Brave New World

The easiest way to feel better is to realize that there's no side-effect-free way to generate power. If you want to live a modern existence with nice things, nuclear is the safest way to do it. The alternative to nuclear power is coal, which puts out as much radioactive waste as a nuclear plant (except up the smokestack instead of used fuel rods), plus tons of heavy metals and shit, plus massive environmental damage strip mining for coal, plus the occasional fly ash spill (probably more damaging than the current state of Fukushima). Wind/solar can't deliver baseloads without leveling systems, which are either huge environmental alterations (pumped storage) or huge quantities of batteries made with materials that are toxic to produce. And biofuels consume huge amounts of land, take food out of the mouths of poor people, and contribute to aquifer depletion. The construction and operation of wind turbines has killed more people than nuclear, while generating a tiny fraction of the power. People fall off turbines, blades shatter or hurl gigantic chunks of ice. Coal passively kills tens of thousands of people every year with pollution. But those aren't big sexy accidents that the media can work themselves into a lather over. It's not just you, generally speaking humans are really bad at comparing probability. We worry about flying when driving is more likely to kill us, because it's an unusual thing that we don't normally do. And we worry about radiation instead of falling off a wind turbine.

Cold war history is probably the most interesting period of time in human history. 

Black holes are weird to conceptualize because a lot of their properties (gravity, density, how much they warp space-time) is not just really large, but infinite. Imagine how dense the sun is and how much gravity it exudes. Now, multiply those numbers times a trillion trillion trillion trillion. Then multiply THAT number by 10100000000. Multiply that by any number you want, no matter how big. The singularity is still denser and its gravity is still stronger. I said nothing can "burst" out of a black hole because the escape velocity of a black hole isn't just some arbitrary number that just so happens to be higher than light such that in theory you could just go that number + 1 and pop right out of the black hole. There is no velocity that would allow for escape. Space is curved in on itself. Even if you went infinitely fast, you would not be able to escape. Once inside, space is so distorted that every direction points to the singularity - even time as we know it becomes a spatial dimension pointing to the singularity; so, in other words, even if you did go infinitely fast, you would have to go in some direction and the only direction that exists anymore is towards the singularity. The closest thing that happens to what you are asking is that sometimes when matter falls into a black hole, it heats up so much that it emits a ton of energy. This stuff isn't bursting out of the black hole, since it's not past the "point of no return" - the event horizon. It's the result of matter from the accretion disk heating up. Sometimes, very massive black holes will shoot out jets of plasma from their poles, but again, this is due to interactions of matter in the accretion disk. Black holes are terrifying.

Socialism is a different way of organising the economy overall, where workers are entitled to a share of the profits their company makes commensurate with some agreed-upon metric of wealth created, ideally equal to the amount of labour they have performed for the company. E: companies are, of course, not the only way of organising a theoretical socialist economy but they're a common one. Picture it this way. Social democracy is where workers go to a privately-owned company and work for a wage, and the government takes some of the profits as taxation and doles it out as social spending. Socialism is where the workers own the company jointly and are paid a percentage of its profits, rather than a fixed wage. That's very simplistic but it's an illustration. The issue socialists tend to have with social democracies, besides the worrying tendency of social democrats to embrace fascism when presented with a choice between it and socialism, is that capitalism is inherently unstable by socialist thought, and so is any system built on it. The New Deal is used as an example of how hard-won concessions by the state to labour can be eroded by the constant application of a system of low-key propaganda and the gradual concentration in the hands of those with money.