron source, or it would be prompt-critical, which pretty much means you would not be able to control the rate of the chain reaction rapidly enough to prevent dangerous power fluctuations.
Modern pressurized water reactors typically can't go prompt critical, since the quantity of relatively low enriched uranium is too small.
It's not that simple because 10% or therabouts of the energy produced in a nuclear reactor comes from the radioactive decay of the fission products, and not the fission reaction itself. Therefore the reactor core will continue to produce heat at an exponentially decaying rate, even after the chain reaction has ceased. This heat is quite sufficient to melt the core, and unless the reactor has been designed in such a way that sufficient cooling persists due to natural circulation, knocking out the cooling pumps could very well cause a meltdown.
That said, due to the much lower power output and natural circulation of coolant, it would take a considerable amount of time for this to start threatening core integrity. Modern reactors are typically designed to not require any operator intervention for at least 72 hours even after a total loss of station power.
Btw, regarding the control rods. I've seen at least one proposed system where one or several of the control rods would be held in place by a strong magnet acting on a ferromagnetic material with a carefully chosen Curie temperature. This way if the reactor temperature rises too high the magnet will no longer be able to hold the control rod in place, and it falls into the core. I dunno if this system has actually been implemented anywhere.
I've seen African-Americans with the disease before, they just have patches of pigmentless skin.
That is the most common symptome, but it isn't always like that. Vitiligo comes in different forms and the more severe cases can very rapidly remove pigmentation in huge areas of the skin. Theres even a name for it "vitiligo universalis". As it happens, it isn't actually possible to bleach your skin the way people thought Michael Jackson did. For peopel that have vitiligo you can sometimes get a more even skin tone through the use of bleaching, but there is no reliable way to turn a healthy black person white.
Ok, explain to me this: how does mutilating your nose help in any way with vitiligo?
It doesn't. However as somebody who've had some severe issues with body image, I can tell you from personal experience that this kind of irrational responses to body changes is not at all rare. In my case it was rather mild, but MJ allegedly suffered from Vitiligo, Lupus , Anorexia Nevrosa, had problems with drug abuse and was abused as a kid. Now add in to that the stress from being the focus from tabloids, having everybody speculate about why your appearance is changing... Heck the anorexia nevrosa alone can kill people from self-starvation. Imagine throwing in the rest of that cocktail of issues he was dealing with ( and there is little doubt he had a lot of issues ) and it's surprising the guy was even able to perform on a regular basis.
Assuming the accusations were true, it was tragic, not funny. Assuming they were false ( as we should seeing he was never convicted in a court of law ) the joke is even more tasteless.
Seriously, considering how often people here point out how society tends to fucking lose its mind once children are involved, it is a bit tragic to see people repeat this tasteless joke and get moderated funny for it.
Sex hormones can affect you a lot, at least some people. I used to be among those who insisted psychological differences between men and women were cultural, or due to upbringing and whatnot, then eventually I came to the point where I could no longer go on suppressing my feelings, and I called up a gender identity clinic, explained I felt fairly certain I'm transsexual, that I had tried my very best just living as a man , accepting it and that I just couldn't do it anymore. At the time I think I had pretty much ceased to eat out of depression.
Since then I've had most of my testosterone replaced with estrogen, and aside from very rapidly ( within weeks ) making me feel better than I even thought was possible, it has also caused a lot of other changes. Some of which are quite common among people in my situation, others are more individual. It's hard to determine which changes are due to the hormones and which are merely due to feeling more comfortable with my body, but some are so common and well documented that psychiatrists and endocrinologists more or less assume them to be hormonal. There's always exceptions, and the effects are variable and individual, but the following is frequently described:
Reduced sex drive Increased appetite A change in orgasmic pattern, moving it closer to that described by women Increased skin sensitivity.
The last bit is actually likely due to the skin going thinner and hence a physical rather than psychological change. Bruises also stay visible longer, acne tends to improve, and many have trouble with dry skin. For me the last bit was so bad I developed severe rashes and had to go on a course of cortisone treatment. Nowadays I can keep it in control with normal skin lotion however.
Now I don't mean with this that all stereotypes you hear about men and women are true, or that this particular study is even worth the paper it is written on. After all I'm arguably quiet different from most people ( or otherwise I would never had to do this ), and hence my experiences or those of people similar to me can't really be extrapolated to the rest of the population.
