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.

That's actually pretty cheap when you consider how much most households spend on electricity in a single year. In fact, Hyperion's reactors can reliably power up to 20,000 homes each—reducing the price of energy to about 10 cents per watt. Again, the idea has a lot of upside, but let's not forget that they still have not developed a way to eliminate the waste it will generate (even a softball-sized amount over 5 years will add up), and burying a radioactive device in our backyards may be a hard-sell for some communities. [Hyperion via Money via DVICE]

He also revealed a few interesting tidbits about their system including the following quote about the possibility of turning their fuel into a bomb:

Our fuel is very unique. It's uranium hydride. UH3 is the chemical formula. Low-enriched, about 10 percent [uranium isotope]-235, the rest is U-238. By comparison, bomb-grade fuel is about 98 percent enriched.

On the problem of nuclear waste:

The waste that comes out of our reactor after powering 20,000 homes for 8-10 years is about the size of a football. Using coal and gas over the same time frame, the waste stream for just you, after factoring in CO2 emissions, would overflow Mile High Stadium in Denver. So our waste stream is very concentrated, and yes, we have to do something with it, but there are known ways of dealing with it. For security reasons, we're not disclosing what will happen to it, but it's not going to just sit in some bucket somewhere. Recycling was "baked in" to our reactor design from the beginning.

I can't say that any of this chatter has done much to overcome my skepticism, but word is that he actually found a buyer for that first backyard system scheduled for 2013. So we will have to wait and see if this will be the next big thing in power production. [Hyperion Power and Techrockies via Treehugger]