Such things are often claimed. But every single statement here is false: ad 1) Nuclear fusion as we know it does not rely only on deuterium, it needs tritium.

Such things are often claimed. But every single statement here is false: ad 1) Nuclear fusion as we know it does not rely only on deuterium, it needs tritium. Tritium needs to be produced by uranium fission, and after having a hypothetical fusion power plant running, by a breeding process. The technology of that breeding process is today completely unsolved. 2) Fusion reactors, if they aver will exist. will be large and will have a very large neutron flux. The will have breeding blankets which need to be several meters in size. Anything within these structures will be activated by neutrons. That means common materials such as carbon steel can't be used, because the carbon would become highly radioactive. Also, the neutron radiation weakens all known materials so that the structures will probably need to be periodically replaced. This alone will probably lead to a higher amount of nuclear waste than uranium fission plants. 3) It is correct that the fusion reaction will stop to operate when the core is damaged. But this does not mean that the plant is safe then. It will contain substantial amounts of tritium and other radionuclides. By the way, you may have seen nice photos of scientists in white coats which stand in the vacuum vessel of a a fusion power plant. Except that, if there were actually fusion to happen in these devices, nobody could enter them before they have been decontaminated in a time-consuming and expensive process. Consequently, in experiments such as ITER, no fusion happens at all. In addition, a fusion plant will be very complex, and especially it will work with extremely large magnetic fields which have by themselves a tremendous energy content. If there is any electrical or structural failure, it is likely that the whole structure just blows apart. And it will not safe to be standing nearby. 4) As said, tritium is a key ingredient in the fusion technology that is aimed for, and it also happens to be a key ingredient of thermonuclear weapons. In addition, the required breeding technology is also highly relevant for military uses, because if you can breed tritium from lithium, you can also breed weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. 5. Steam turbines are not physically simpler than wind turbines. Apart from that wind power converters, as well as photovoltaic energy converters, can come pretty close to the physically possible optimum, there is another problem: Large steam turbines need cooling for thermodynamical reasons. Lots of cooling. The amount of cooling required for today's uranium fission plants is already a problem. For one, they cannot be built in arbitrary places - they need to be at rivers or at the coast. As the fukushiuma plant has shown, having a nuclear plant at the seaside can be a bit risky. But cooling by rivers also has costs, heating up a river to much messes up its ecology. Also, France often has energy problems in the summer, and the reason is that the rivers are too hot to cool its numerous nuclear plants. Here another article on further problems of nuclear fusion - see the article of Michael Moyer. http://energyskeptic.com/2014/why-fusion-is-still-30-years-away/ http://energyskeptic.com/2014/why-fusion-is-still-30-years-a... As a closing remark, I am not saying that fusion power plants are impossible. Sometimes, technological break-troughs happen, similar to the advances which made airplanes and aviation possible. But today, we don't even know what is required to make it possible. We are in a similar position like people from 1800 were in respect to aviation. And also, we have more urgent problems to solve - we need clean energy within the next decade, not in the next century. And fortunately, we do have the technology for that, we just need to put it in march.