> Wouldn't you like to leave this polluted rock behind

Why, so you can screw up another planet?

Even cats can figure out how to bury their waste.

"We often decry the state of funding to NASA. Its limited scope has kept us from returning to the moon for over four decades, maintained only a minimal presence in low-Earth orbit, and failed to develop a capable asteroid defense system"

Wow, what a list. I'm surprised it doesn't include unicorn hunts and panda mating.

> returning to the moon for over four decades

Why?

> minimal presence in low-Earth orbit

Sure, so we can spend all our time learning what happens to people in LEO.

> failed to develop a capable asteroid defense system

Nor do we have an alien defense system, which is exactly as likely to be needed.

We need to go to Mars. Permanently. There is no other manned mission.

> No. Just another anti-nuke FUD summary by mdsolar

And this is just another example of reading comprehension problems on the part of the mdhaters.

> The operators of the reactor know the bundle was there, they waited to see if the experimenters would find it.

Yes, that is *exactly what it says* in the *direct quote from the source*. I'm sorry you have so much trouble parsing this and confused it with something mdsolar created that implied something different. I understand ASL courses are quite inexpensive.

> full imperialism mode is good for noone but Russia

Given the full history of such, it's almost certainly not good for Russia either.

Learning how to be friends and trade successfully with your neighbours is the hallmark of successful long-lived anything. Not a lot of wars between Canada and the US, for instance, to the benefit of everyone, notably the bottom line.

> Not that it matters. Only oil and coal companies have the financial clout to pay for reactors

If an oil and gas company could do it, so could Apple or Google. But they're installing solar.

Why? PV is $1.79/W in 2013, and nukes were around $8 to $10 depending on pre- or post-price-rise numbers (ie, Flamanville).

There is exactly one reason nukes are in the dumps now: CAPEX. When someone figures out how to get that back down to the $4 range, they'll start building them again. As long as it remains north of $6/W, its dead. That simple.

> Environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club [time.com] and campaigns like Solar not
> nuclear [atomicinsights.com] have often been financed by fossil fuel industries

And was the financing of attacks greater or less than the amount the same fossil fuel industries spent denigrating these same people that you say are the problem? I'd like to see the numbers, because it's relatively easy to find that millions of dollars have been spent on the anti-solar campaign:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/opinion/sunday/the-koch-attack-on-solar-energy.html?_r=0
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-solar-kochs-20140420-story.html#page=1
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2014/04/23/the-koch-brothers-extra-baggage/

> And now we heard from the High Schoolers who never heard of Breeder Reactors except
> in the context of Carter banning then because of proliferation risks.

And now we hear from the deliberate forgetfuls who fail to recall Superphénix or the fact that the economics of such systems are so marginal that every one of them has been a failure on those grounds.

Conventional plants are going in around $7.50/We on paper, but if you include the constant price overruns, it's closer to $9 to $10. No one can afford that, which is why everyone is giving up on it. Plans are being abandoned much more rapidly that they are going forward, and that is a simple statement of fac.

But let's not put the blame where it actually is, because that would require self-reflection. No no, let's blame someone else, it's the American Way! So who should we blame... hmmm, how about those patchouli-scented kids we all get our hater-aid out for. Yeah, that's the ticket.

It's a sad comment on any industry if you think a group of people who can't hold down a job at Starbucks have managed to bring down an empire consisting of the largest and most powerful companies in the world, like GE and Westinghouse.

> Even with cheap solar and wind we will still need nuclear, at least until somebody perfects a cheap,
> reliable and long-lived utility scale battery.

Or you do what everyone is actually doing, and using gas peakers in those periods.

And we already have most of what we need in that department for the "opposite reason", that most nukes don't power cycle for peak following.

It makes no difference to me if you have 50% of your load coming from NG turbines to make up for daytime peak that the nukes can't supply, or nighttime baseload that the PV can't supply.

