Another Amory Lovins Big Lie: Nuclear Power Costs Too Much for Private Companies and With No Government Support None Will Be Built

Another Amory Lovins big lie, which is often repeated by various environmentalists is that nuclear power costs too much for private companies with no government support. The lie is not that nuclear power costs large amounts of money. The big lies ignore these truths:1. Other forms of power also cost a lot money2. Government money …

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Military Laser Technology Roundup

1. Mirrored drones can make jet mounted lasers more effective. [H/T alfin and Tom Craver] The flying laser cannon could be accompanied by a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) fitted with mirrors. These relay UAVs would be harder to spot and more disposable than a 747, and could bounce the high-energy beam onto targets …

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Power to Overall Weight Ratio of the 2013 Hyperion Power Nuclear Reactor

The Hyperion Power Generation uranium hydride reactor will weigh fifteen to 20 tons, depending on whether you’re measuring just the reactor itself or the cask—the container that we ship it in—as well. It was specifically designed to fit on the back of a flatbed truck because most of our customers are not going to have …

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Light Crude Oil Below $100 a barrel

Light crude oil prices have fallen below $100 amid signs that refineries along the Gulf of Mexico coast will soon resume operations after shutting for Hurricane Ike and escaping major damage. “It looks like we’ve dodged another bullet,” said Peter Beutel, president of energy consultant Cameron Hanover Inc. in New Canaan, Connecticut. “The refineries in …

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Detailed analysis of salamander regeneration

Technology Review discusses the work of Gerald Pao, a postdoctoral researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, to perform a detailed genetic analysis of the axolotl salamander’s DNA and the precise molecular processes of successful regeneration. Pao and his collaborators won one billion bases’ worth of free sequencing from Roche Applied Science, based in …

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Inflatable electric cars could be cheap, safe and have long range

Inflatable electric cars could have 2500 mile range using a single hot-swap XPack Multi-CoreTM Battery/Fuel Cell power plant. You would use the battery/fuel cell and then it would be changed out when you needed to “refuel/recharge”. It will take until at least 2010 for the cars to be fully certified and placed into high volume …

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Carnival of Space Week 46

Carnival of Space 46 is up at riding with robots My contribution was the premature report of room temperature superconductors. There is a new class of superconductors made under high pressure which could lead to room temperature superconductors. Centauri Dreams talks about David Brin’s speculation on eleven reasons for no contact with aliens (fermi paradox) …

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Artificial letters added to the four natural DNA bases

Two artificial DNA “letters” that are accurately and efficiently replicated by a natural enzyme have been created by US researchers. Adding the two artificial building blocks to the four that naturally comprise DNA could allow wildly different kinds of genetic engineering, they say. This combines with the previous articles about using DNA to assemble millions …

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99.1% accurate lab on chip cancer detector

A new lab on a chip — slightly more than 1.5 square inches in area — detected circulating cancer cells in 115 of 116 blood samples from patients with metastatic cancer for a sensitivity of 99.1%, according to Daniel Haber, M.D., director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, and colleagues. I have proposed widespread …

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