The name of the movie refers to a downright-preposterous idea that if a nuclear power plant in America melted down, it would melt through the entire Earth and pop out in China. Yeah, that's about how smart the science in this movie is.

The timing of the movie coming out tying in with Three Mile Island may have been lucky for the producers, who suddenly had a huge blockbuster hit on their hands, but it was less lucky for boosters of safe nuclear energy. Since that meltdown, the production of nuclear power plants has gone down significantly despite the fact that there were no deaths or even recorded cases of cancer caused by Three Mile Island—the amount of radiation that the people near the plant were exposed to is said to be similar to that of getting an X-ray.

Instead, we had a movie that hysterically made up fake info about the danger of nuclear power and the evil intentions of those behind power plants that turned a relatively minor accident into a huge outcry against nuclear power. And now here we are 30 years later, still skittish about what is probably the safest and most eco-friendly source of power we've got. Thanks for nothing, Jack Lemmon! [Chart via Wikipedia]

Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

The most pressing one is that changing to nuclear will help reduce the amount of emissions from planes and keep them flying in the air longer. A plane sipping on nuclear energy could take off in London, land in Australia, and then go to South Africa without needing to refuel, and it'll have zero impact on the atmosphere as well.

Plus, the safety risks we tend to knee-jerk envision with nuclear are tied more to its image in popular culture than any real scientific facts. Nuclear submarines have been around since the beginning of the Cold War—when was the last time you heard of an actual meltdown related to one of those? Now compare that to the tons of other fuels that have been leaked into waters over the years. Safe nuclear planes have been feasible since the 1950s, but lost favor when the military decided to start building intercontinental ballistic missiles instead.

While there are a few genuinely valid concerns we need to address before we actually let nuclear-powered planes take off—how to automatically jettison the reactor in case of a plane crash and what to do with spent fuel, for instance— there's no reason why we shouldn't at least hit the power button on research. [Times UK via Crunchgear]

Yoshiaki Arata, a highly respected physicist in Japan, demonstrated a low-energy nuclear reaction at Osaka University on Thursday. In front of a live audience, including reporters from six major newspapers and two TV studios, Arata and a co-professor Yue-Chang Zhang, produced excess heat and helium atoms from deuterium gas.

Arata used pressure to force deuterium gas into an evacuated cell that contained a palladium and zirconium oxide mix (ZrO2-Pd). Arata said that the mix caused the deuterium's nuclei to fuse, raising the temperature in the cell and keeping the center of the cell warm for 50 hours.

Arata's experiment would mark the first time anyone has witnessed cold fusion since 1989, when Martin Fleishmann and Stanely Pons supposedly observed excess heat during electrolysis of heavy water with palladium electrodes. When they and other researchers were unable to make it work again, cold fusion became synonymous with bad science.

But the method Arata showed was "highly reproducible," according to eye witnesses of the event. If nobody calls this demonstration out as a sham, Arata might have finally found the holy grail of cheap and abundant energy—nuclear power, without its destructive heat. [Physicsworld via Slashdot]