10 ms·

God I wish we could Manhattan Project this shit. I'm a layman too but I get the impression that the theory is basically there and we just need to figure out th

God I wish we could Manhattan Project this shit. I'm a layman too but I get the impression that the theory is basically there and we just need to figure out the engineering. That's a solvable problem with lots of money and lots of teams. Are we going to wait until the sea level rises 20 feet and then say, geez, compared to the costs this imposed, fusion would have been easy?

kortilla 6y ago
Fission is a solved engineering and science problem though and we’re still blocking it to let the sea levels rise. Point being, nobody actually cares about climate change enough to make hard decisions so a Manhattan style project is highly unlikely.
- orthecreedence 6y ago
  Yes, I've been saying it over and over: raise the price of oil until gasoline et al are $20+/gallon. Then nuclear will be cheap. Why are we letting a silly thing like scarcity, supply, and demand dictate whether we self-destruct?
  - jdeibele 6y ago
    I've been saying for a long time that the US should increase the tax on gas steadily every year. Even a nickel a year would be OK but more would be better. People would be able to plan on the price increasing every year and make sound economic decisions on whether they wanted to move closer to work, etc. Unfortunately, it became apparent about the same time that the US is almost incapable of doing something in an organized fashion. People would scream about the price of gas going up and it would be rolled back. Or there'd be subsidies that would negate the tax increases.
    - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
      Fuel in the US is already much more expensive than two decades ago. I remember buying a gallon for around 90 cents in 1999, and at the same time I read a newspaper article about some immigrant-run stations on the Jersey shore that had slashed their prices to several cents below that, as they were content to make a tiny profit margin and play a long game. Now a gallon costs more than twice as much as then, but as far as I can tell the average American has not made significant lifestyle changes with regard to vehicle usage: they just suck it up.
      - Xorlev 6y ago
        $0.90 in 1999 is $1.41 today. Near me, gas is ~$2 (give or take). So, more expensive (~40-50%), but not double.
        Mediterraneo10 6y ago
        Granted, it may not be quite double, but average American salaries have not entirely kept pace with inflation in the last twenty years, so fuel expenses are appreciably higher than simply counting the inflation in.
        jacquesm 6y ago
        Here it's closer to $2 / liter. (1/4 of a Gallon).
        tremon 6y ago
        Sure, but your "here" isn't in the US.
        jacquesm 6y ago
        Indeed, which is why I provided that datapoint.
        jsight 6y ago
        0.90 is also an outlier for 1999. The average price was closer to $1.20 back then.
  - nine_k 6y ago
    Most fossil-based electric generation is not oil; it's either natural gas (reasonably clean, though it does produce a lot of CO₂), or coal (terrible on many counts). I'd say that killing coal would have a large effect. It would also put entire town populations out of work — a really hard problem, read about how UK tackled it in 1970s and 1980s, it was painful and ugly.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      The death of UK coal was all to do with economics of importing coal and labour prices and relations, rather than climate change. But also that's why most green parties talk of a "just transition", subsidy to the workers who will lose their jobs.
      - hardlianotion 6y ago
        It was also to do with cleaner energy generation and taking advantage of natural gas resources in North Sea. Dash to Gas was a major enabler of the switch away from coal in the 90s.
    - DennisP 6y ago
      At the end of 2016 there were 50,000 coal miners in the US.[1] Their average annual pay is $29K.[2] We could give each of them one million dollars, invested and paying out 3% annually, and the $50B it costs would be a drop in the bucket compared to the economic benefit of eliminating those carbon emissions. In fact, it would even be cheaper than the healthcare costs of pollution from coal plants, which amounts to $187 billion in the U.S.[3] And in Appalachia, healthcare costs from coal production are $75B annually, so we'd come out ahead there too, which would be a double benefit for the miners since they'd be both richer and healthier. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_States#Coal_mining_employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Stat... [2] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coal-miner-salary-SRCH_KO0,10.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coal-miner-salary-SRCH_KO... [3] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/coal-costs-us-half-trillion-annually-in-hidden-costs-study-says https://e360.yale.edu/digest/coal-costs-us-half-trillion-ann...
  - tuatoru 6y ago
