The End of Coal Fired Powerplants

The threat is greatly exaggerated. When you compare it to the harm fossil fuels do (especially coal - 74% of our energy production), nuclear fusion becomes really quite tolerable, especially when you consider we wouldn't be holding it for thousands of years, just until it becomes economically viable to launch it off into space.

There are no good alternatives right now.

 

I hate to burst your bubble, but this is just barely above the vaporware stage.

These guys apparently have a machine that has run about 200 "shots", but they're not releasing even one of the Lawson criterion numbers, and not releasing a Q number. Which implies that the numbers they do have are dismal. So they've probably got neutrons, but might be several orders of magnitude from break-even. Or in other words, they're probably no better than half a dozen other small fusion projects currently going.

Were it not for the Skunk Works label, nobody would be paying attention.

 

The entire stockpile of high-level spent nuclear fuel in the US amounts to 70,000 tons. That's a long way from "millions". You must be thinking of coal.

"Radioactive" is not the same as "toxic". The toxicity of uranium is less than that of nicotine or capsacin, both of which you have probably swallowed or inhaled at some point in your life. The mercury in fly ash waste from coal plants remains toxic forever and ever and ever.

It's not waste if we don't waste it. The existing US stockpile of "spent" nuclear fuel contains enough remaining energy to run the entire US electric grid fossil-free for 150 years. It's perfectly clear that at some point in the next century or two, we will have developed full-use fuel cycles that will be capable of using that stuff for fuel, and we will begin using it that way, leaving no long-term waste. In the meantime, dry cask storage is perfectly safe.

Worldwide, coal kills more than 1000 times as many people as nuclear power does, per TWh, and the adoption of nuclear power has so far saved millions of lives. Three Mile Island killed zero, Fukushima killed zero, and the worst possible reactor design imaginable, at Chernobyl, killed 64 people. Meanwhile the coal plant nearest my home kills 200 people every single year in normal operation, from air pollution.

It's not a case of "lesser of two evils". It the case of a real evil versus a fake evil, propped up entirely by irrational fear.

 

I would actually agree with you on this because it's the 100% success rate of the Skunk Works that gives the story credibility. Were it not for the fact that the Skunk Works has never failed to meet previously established goals I would also be skeptical.

 

You confuse the limited amount high-level spent nuclear fuel with the highly radioactive waste. I will reference just a single location of radioactive waste being dealt with today.

http://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/HanfordCleanup

While this related to US weapons efforts the same problems exist for commerical nuclear fission where not just the fuel is highly radioactive but also everything exposed to it. The water use to cool the reactor becomes highly radioactive. The containment structure becomes highly radioactive. All of this radioactive 'waste' is dangerous to people and it's measured in the millions of tons.

Nuclear fusion creates no radioactive waste harmful to people.

 

And you're confusing nuclear power with nuclear weapons. Hanford is a weapons production facility that has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear power.

Thanks for proving my point regarding irrational fearmongering. Here's a little nuclear physics 101: The more highly radioactive something is, the faster it decays. Highly radioactive isotopes decay quickly, and therefore pose no long-term risk. Except for the spent fuel, there is no isotope produced in a nuclear reactor that has a half-life of greater than 30 years. Lifetimes that short are easy to deal with using conventional technology. Once those isotopes decay, the steel from a reactor vessel is completely recyclable.

In fact, reactor steel actually recyclable well before that time, since the level of radiation it emits is so low that it actually reduces the incidence of cancer rather than increasing it. That happened by accident in Taiwan, even though you'll never read about it on the Greenpeace website.

Also untrue in most schemes, including the Skunk Works proposal. D-T fusion and D-D fusion both create neutrons, which cannot be confined magnetically and therefore do cause the walls of the fusion reactor to become radioactive, just like the walls of a fission reactor and for exactly the same reason.

There are some fusion reactions that create no neutrons (so-called aneutronic fusion, relying on the proton-boron11 fusion reaction). But that kind of fusion requires a lot more energy as input, and is therefore even farther from realization.

 

Depending on which National or international agency is quoted chernobyl death toll is ongoing, estimates range from 4k to a million...

 

They can compute all the fake data they want, based on the now discredited linear-no-threshhold hypothesis (which even the ultra-conservative ICRP now admits should never be used in the collective-dose way that the fearmongers so love to push, and upon which all the multi-thousand and even multi-million "estimates" are based -- in the most egregious pushing of junk science since the anti-vaxxers.)

The problem is that when their fake computed data runs up against actual, real-world data from actual living persons, such as those who actually cleaned up the Chernobyl site, and who got a lot more radiation than anyone in the general public got, and who now find that their death rate is lower than that of the general public, the fearmongers pretty much don't have a leg to stand on. But don't expect mere facts to get in the way of a good scary story though. Remember, ignore the facts! Just be afraid, be very afraid! It's noooooooocleur radiaaaaaaashun! Run for your lives! Hide your kids!

Oh, and by the way, did you know that people are living in the Chernobyl "zone of death" right now (illegally) and outliving their counterparts who accepted relocation?

 

wow too good info
really helpful in today's world of increasing technolog
we need this