However I can tell you one thing for sure. Hormones can do a lot of things to a person. Some people want to insist I'm just imagining it or that it may be a placebo effect or similar. It's a real pity the physical effects ( like breast development ) are partially irreversible, because otherwise I could just tell those people to go try for themselves. It really does affect you quite a bit.
I'm taking estradiol valerate for hormone replacement therapy. Now it's quite possible that I might have some undiagnosed predisposition to breast cancer or some other disease that is dependent on estrogen or even just the compounds used in its delivery, but if this turns out to be the case I'd be a bloody fool to start suing people for it, because it's not as if I would have gone without the medication if I knew there was a 1 in 10.000 chance it could kill me. No, seriously, between people smoking, driving without a seatbelt and eating garbage, I just don't believe that any rational person would abstain from important medical treatment due to a very minor chance of complications, unless of course they've been pressured to do so by the kind of fear mongering nonsense you've seen against the MMR vaccine.
Actually it just means that once again the new prediction for sea level rise falls outside of the 95% confidence interval reported in the IPCC reports. Again. Imagine the chances. They've made 3 predictions, all with 95% confidence intervals, and the new prediction falls out of all 3 of them (just like their next prediction fell outside the 95% range for their previous prediction, both for sea level rise and temperature, so actually we should square the 5%). So if their chances are accurately calculated, that they're this wrong should happen once in 10y * 1 / ( 5% * 5% * 5% ) = 80 000 years.
Nonsense. You just don't understand the difference between systematic and statistical errors, a concept introduced in high school physics classes. This error here was a systematic one. Confidence intervals and error bars only show statistical errors.
Some bright researchers managed to refine a previous model and come up with better and more accurate predictions. You may want to note how, contrary to some "skeptics" beliefs this wasn't suppressed or refused publication or any other such shenanigans. In the word of a famous person "When I'm proven wrong I change my opinion, what do you do ?".
What if this guy Carlin is referring too has just made his decision and is not yet living as a woman?
The way the words are usually used by psychiatrists as well as transsexuals themselves is still "transwoman" for male-to-female transsexuals, and "transman" for female-to-male transsexuals.
Thus if you use the words differently you are likely to be misunderstood. "Transman" refers to a transsexual that wants to live as a guy, and "Transwoman" refers to a transsexual that wants to live as a woman, regardless of whether they do so at the moment.
At least read the summary. If you want a high resolution display from a compact projector small pixel sizes are a must. Imagine as an example trying to squeeze a projector into a mobile phone.
While it could theoretically be done, this particular plant is not very useful for making bomb material.
In order for plutonium produced by reactors to be useful for weapons it needs to be extracted from a reactor fairly shortly after being produced, or otherwise it will be contaminated with heavier plutonium isotopes that generate a lot of heat and neutrons, making the weapon design dramatically more difficult (so difficult in fact that it is probably easier to start all over and make decent material ). For this reason plants used to make bomb material are usually smaller and built to be able to refuel quickly. Attempting to separate the plutonium isotopes after they have been mixed would likely be more difficult than "simply" enriching uranium, so that's not much of a worry either.
It is possible to build large reactors that can function both as power-plants and bomb producers, but this generally requires them to be designed so they can change their fuel bundles while operating ( The UK and former Soviet used to do this ). For a large pressurized water reactor, like this one, it is however not practical since it would require you to shut down and restart it to replace the fuel at frequent intervals, and for such a large reactor doing that takes ages, and it would be obvious to the outside world what is going on ( you don't just hide the fact that a few gigawatt of spill heat suddenly went away ).
Basically of all the types of power producing reactors in widespread use in the world today, a large pressurized water reactor is probably the least suitable for making plutonium. It is theoretically possible, but it is not even a fraction as big a concern as the uranium enrichment facilities Iran is also operating. Those facilities can be used to create highly enriched U-235, which is pretty much the material that is easiest to turn into a nuclear weapon. Using plutonium can have advantages for advanced weapon designs, but it is a lot easier to do with uranium.
There has been a number of fraud reports of high temperature superconductivity, and while there are some confirmed examples of superconductivity at very high temperatures ( like -70C ) they usually involve some microscopic crystal or other structure which is not very useful for most practical applications.
