The Bataan Nuclear Power Plant in the Philippines was built decades ago, but was never put into use. The facility’s maintenance is quite an expense, but its owner, the National Power Corporation, has turned the site into a tourist attraction! You can take a tour of the nuclear reactor (something you certainly cannot do in the U.S.) and stay in a cabana on the beautiful beach nearby, which also serves as a turtle sanctuary. Relax, there is no uranium here! But if you can’t just pick up and go to Bataan, take a tour with a gallery of photographs and information from National Geographic News. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!

(Image credit: Jay Directo, AFP/Getty Images)

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In the 1950s, nuclear power was seen as the answer to everything. Engineers were working on nuclear powered planes, automobiles, and trains, and searching for other ways to use the power of the atom. Read about some of the inventions that seem far-fetched today, but were just on the horizon at one time, at Dark Roasted Blend. Link

The German site Zeit Online posted a map in which you can compare the evacuation around Japan’s Fukushima power plant to the populations around nuclear plants in the US and Canada. You can adjust the area of evacuation with a slider. Zoom in on a red dot, and see the stats. For example, 37,513 people live within 18 miles of the Callaway (Missouri) pressurized-water reactor nuclear plant, shown in this screenshot. The same type of evacuation would affect over a million people near the Indian Point plant in New York. However, Japan is beginning to evacuate some areas beyond the 30km (18 mile) radius. Link -via Metafilter

The military’s already working on using seawater to create fuel, but that’s more of an option for maritime operations. Without an endless supply of seawater, they’d need an alternative carbon source. Enter the massive quantities of sludge that inevitably accumulate around troop outposts. It’s been a problem for decades, according to environmental management expert Dr. James Lee. In an article for the Army’s Engineer School, he writes that the military spent upwards of $65,000 in annual fuel costs just to burn off human refuse at base camp in the Balkans.

So Darpa’s proposal would offer two major benefits: Less waste to treat and dispose of at bases, and fewer financial and tactical burdens around sourcing adequate fuel — whether to power jets and facilities or burn off heaps of odorous fecal matter. And with a single trooper stationed in Afghanistan using 22 gallons of fuel a day, that’d add up to major savings.

Link via Fast Company | Photo: US Department of Agriculture

That’s the World Thorium Fuel concept car by Cadillac. The Cadillac WTF (yes, I know), designed by Loren Kulesus, is supposed to be powered by the nuclear fuel thorium and therefore last 100 years (Whaaa? Nuclear fuel in a car? What a great idea!):

Elsewhere, every major system is redundant in case of a failure. And the wheels don’t have individual tires – in fact, what’s located at each corner is one combined unit made up of six individual wheels. That gives you 24 wheels in total, and each wheel has its own induction motor. Said Kulesus, "The vehicle would require the tires to be adjusted every five years, but no material would need to be added or subtracted."

Link | Loren’s portfolio at Coroflot – via TechEBlog

Previously on Neatorama: Curly Skateboard by Loren Kulesus