More than four years since the economy shifted from recession to recovery, 36 percent of U.S. workers always or usually live paycheck to paycheck according to a survey released Wednesday by CareerBuilder.com. Another 40 percent say they sometimes do.

The figures are down from their 2008 highs and paint a rosier picture than a separate poll from June that defined check to check living differently. That survey had reported that three out of four Americans don’t have enough saved to survive for six months should they lose their jobs, and that 27 percent have no savings whatsoever. The CareerBuilder.com survey asked respondents directly if they live check to check, producing the lower percentage.

The stress induced by constantly fretting over making ends meet has the same effect on the brain as constantly pulling all-nighters and can knock 13 percent off a person’s IQ according to a study released earlier this summer.

The press release for Wednesday’s findings stresses the slight improvement over previous CareerBuilder-commissioned surveys. In 2012, 38 percent of respondents reported living check to check, and CareerBuilder’s Rosemary Haefner calls that improvement ‘a sign that job security and spending power may be on the rise.

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Japan’s nuclear regulator said today it has officially raised the severity rating of the latest radioactive water leak at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant to Level 3 on an international scale for radiological releases. The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), said last week that 330 tons of highly radioactive water leaked from a storage tank at the facility. Crews of workers have been rushing to check for leaks in hundreds of other tanks holding radioactive water. Japanese regulators have accused TEPCO of failing to properly monitor the storage tanks. ‘The problem is going to get worse,’ warns Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear industry executive who has coordinated projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the United States. ‘Radioactive water is leaking out of this plant as fast as it is leaking in.’
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I wanted to ask about the latest news from Japan. Japan’s nuclear regulator said today it has officially raised the severity rating of the latest radioactive water leak at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant to Level 3 on an international scale for radiological releases. The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, […]

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BELLEVUE, Wash. - In a drab one-story building here, set between an indoor tennis club and a home appliance showroom, dozens of engineers, physicists and nuclear experts are chasing a radical dream of Bill Gates.

The quest is for a new kind of nuclear reactor that would be fueled by today’s nuclear waste, supply all the electricity in the United States for the next 800 years and, possibly, cut the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation around the world.

The people developing the reactor work for a start-up, TerraPower, led by Mr. Gates and a fellow Microsoft billionaire, Nathan Myhrvold. So far, it has raised tens of millions of dollars for the project, but building a prototype reactor could cost $5 billion - a reason Mr. Gates is looking for a home for the demonstration plant in rich and energy-hungry China.

(Mr. Gates, of course, has plenty of money of his own. This year Forbes listed him as the world’s second-richest person, with a net worth of $67 billion.)

‘The hope is that we’ll find a country, with China being the most likely, that would be able to build the demo plant,

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The Switzerland-based company ST Microelectronics, one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world, has filed a patent application to the United States Patent Office for a Reactor for energy generation through low energy nuclear reactions (lenr) between hydrogen and transition metals and related method of energy generation. The application was filed in February of this year, and the inventors are listed as Ubaldo Mastromatteo and Federico Giovanni Ziglioli.

The reactor described contains:

a reaction chamber having an energy port;

a reaction unit disposed in the reaction chamber and configured to allow an energy-releasing reaction between first and second materials; and

an energy regulator configured to control a rate at which reaction-released energy exits the reaction chamber via the energy port.

The patent explains that a reaction is achieved by the absorption of hydrogen within an active metallic material (could be a number of metals such as Ni, Pd, Pt, W, Ti, Fe, Co and their alloys), applying heat, triggering the reaction and using a mechanism to control the reaction.

Interestingly, the patent doesn’t beat about the bush and try and disguise the fact that this is a LENR reaction. They cite Pons and […]

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