is it just me or does it kinda look like a lightsaber handle?

Nope, it's not only you :) That was my first thought when i saw the pic :)

meh. wake me up when we get fusion power working.

I've been trying to estimate the cost of prower from this unique reactor, using the compan'y description, and it looks like it will range between 1.4 and 1.8 cent spe kilowatthour. Apparently there' lots of nuclear ignorance around here - nuclear power is far more practical than any other technology out there. Even here, where we pay $5billion per gigawatt, that's 5 times cheaper than solar thermal and 6 or 7 ties cheaper than solar PV, both unreliable and crappy ways to produce very expensive power. The Chinese are building one new gigawatt nuclear plant every two months, at $2 biilion, while we stupid Americans are cheering Obama's brainless effort to provide us with power costing 10 times more. And Obama also claims this will make our economy better. Sure it will - try competing with the Chinese while paying ten times more for power. No wonder the Chinese are cleaning our clock and holding trillions of out debt. We sit here listening to brainwashed pimply faced morons gripe about nuclear power. What wimps. Not to mention dolts. What a crappy country.

I've been trying to estimate the cost of prower from this unique reactor, using the compan'y description, and it looks like it will range between 1.4 and 1.8 cent spe kilowatthour. Apparently there' lots of nuclear ignorance around here - nuclear power is far more practical than any other technology out there. Even here, where we pay $5billion per gigawatt, that's 5 times cheaper than solar thermal and 6 or 7 ties cheaper than solar PV, both unreliable and crappy ways to produce very expensive power. The Chinese are building one new gigawatt nuclear plant every two months, at $2 biilion, while we stupid Americans are cheering Obama's brainless effort to provide us with power costing 10 times more. And Obama also claims this will make our economy better. Sure it will - try competing with the Chinese while paying ten times more for power. No wonder the Chinese are cleaning our clock and holding trillions of out debt. We sit here listening to brainwashed pimply faced morons gripe about nuclear power. What wimps. Not to mention dolts. What a crappy country.

I've been trying to estimate the cost of prower from this unique reactor, using the compan'y description, and it looks like it will range between 1.4 and 1.8 cent spe kilowatthour. Apparently there' lots of nuclear ignorance around here - nuclear power is far more practical than any other technology out there. Even here, where we pay $5billion per gigawatt, that's 5 times cheaper than solar thermal and 6 or 7 ties cheaper than solar PV, both unreliable and crappy ways to produce very expensive power. The Chinese are building one new gigawatt nuclear plant every two months, at $2 biilion, while we stupid Americans are cheering Obama's brainless effort to provide us with power costing 10 times more. And Obama also claims this will make our economy better. Sure it will - try competing with the Chinese while paying ten times more for power. No wonder the Chinese are cleaning our clock and holding trillions of out debt. We sit here listening to brainwashed pimply faced morons gripe about nuclear power. What wimps. Not to mention dolts. What a crappy country.

You, on the other hand, are in possession of an intellect that cannot, nay, will not, be contained in a single post!

an average household consumes 1kw? i think not try 20 kw on average my freezer alone is energy star compliant and needs 1000 watts

Cheap, one way space craft or rail guns may get our waste off planet and into the sun. That kind of disposal means one less hurdle for nuclear power. It's only a matter of time before technology meets our needs.

Once again, the advocates of nuclear power fail to figure in the cost of storage of the waste when discussing the "cheap" cost of the energy produce. The facility at Yucca Mountain has cost tens of billions of dollars so far and it is not even close to opening. The law suits surrounding the operations will also cost billions not to mention the operation cost involved. If you want to discuss the true cost of nuclear energy, I think that you will find that green technologies, although not as "cheap" on the front side, will be comparable.

hey mundmusic please provide some numbers to back up your claim? I hear lots of "greenies" give this same statement over and over but when I ask for real concrete numbers nothing ever appears. Yucca Mtn has cost alot more to be sure but how can it not with all the political idoits getting their thieving hands involved one way or another.

hey that's really brilliant! fire nuclear waste on rail guns at our enemies or at the moon and if the gun misfires it blows up in our faces!!!!!

So, let me get this straight: the Greens killed nuclear power in America in the 70s and 80s (leaving coal and petroleum as the only alternatives), and now they're hyping nuclear power as the answer to coal and petroleum.

And you think Marjuana doesn't effect your brain???

Message from the environmental extremists of the '70's...

"Stop listening to what we SAID... start listening to what we're SAYING. Nuclear power is the way, man! Peace, love, rock-n-roll, and nukes, babe."

While it is true that it does cost a pretty penny to store nuclear waste, with new reprocessing technology, it has become cheaper to reuse the spent fuel rods than to store them, thereby decreasing the amount of waste. One report said that if America were to reprocess every bit of nuclear waste it had, the country wouldn't need to import Uranium or Plutonium for 30 years, plus we would end up with about the same amount of waste. Add to that the transmutation process that can convert actinides into fissionable materials, and then into nuclides (which have a much shorter half life), then long term storage requirement change from thousands of years to hundreds. Which, hopefully by that time, we would have found a new reprocessing method other than PUREX, DUPIC, or the many variations of Pyroprocessing to increase efficiency, and allow us to reclaim most of the spent fuel, and then to convert the rest into stable, non-radioactive materials. Nuclear power is the way to go.

as I recall many moon ago nuclear power was forbidden now all of a sudden it's the best thing since sliced bread. I'm over the yrs some improvements have been made but I have lived less than 20 miles from a plant and never to my knowledge has their been a problem. If we had allowed the system to progess I think we would be in a far better energy situation today than we are and I do think the gov't is still dragging its feet ( as always) Common sense never seems to prevail and by the time we get more power plants on line I'll either be dead or so senile that it won't make any difference.

From a strictly scientific point of view, nuclear waste is not a problem.

Its creepy, but if you're capable of employing a strictly scientific outlook, nuclear waste is not a problem at all.

But can they be mounted to a DeLorean?

The point cannot be more clear. The anti-nuclear activists of the 1970s thought they were doing good. It turns out that they were the TOOLS of the coal industry and the natural gas industry.

The fact is, for each nuclear reactor they stopped, 2 or 3 coal or nat gas power plants needed to be built. America grinds to a halt without reliable electric power. We need to have that clearly understood as a nation.

We either want safe, clean air and water for our children by using nuclear power, or dirty air and water produced by coal power plants. The death toll of what we have now is too high.

Do you want good science on nuclear power? Go to WWW.OISM.org/access to energy.

Honestly, it's a politicall debate. Nothing actually wrong with Nuclear power, just with who was in the White House and in control of Congress. Where were these fine arguments when Ronald Regan, Bush Senior, Bush Junior where in the hot seat. They all tried to get things going, they had the science right in front of them. Nope, and please don't try to be objective and say it was the maturity of the science.. it has not matured significantly enough in the last 2 decades to warrant the use of that argument, only stowage has-the tech is decades old before we even har about it. It's simple, if you don't have a man in the hot seat you like, you shoot the idea down. Sad to say, this will be the death of our fine country-power consumption and the lack of response. I didn't see this coming, sad too, as I have lived through it.