> 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.

> That $100 car battery? A lithium-ion equivalent that's 1/10th the weight for the same
> capacity and probably even more cold cranking amps might be $80.

Sheesh. Why not also demand it be made out of unicorn tails and magic dust?

Li-ion is 1/3rd the weight. 1/3rd, not 1/10th. It doesn't have to be any lighter.

Li-ion also has less *power*. Be sure you understand the difference between *power* and *energy*. A li-ion battery will have *less* cranking amps, not more.

> I know it's not XKCD, but there's relevant SMBC [smbc-comics.com] and PHD [phdcomics.com] comics.

Minor complaint with the second: we know from studies that the problem is not the university PR departments, but the researchers themselves.

> Why do physicists insist on treating gravity as a force?

Because everything else works that way.

> Since Einstein, we know gravity is the curvature of space-time

No, since Einstein we know that Einstein's model is that gravity is the curvature of space-time.

Before Einstein, we thought it was a force between objects, or objects and a space-filling field.

There's no reason to suggest one model is inherently "more correct" than the other. Personally, I *like* the geometric model more, which almost certainly means it's wrong.

The good news is that such an experiment is likely far, far less expensive than the LHC. Therefore it is also more likely to happen.

Someone needs to write a paper on the inverse relationship between CAPEX and chance that the experiment is carried out. Of course, that relationship is likely identical to many, many others.

> Except those who continue working on it.

Maybe. But there's a long history of people working on projects they know are going nowhere while keeping up a brave face. I'm sure you've worked on a few yourself.

> You may call this hand waving, but the best way to establish this is an actual experiment.

Absolutely! Which is why I brought up the Teller example. The pattern is *exactly* analogous.

> This article from 2 years ago [slashdot.org] and its accompanying chart [imgur.com] make
> a good case that we'd have fusion already if we as a civilization seriously funded it.

It doesn't make a difference how fast you throw money at it. If the parts that go into the reactor cost more than the economic value of the electricity that comes out, then no one is going to ever build one. And right now, that's absolutely the case.

It's a little hard to do the math on something like ITER, which runs continually. On the other hand, it's really easy to do the math for something like NIF, where the inputs are nicely quantized. NIF burns a fuel packet that costs thousands of dollars. Under the most ridiculous future scenarios, they thing they can get that down to 50 dollars. Mind you we're not talking about the machine here, just the fuel.

When burned perfectly, which of course we can't actually do, we expect to get about 13 MJ of fusion. We might extract 25% of that energy as electricity. That sells for about 5 cents.

So $50 in, $0.05 out. And that's the best case scenario.

> Actually, it was shut down because Canada had a surplus of heavy water

Which says a lot about the industry as it currently stands. In spite of numerous technical advantages, actually selling a D2O reactor seemed beyond the capabilities of the country.

> Canada developed a new technology for enriching deuterium from water, based on catalyzed exchange

Currently small-scale system suitable for lab production and make-up supplies for the existing reactors, based on semi-enriched feedstock. That feedstock comes from LPCE.

> I thought it was kind of a general purpose device that could do other things.

Oh sure, but no one was *banking* on it. The basic long and short is that if you detect the Higgs everyone gets a Nobel and a slap on the back. If you don't detect anything, you get nothing.

So the entire project is focused on Higgs, because we already know it exists, as opposed to actually useful science like supersymetric partners which no one really has any clue if they exist or how to really look for them.

It is entirely possible LHC will return really useful new science. It is equally likely it will not. In comparison, I *guarantee* you that the EELT will generate new science, science that the standard model can't explain. So in terms of cash-for-outcomes, it's no contest.

> The old FermiLab accelerator could do all manner of experiments

Indeed, and it spent the last decade of its life spending hundreds of millions measuring the top quark mass to the 6th decimal. One can imagine less useful ways to spend money, but you'll have a hard time doing so.