In addition, that something super conducts does not imply it can handle a very large current at high temperatures. The current creates a magnetic field, and superconductors can only work when the magnetic field is less than some fixed value that depends on the material. If I'm not mistaken this value is at its highest when the temperature is very low, and thus it's quite plausible you could get a room temperature superconductor which can't carry any significant current unless cooled to more traditional temperatures.
I think PETA has a lot of morons, but I also have to say this does disturb me. Not so much in the ethical way (they used roadkill after all), but rather in the "what kind of morbid person would want a drink served in a dead animal" kind of way. Pretty similar reasons why I don't eat other creatures.
With every single form of energy generation in widespread use today, economies of scale heavily favors building big plants, assuming you're in a country with a well developed electric grid.
This is not only true for nuclear, but also coal, natural gas, hydro, wind turbines and even solar installations. Even combined heat and power works better when implemented as a district-heating system ( as is done many places in the world ). The effect is even more pronounced for nuclear, however, because capital costs associated with construction is such a big part of its cost. Since power output increases more rapidly than material and construction costs, this heavily favors large installations.
There is one exception I can think of, and that is if you try to build a nuclear plant to do load following, in which case you want to keep capital costs low, since you will be operating the plant at a low capacity factor. For such an installation it might make sense to make it as small as possible while still being able to deliver adequately during peak hours.
Recycling works, it is that feel good, separate your trash, recycling at the curb that is fake.
It's not that simple. Here in Sweden we usually separate our garbage into paper, other combustibles, glass and metal componenets. The latter two are particularly important since it is much more energy intensive to refine ores ( in particular aluminium ) than it is to recycle the used bits. Paper recycling is more controversial and basically depends on how far you have to transport the stuff and whether you recover the heat from incinerating it.
We also tend to recycle PET-bottles , but rarely other forms of plastic. I'm not quite sure what they do with the used bottles, if they simply wash them and reuse, or if it becomes insulation material or whatever, but it's supposedly worthwhile, which I suspect may have something to do with the bottles being a fairly uniform composition. After all, it must be much harder to recycle a heterogeneous mass of unknown plastic componenets than a know-composition mass of PET bottles).
1 - If they accept stolen information anything they do with it will be tossed out of court and taint any pending or future litigation.
It does not work that way in Sweden. The court could take it into consideration ( and probably would ) , but as far as I am aware there's no law which explicitly says evidence is inadmissible if illegally collected. Having said that, if evidence like this was collected illegally it would be simple for the defense to argue that it was unreliable since anybody who is disrespectful enough of the law to steal information cannot be trusted to not have altered it.
This is either a bunch of diodes or a horrible case of over engineering.
Seriously it's not hard to do this, it's just stupid to waste money on more complicated contacts when you can simply
stamp a small picture into the device to show how batteries are supposed to be aligned.
Slashdot Mirror
So, miss Parrot, choose wisely now... Would you rather be eaten or will you bend over?
Fixed that for you.
Then why is it ok to kill and eat them? Are you saying they can consent to having their lives ended in adolescence? Can a hen consent to living its life on an area less than that of an A4 paper ?
It's hypocrisy no matter how you try and twist and turn it.
You know what. I personally think it does say a lot by our society that it's acceptable to slaughter adolescent animals simply because we think they taste well, but if you let one of them lick your naked body it's somehow animal abuse even if the creature in question suffers no ill effects.
Damn will my karma burn for saying this, but while people like to pretend zoophilia is bad because it hurts animals, the real reason it's considered unacceptable is because we have freaking problem with sex. Food does not cause the same reaction, and thus few people care that we are raising animals with the intent to kill and eat them.
Similar complete failure of logic is seen in the anti stem-cells crowd, many of which will happily eat eggs, bacon or chicken, while at the same time declaring IVF and embryonic stem cell research as unacceptable attacks on the sanctity of life.
Now go on, try to justify it. All the usual arguments basically boil down to "it's ok to kill animals because they taste nice", which does make it seem rather hollow when the same people condem zoophilia.
As it happens, I'm not actually a zoophiliac. Merely a vegan who finds it a bit twisted that we seem to consider it worse to let an animal have sex with you than it would be to kill it.