    > Then nuclear will be cheap. But it still won't be built, because Solar PV and wind are roughly two-thirds the cost and falling. (Including the cost of backup power supplies for periods of low sun or low wind.) (Not to mention having much shorter construction times until first revenue, lower delay risk, lower investment risk, and lower operation and maintenance costs.) Nuclear had its chance in the 1990s. Today, we have cheaper and better options.
- dchichkov 6y ago
  Is there a way to make people care? Personally, I think, for United States it does make perfect sense to redirect, say, half of the military budget onto solving real homeland security issues: climate change, sustainability, ecology, pandemics. There might be enough budget there to address climate change [1]. It'd be a risk to spend less on military, but considering that the United States has nuclear weapons and allies, is it a risk really? [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02460-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02460-9
  - entropicdrifter 6y ago
    The real risk is politicians not getting their kickbacks from defense suppliers, sadly. The military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about has a death-grip on the congressional budget, even against the wishes of Pentagon leaders.
- numpad0 6y ago
  Politics, NIMBY, risks of accidents, and radioactive materials pollution are unsolved problems. You could argue it’s sociology than engineering but a problem nonetheless. I think nukes is the future but nukes belong in space; just build some fission on high orbit to perfect fusion, and bring the meat down over microwave or as bulk hydrocarbons or whatever that works. Solar system has unlimited free meal supplies of raw materials on first-come-first-serve basis. It’s been said that extraterrestrially constructed spacecraft can be launched for free merely by gently pushing it out of dockyard, or at most shooting out of a maglev train, for at least half a century. So build some gigantic fission satellites in space!
  - Lammy 6y ago
    > You could argue it’s sociology than engineering but a problem nonetheless. It can be both when the consent is manufactured! :)
  - vladTheInhaler 6y ago
    Why do fission in orbit when you have unimpeded access to a huge natural fusion plant, and virtually unlimited real estate to harvest its energy?
    - imtringued 6y ago
      People underestimate what 21% efficient means when it comes to solar panels... If you bring a solar panel to space and receive sunlight 24/7 at 44% higher intensity than the best place on earth you will generate an obscene amount of electricity.
- hunter-gatherer 6y ago
  A month or so ago I was listening to an NPR interview about insects. The interviewee said that the insect population in Germany has declined something like 75% in 25 years. He noted that people don't tend to notice big changes over the span of a couple decades, which is a good point, and helps explain why climate change will probably never be seriously tackled. Edit- link to article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/18/warning-of-ecological-armageddon-after-dramatic-plunge-in-insect-numbers https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/18/warning-...
  - api 6y ago
    It will be tackled through adaptation. Some coastal cities may die. Others may have to spend a ton on remediation. More people will migrate inland, and farming centers will shift. It’s far too late to stop it with prevention, though there is still value in trying to cut CO2 when possible to blunt it a bit.
Lammy 6y ago
> Are we going to wait until the sea level rises 20 feet and then say, geez, compared to the costs this imposed, fusion would have been easy? Well, yeah, the US spent the last 50 years (e.g. "WTF Happened In 1971?"[0]) widening the income gap and doing everything possible to keep their "undesirable" ethnic groups as poor as possible. When the bottom falls out, the only people left standing will be the people who would have been able to use the nice water fountain back when America was "Great", and anyone suffering will get individual blame for their lack of individual bootstraps. e: In case I was unclear, I think this is a bad thing :) [0]: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/, but I would ask "WTF Happened in 1968?" instead.
logicchains 6y ago
>God I wish we could Manhattan Project this shit. Interesting point of reference: the Manhattan project cost around around $25 billion in today's dollars. The US government spent at least $6 trillion on the coronavirus response, which could buy 200 Manhattan Projects. Coronavirus will kill around a million people this year at most; air pollution kills around five million per year (and sea level rises could kill a lot more).
- 01100011 6y ago
  Aren't you implying, intentionally or not, that a "Manhattan Project" level of expenditure, $25 billion, is enough to make meaningful progress towards commercial fusion energy production? I don't think that is a given.
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    The implication is rather that we’ve grown much more inept when it comes to getting things done.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      Because there isn't an existential war going on forcing people to listen to the people who want to be economically efficient.