It does make a difference to people who oppose renewables though. They say that building out renewables requires backup, and that you need to factor the price of the backup into the renewable. However, they fail to note that the exact same argument is true for nukes, or even coal plants for that matter, yet they never mention that fact. Imagine that.

> And that is the answer. Too bad it eludes so many in search of their own vision of the holy grail of green

Oh don't go blame this on the "greens". The only green involved is money. *Everyone* selling a particular solution claims it is the only solution needed for everything. You hear this *far more often* from nuclear supporters than PV people.

Example. In this article, the engineer proposes that we should supply most of Ontario's power from a fleet of refit CANDU reactors. CANDUs don't throttle, so what does he propose? Spending billions on adding steam bypass, and then dumping the excess power at night into the St. Lawrence Seaway. So basically reducing the CF from around 90 to maybe 60 to 65%, and thereby increasing the price up into the 10 cent/kWh range FOR BASELOAD (which is currently selling for about 2 cents in Ontario).

http://canadianenergyissues.com/2011/11/09/ontarios-nuclear-electric-generation-can-be-more-flexible-than-natural-gas-fired-generation/

> Solar doesn't provide energy in the evening or nighttime

And nuclear doesn't (generally) peak. Either way you need some other generation capacity to make up for the peaks and valleys. Which is precisely why Ontario had the west's largest coal plant, and now has significant gas peakers, in spite of getting half our power from nukes.

In fact we now have so much load following capability that we can deploy a WHOLE LOT of renewables, essentially for zero upstream cost. Which is precisely what we're doing.

> US starts buying more nuclear power from Canada

Ummm, only one province in Canada really has any nuclear capacity, and we're shutting it down, slowly but surely.

A bunch of the reactors are already permanently offline. Another group at Pickering is slated to go in 2017. Darlington is slated for a rebuild starting shortly (but already 300 million over budget).

The last build was in the 1980s, and the last effort to build a new reactor set at Darlington B was cancelled last year.

Canada tried nuclear. We're done.

> the bad health conditions of the modern diet probably won't kill you until you are least 40

Presupposes the conclusion. Perhaps you might want to look up the term "science"?

"The popularity of these so-called caveman or Stone Age diets is based on the idea that modern humans evolved to eat the way hunter-gatherers did during the Paleolithic—the period from about 2.6 million years ago to the start of the agricultural revolution—and that our genes haven't had enough time to adapt to farmed foods."

We've evolved widespread lactose tolerance in a couple of thousand years and I'm supposed to believe that we haven't figured out wheat in 7000? We're apparently evolving so women can successfully have children later in life, and that's been going on for maybe two generations.

So I call BS.

BS like every other fad diet. I'm not *that* old, and have no interest in diets, and I've already seen the bread diet craze, the water diet, pineapple diet, low-fat diet, no-carb diet and now caveman diets. Every single one of these had plausible sounding excuses for why they would work that went something along the lines of "well your body [insert technobabble] so if you eat [insert types of food] you'll feel full while losing weight!"

And that's in my lifetime. If one looks even a *little* harder (which is all I've done, read one article on it years ago), you'll see this has been going on since people weren't continually starving to death, so basically the last couple of hundred years. For instance, about 400 (300?) years ago everything was mushy gains and/or covered in gravy. That's because "well, your stomach is a bakery, thats why it's warm, so we want to eat things that help the baking process". Then about 200 years ago we realized that was totally wrong. What you want to eat is meat and potatoes, because "well your stomach is a brewery, that's why you burp, so we want things that decompose down into liquids".

"It sounds like it should be that way" is not science, and turns out to be wrong most of the time. I suspect this latest fad will die just as quickly as all the other ones.

The spherical approach seemed like a great idea until they actually built them. Now it's pretty clear the economics are no better than the conventional MFP approaches. See the Disadvantages of this article, especially the first two items listed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_tokamak

> The russians have been operating sodium / lead fast reactors for decades

Sure, especially on their submarines. Excellent safety record there.

> The next step BN-1200

Riiiight. Like the Gen III reactors were going to be so much better than Gen II. Look how that turned out.