Reality:
- sustainable energy: growing market, although expensive
- nuclear energy: market stagnation, too expensive
First of all the article is about competition with natural gas, the cheapest form of electricity generation currently available. The reason nuclear has issues compeeting is the same that renewables don't cut it, the fossil fuels are getting a free pass emitting pollutants and greenhosue gases which would be very expensive to sequester and dealt with properly.
Secondly when it comes to replacing fossil fuels it's not a question of nuclear OR renewables, we will need both. Even MITs somewhat optimistic forecast of nuclear growth will not displace the fossil fuels within several decades, and the situation is similar for energy conservation and the renewables. It is however quite possible to get rid of teh fossil fuels if you are willing to use ALL of these techniques in combination.
So in summary, if we are to have any realistic hope of getting rid of the fossil fuels within any foreseeable future we will need a strong combination of nuclear , renewables and energy conserving technology. There's no silver bullets for this problem, and it sure as hell won't be solved by people like you trying to sound smug by deliberately misinterpreting the problem.
It's not really true though. The ESCs are typically harvested from left-over fertilized eggs from fertility treatment. Normally those cells would be incinerated. Your claim makes it sound as if one is destroying an embryo which would otherwise become a human, which simply is not true. You may be true in some technical manner, depending on how you interpret your statement, but most people who don't already know what is going on will probably have quite a different reaction if they knew the details of the matter, rather than "destroy a potential life" line that you and others throw out there without much explanation of the actual circumstances.
Basically there would not be any fuss about this at all if people actually knew what was being done, and how.
Dunno about the wheat germ, but many soy products are quite nice on their own merit. Take soy milk as an example. Aside from ethical issues one may have with dairy farming, It has some advantages over regular milk. It is lactose-free (good if you're intolerant) , low in fat, and it doesn't need refrigeration before you open the package. Granted it tastes nothing like regular milk, and is very much an acquired taste. First time I tried it I thought it tasted like sweetened chalk with some almonds mixed in, but nowadays I love it.
All power reactors in the world today go critical as part of their normal operation. That's why they can sustain a chain reaction. However, they are all designed in such a way that their criticality is not sufficient to allow the reactor to remain critical without the contribution from so called delayed-neutrons. These are neutrons emitted by the fission products some time after the fission event. It's because the release of these neutrons is much slower than the release of fission neutrons that it is possible to build a stable nuclear reactor. Without them the reactor would either be sub-critical and hence not produce any power without an external neutron source, or it would be prompt-critical, which pretty much means you would not be able to control the rate of the chain reaction rapidly enough to prevent dangerous power fluctuations.
Modern pressurized water reactors typically can't go prompt critical, since the quantity of relatively low enriched uranium is too small.
It's not that simple because 10% or therabouts of the energy produced in a nuclear reactor comes from the radioactive decay of the fission products, and not the fission reaction itself. Therefore the reactor core will continue to produce heat at an exponentially decaying rate, even after the chain reaction has ceased. This heat is quite sufficient to melt the core, and unless the reactor has been designed in such a way that sufficient cooling persists due to natural circulation, knocking out the cooling pumps could very well cause a meltdown.
That said, due to the much lower power output and natural circulation of coolant, it would take a considerable amount of time for this to start threatening core integrity. Modern reactors are typically designed to not require any operator intervention for at least 72 hours even after a total loss of station power.
Btw, regarding the control rods. I've seen at least one proposed system where one or several of the control rods would be held in place by a strong magnet acting on a ferromagnetic material with a carefully chosen Curie temperature. This way if the reactor temperature rises too high the magnet will no longer be able to hold the control rod in place, and it falls into the core. I dunno if this system has actually been implemented anywhere.
That is the most common symptome, but it isn't always like that. Vitiligo comes in different forms and the more severe cases can very rapidly remove pigmentation in huge areas of the skin. Theres even a name for it "vitiligo universalis". As it happens, it isn't actually possible to bleach your skin the way people thought Michael Jackson did. For peopel that have vitiligo you can sometimes get a more even skin tone through the use of bleaching, but there is no reliable way to turn a healthy black person white.
It doesn't. However as somebody who've had some severe issues with body image, I can tell you from personal experience that this kind of irrational responses to body changes is not at all rare. In my case it was rather mild, but MJ allegedly suffered from Vitiligo, Lupus , Anorexia Nevrosa, had problems with drug abuse and was abused as a kid. Now add in to that the stress from being the focus from tabloids, having everybody speculate about why your appearance is changing... Heck the anorexia nevrosa alone can kill people from self-starvation. Imagine throwing in the rest of that cocktail of issues he was dealing with ( and there is little doubt he had a lot of issues ) and it's surprising the guy was even able to perform on a regular basis.