      - xyzzyz 6y ago
        Yeah it’s not like we’re in any kind of emergency that required reorganizing the whole society and economy, or anything like that.
    - ars 6y ago
      Or because all the low hanging fruit is plucked.
  - IanCal 6y ago
    That's roughly the total cost of ITER.
SiempreViernes 6y ago
Its amazing how cutting emission by regulation is completely left out of the list of options, somehow spending infinite money is seen as easier than getting congress to act... Anyway, I let Wellerstein reply to this: """The Manhattan Project was an unusual, somewhat dubious enterprise that had massive, world-affecting consequences. Ignoring that not only misunderstands the Manhattan Project, it misunderstands what happens when you pour essentially unlimited resources into a given field — which actually is the primary goal of those who use this metaphor. The problem is, the Manhattan Project “worked,” if by “worked” you mean, “produced atomic bombs for use in the Pacific theatre during World War II.” It almost didn’t work — there are plenty of reasons to believe that the war would have been over fairly soon with or without the bombs (the main historical question is not whether it would soon end, but on what terms and at what costs).""" http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/02/do-we-want-another-manhattan-project/ http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/02/do-we-want-another...
- kenneth 6y ago
  It's widely believed that the use of the bombs in WWII as a practical demonstration of the technology is what lead to there not being a WWIII and generally a period of (granted, uneasy) world stability throughout the cold war. Thanks to the bomb's use at the end of an almost-finished conflict, everyone was too afraid of the destruction to turn the cold war hot. Without it, the cold war would have turned hot and a lot more nukes would have been used. Who knows what the world would look like today without those two bombs.
  - ahelwer 6y ago
    Love too incinerate 150,000 civilians instead of some random atoll with media floating in a boat a few miles away This is just one of many lacklustre attempts at justifying a hideous war crime. From Eisenhower: "I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon."
  - pasabagi 6y ago
    I think the USSR was typically very keen to avoid a war for obvious reasons: they had a much smaller economy, exhausted population, significantly smaller military and massively smaller industrial base than the West. America was more keen, but the logistics of actually invading the USSR would make any war essentially unwinnable. Maybe if the nukes didn't exist, the USSR would have annexed western Berlin, but I don't really know how they would have managed more than that, even if they had wanted to. I also don't think nuclear weapons would have prevented a war if the USSR was more aggressive or more close to the USA in military power.
olau 6y ago
Fusion is not going to solve the sea level rise problem. You can see this by comparing it to fission. Fission fuels is not expensive on a kWh base, so cheaper fuel is not really a big advantage. Fusion plants produce radioactive waste too (perhaps less?), so you don't save yourself from that headache. Which isn't actually that big of a problem either, even if the costs are probably underestimated for fission plants. Now, the real killer for fission is the cost of the plants. They are just so incredibly complex and expensive that they are not competitive. Will a fusion plant be cheaper? Probably not. It will most likely, with current tech, be much more expensive. So it won't be able to compete with fission. And fission can't compete (in most parts of the world) with renewables, that are still falling exponentially in price. So fusion may still be interesting from a scientific stand point, and perhaps things will change in the far future. An argument I often see is that renewables need storage, and that's true. But so does a fission or a fusion plant, unless you overbuild and accept a bad capacity factor. Some amount of overbuild combined with storage looks like the most economical solution currently - the specifics depend very much on where you are in the world.
- deweller 6y ago
  Fusion does not create any long-lived radioactive waste.
  - tyho 6y ago
    No, but fast neutrons are created in some processes which induce long lived radiation in reactor materials though.
    - willis936 6y ago
      100 years is not “long lived” in the context of radioactive waste disposal. http://www.acamedia.info/sciences/J_G/fusion.html http://www.acamedia.info/sciences/J_G/fusion.html
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Fusion will likely produce a larger volume of waste contaminated enough to prevent easy disposal. That could very well make the waste more expensive to deal with.
pfdietz 6y ago
Fission was a fundamentally easier problem than fusion. The equivalent of ignition was achieved in 1942 after one year of effort.