Assuming the accusations were true, it was tragic, not funny.
Assuming they were false ( as we should seeing he was never convicted in a court of law ) the joke is even more tasteless.
Seriously, considering how often people here point out how society tends to fucking lose its mind once children are involved, it is a bit tragic to see people repeat this tasteless joke and get moderated funny for it.
Sex hormones can affect you a lot, at least some people. I used to be among those who insisted psychological differences between men and women were cultural, or due to upbringing and whatnot, then eventually I came to the point where I could no longer go on suppressing my feelings, and I called up a gender identity clinic, explained I felt fairly certain I'm transsexual, that I had tried my very best just living as a man , accepting it and that I just couldn't do it anymore. At the time I think I had pretty much ceased to eat out of depression.
Since then I've had most of my testosterone replaced with estrogen, and aside from very rapidly ( within weeks ) making me feel better than I even thought was possible, it has also caused a lot of other changes. Some of which are quite common among people in my situation, others are more individual. It's hard to determine which changes are due to the hormones and which are merely due to feeling more comfortable with my body, but some are so common and well documented that psychiatrists and endocrinologists more or less assume them to be hormonal. There's always exceptions, and the effects are variable and individual, but the following is frequently described:
Reduced sex drive
Increased appetite
A change in orgasmic pattern, moving it closer to that described by women
Increased skin sensitivity.
The last bit is actually likely due to the skin going thinner and hence a physical rather than psychological change. Bruises also stay visible longer, acne tends to improve, and many have trouble with dry skin. For me the last bit was so bad I developed severe rashes and had to go on a course of cortisone treatment. Nowadays I can keep it in control with normal skin lotion however.
Now I don't mean with this that all stereotypes you hear about men and women are true, or that this particular study is even worth the paper it is written on. After all I'm arguably quiet different from most people ( or otherwise I would never had to do this ), and hence my experiences or those of people similar to me can't really be extrapolated to the rest of the population.
However I can tell you one thing for sure. Hormones can do a lot of things to a person. Some people want to insist I'm just imagining it or that it may be a placebo effect or similar. It's a real pity the physical effects ( like breast development ) are partially irreversible, because otherwise I could just tell those people to go try for themselves. It really does affect you quite a bit.
I'm taking estradiol valerate for hormone replacement therapy. Now it's quite possible that I might have some undiagnosed predisposition to breast cancer or some other disease that is dependent on estrogen or even just the compounds used in its delivery, but if this turns out to be the case I'd be a bloody fool to start suing people for it, because it's not as if I would have gone without the medication if I knew there was a 1 in 10.000 chance it could kill me. No, seriously, between people smoking, driving without a seatbelt and eating garbage, I just don't believe that any rational person would abstain from important medical treatment due to a very minor chance of complications, unless of course they've been pressured to do so by the kind of fear mongering nonsense you've seen against the MMR vaccine.
Nonsense. You just don't understand the difference between systematic and statistical errors, a concept introduced in high school physics classes. This error here was a systematic one. Confidence intervals and error bars only show statistical errors.
Some bright researchers managed to refine a previous model and come up with better and more accurate predictions. You may want to note how, contrary to some "skeptics" beliefs this wasn't suppressed or refused publication or any other such shenanigans. In the word of a famous person "When I'm proven wrong I change my opinion, what do you do ?".
The way the words are usually used by psychiatrists as well as transsexuals themselves is still "transwoman" for male-to-female transsexuals, and "transman" for female-to-male transsexuals.
Thus if you use the words differently you are likely to be misunderstood. "Transman" refers to a transsexual that wants to live as a guy, and "Transwoman" refers to a transsexual that wants to live as a woman, regardless of whether they do so at the moment.
At least read the summary. If you want a high resolution display from a compact projector small pixel sizes are a must. Imagine as an example trying to squeeze a projector into a mobile phone.
While it could theoretically be done, this particular plant is not very useful for making bomb material.