kortilla 6y ago

Fission is a solved engineering and science problem though and we’re still blocking it to let the sea levels rise. Point being, nobody actually cares about climate change enough to make hard decisions so a Manhattan style project is highly unlikely.

orthecreedence 6y ago
Yes, I've been saying it over and over: raise the price of oil until gasoline et al are $20+/gallon. Then nuclear will be cheap. Why are we letting a silly thing like scarcity, supply, and demand dictate whether we self-destruct?
- jdeibele 6y ago
  I've been saying for a long time that the US should increase the tax on gas steadily every year. Even a nickel a year would be OK but more would be better. People would be able to plan on the price increasing every year and make sound economic decisions on whether they wanted to move closer to work, etc. Unfortunately, it became apparent about the same time that the US is almost incapable of doing something in an organized fashion. People would scream about the price of gas going up and it would be rolled back. Or there'd be subsidies that would negate the tax increases.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    Fuel in the US is already much more expensive than two decades ago. I remember buying a gallon for around 90 cents in 1999, and at the same time I read a newspaper article about some immigrant-run stations on the Jersey shore that had slashed their prices to several cents below that, as they were content to make a tiny profit margin and play a long game. Now a gallon costs more than twice as much as then, but as far as I can tell the average American has not made significant lifestyle changes with regard to vehicle usage: they just suck it up.
    - Xorlev 6y ago
      $0.90 in 1999 is $1.41 today. Near me, gas is ~$2 (give or take). So, more expensive (~40-50%), but not double.
      - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
        Granted, it may not be quite double, but average American salaries have not entirely kept pace with inflation in the last twenty years, so fuel expenses are appreciably higher than simply counting the inflation in.
      - jacquesm 6y ago
        Here it's closer to $2 / liter. (1/4 of a Gallon).
        tremon 6y ago
        Sure, but your "here" isn't in the US.
        jacquesm 6y ago
        Indeed, which is why I provided that datapoint.
      - jsight 6y ago
        0.90 is also an outlier for 1999. The average price was closer to $1.20 back then.
- nine_k 6y ago
  Most fossil-based electric generation is not oil; it's either natural gas (reasonably clean, though it does produce a lot of CO₂), or coal (terrible on many counts). I'd say that killing coal would have a large effect. It would also put entire town populations out of work — a really hard problem, read about how UK tackled it in 1970s and 1980s, it was painful and ugly.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    The death of UK coal was all to do with economics of importing coal and labour prices and relations, rather than climate change. But also that's why most green parties talk of a "just transition", subsidy to the workers who will lose their jobs.
    - hardlianotion 6y ago
      It was also to do with cleaner energy generation and taking advantage of natural gas resources in North Sea. Dash to Gas was a major enabler of the switch away from coal in the 90s.
  - DennisP 6y ago
    At the end of 2016 there were 50,000 coal miners in the US.[1] Their average annual pay is $29K.[2] We could give each of them one million dollars, invested and paying out 3% annually, and the $50B it costs would be a drop in the bucket compared to the economic benefit of eliminating those carbon emissions. In fact, it would even be cheaper than the healthcare costs of pollution from coal plants, which amounts to $187 billion in the U.S.[3] And in Appalachia, healthcare costs from coal production are $75B annually, so we'd come out ahead there too, which would be a double benefit for the miners since they'd be both richer and healthier. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_States#Coal_mining_employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Stat... [2] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coal-miner-salary-SRCH_KO0,10.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coal-miner-salary-SRCH_KO... [3] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/coal-costs-us-half-trillion-annually-in-hidden-costs-study-says https://e360.yale.edu/digest/coal-costs-us-half-trillion-ann...
- tuatoru 6y ago
  > Then nuclear will be cheap. But it still won't be built, because Solar PV and wind are roughly two-thirds the cost and falling. (Including the cost of backup power supplies for periods of low sun or low wind.) (Not to mention having much shorter construction times until first revenue, lower delay risk, lower investment risk, and lower operation and maintenance costs.) Nuclear had its chance in the 1990s. Today, we have cheaper and better options.
dchichkov 6y ago
Is there a way to make people care? Personally, I think, for United States it does make perfect sense to redirect, say, half of the military budget onto solving real homeland security issues: climate change, sustainability, ecology, pandemics. There might be enough budget there to address climate change [1]. It'd be a risk to spend less on military, but considering that the United States has nuclear weapons and allies, is it a risk really? [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02460-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02460-9
- entropicdrifter 6y ago
  The real risk is politicians not getting their kickbacks from defense suppliers, sadly. The military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about has a death-grip on the congressional budget, even against the wishes of Pentagon leaders.
numpad0 6y ago
Politics, NIMBY, risks of accidents, and radioactive materials pollution are unsolved problems. You could argue it’s sociology than engineering but a problem nonetheless. I think nukes is the future but nukes belong in space; just build some fission on high orbit to perfect fusion, and bring the meat down over microwave or as bulk hydrocarbons or whatever that works. Solar system has unlimited free meal supplies of raw materials on first-come-first-serve basis. It’s been said that extraterrestrially constructed spacecraft can be launched for free merely by gently pushing it out of dockyard, or at most shooting out of a maglev train, for at least half a century. So build some gigantic fission satellites in space!
- Lammy 6y ago
  > You could argue it’s sociology than engineering but a problem nonetheless. It can be both when the consent is manufactured! :)
- vladTheInhaler 6y ago
  Why do fission in orbit when you have unimpeded access to a huge natural fusion plant, and virtually unlimited real estate to harvest its energy?
  - imtringued 6y ago
    People underestimate what 21% efficient means when it comes to solar panels... If you bring a solar panel to space and receive sunlight 24/7 at 44% higher intensity than the best place on earth you will generate an obscene amount of electricity.
hunter-gatherer 6y ago
A month or so ago I was listening to an NPR interview about insects. The interviewee said that the insect population in Germany has declined something like 75% in 25 years. He noted that people don't tend to notice big changes over the span of a couple decades, which is a good point, and helps explain why climate change will probably never be seriously tackled. Edit- link to article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/18/warning-of-ecological-armageddon-after-dramatic-plunge-in-insect-numbers https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/18/warning-...
- api 6y ago
  It will be tackled through adaptation. Some coastal cities may die. Others may have to spend a ton on remediation. More people will migrate inland, and farming centers will shift. It’s far too late to stop it with prevention, though there is still value in trying to cut CO2 when possible to blunt it a bit.