In order for plutonium produced by reactors to be useful for weapons it needs to be extracted from a reactor fairly shortly after being produced, or otherwise it will be contaminated with heavier plutonium isotopes that generate a lot of heat and neutrons, making the weapon design dramatically more difficult (so difficult in fact that it is probably easier to start all over and make decent material ). For this reason plants used to make bomb material are usually smaller and built to be able to refuel quickly. Attempting to separate the plutonium isotopes after they have been mixed would likely be more difficult than "simply" enriching uranium, so that's not much of a worry either.
It is possible to build large reactors that can function both as power-plants and bomb producers, but this generally requires them to be designed so they can change their fuel bundles while operating ( The UK and former Soviet used to do this ). For a large pressurized water reactor, like this one, it is however not practical since it would require you to shut down and restart it to replace the fuel at frequent intervals, and for such a large reactor doing that takes ages, and it would be obvious to the outside world what is going on ( you don't just hide the fact that a few gigawatt of spill heat suddenly went away ).
Basically of all the types of power producing reactors in widespread use in the world today, a large pressurized water reactor is probably the least suitable for making plutonium. It is theoretically possible, but it is not even a fraction as big a concern as the uranium enrichment facilities Iran is also operating. Those facilities can be used to create highly enriched U-235, which is pretty much the material that is easiest to turn into a nuclear weapon. Using plutonium can have advantages for advanced weapon designs, but it is a lot easier to do with uranium.
You know we also tend to really dislike? Having people assume they know what we want as if we were all the same.
The most honest answer to that question is "we don't know".
There has been a number of fraud reports of high temperature superconductivity, and while there are some confirmed examples of superconductivity at very high temperatures ( like -70C ) they usually involve some microscopic crystal or other structure which is not very useful for most practical applications.
In addition, that something super conducts does not imply it can handle a very large current at high temperatures. The current creates a magnetic field, and superconductors can only work when the magnetic field is less than some fixed value that depends on the material. If I'm not mistaken this value is at its highest when the temperature is very low, and thus it's quite plausible you could get a room temperature superconductor which can't carry any significant current unless cooled to more traditional temperatures.
I think PETA has a lot of morons, but I also have to say this does disturb me. Not so much in the ethical way (they used roadkill after all), but rather in the "what kind of morbid person would want a drink served in a dead animal" kind of way. Pretty similar reasons why I don't eat other creatures.
With every single form of energy generation in widespread use today, economies of scale heavily favors building big plants, assuming you're in a country with a well developed electric grid.
This is not only true for nuclear, but also coal, natural gas, hydro, wind turbines and even solar installations. Even combined heat and power works better when implemented as a district-heating system ( as is done many places in the world ). The effect is even more pronounced for nuclear, however, because capital costs associated with construction is such a big part of its cost. Since power output increases more rapidly than material and construction costs, this heavily favors large installations.
There is one exception I can think of, and that is if you try to build a nuclear plant to do load following, in which case you want to keep capital costs low, since you will be operating the plant at a low capacity factor. For such an installation it might make sense to make it as small as possible while still being able to deliver adequately during peak hours.
It's not that simple. Here in Sweden we usually separate our garbage into paper, other combustibles, glass and metal componenets. The latter two are particularly important since it is much more energy intensive to refine ores ( in particular aluminium ) than it is to recycle the used bits. Paper recycling is more controversial and basically depends on how far you have to transport the stuff and whether you recover the heat from incinerating it.
We also tend to recycle PET-bottles , but rarely other forms of plastic. I'm not quite sure what they do with the used bottles, if they simply wash them and reuse, or if it becomes insulation material or whatever, but it's supposedly worthwhile, which I suspect may have something to do with the bottles being a fairly uniform composition. After all, it must be much harder to recycle a heterogeneous mass of unknown plastic componenets than a know-composition mass of PET bottles).
It does not work that way in Sweden. The court could take it into consideration ( and probably would ) , but as far as I am aware there's no law which explicitly says evidence is inadmissible if illegally collected. Having said that, if evidence like this was collected illegally it would be simple for the defense to argue that it was unreliable since anybody who is disrespectful enough of the law to steal information cannot be trusted to not have altered it.
This is either a bunch of diodes or a horrible case of over engineering. Seriously it's not hard to do this, it's just stupid to waste money on more complicated contacts when you can simply stamp a small picture into the device to show how batteries are supposed to be aligned.