Lammy 6y ago

> Are we going to wait until the sea level rises 20 feet and then say, geez, compared to the costs this imposed, fusion would have been easy? Well, yeah, the US spent the last 50 years (e.g. "WTF Happened In 1971?"[0]) widening the income gap and doing everything possible to keep their "undesirable" ethnic groups as poor as possible. When the bottom falls out, the only people left standing will be the people who would have been able to use the nice water fountain back when America was "Great", and anyone suffering will get individual blame for their lack of individual bootstraps. e: In case I was unclear, I think this is a bad thing :) [0]: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/, but I would ask "WTF Happened in 1968?" instead.

logicchains 6y ago

>God I wish we could Manhattan Project this shit. Interesting point of reference: the Manhattan project cost around around $25 billion in today's dollars. The US government spent at least $6 trillion on the coronavirus response, which could buy 200 Manhattan Projects. Coronavirus will kill around a million people this year at most; air pollution kills around five million per year (and sea level rises could kill a lot more).

01100011 6y ago
Aren't you implying, intentionally or not, that a "Manhattan Project" level of expenditure, $25 billion, is enough to make meaningful progress towards commercial fusion energy production? I don't think that is a given.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  The implication is rather that we’ve grown much more inept when it comes to getting things done.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    Because there isn't an existential war going on forcing people to listen to the people who want to be economically efficient.
    - xyzzyz 6y ago
      Yeah it’s not like we’re in any kind of emergency that required reorganizing the whole society and economy, or anything like that.
  - ars 6y ago
    Or because all the low hanging fruit is plucked.
- IanCal 6y ago
  That's roughly the total cost of ITER.

SiempreViernes 6y ago

Its amazing how cutting emission by regulation is completely left out of the list of options, somehow spending infinite money is seen as easier than getting congress to act... Anyway, I let Wellerstein reply to this: """The Manhattan Project was an unusual, somewhat dubious enterprise that had massive, world-affecting consequences. Ignoring that not only misunderstands the Manhattan Project, it misunderstands what happens when you pour essentially unlimited resources into a given field — which actually is the primary goal of those who use this metaphor. The problem is, the Manhattan Project “worked,” if by “worked” you mean, “produced atomic bombs for use in the Pacific theatre during World War II.” It almost didn’t work — there are plenty of reasons to believe that the war would have been over fairly soon with or without the bombs (the main historical question is not whether it would soon end, but on what terms and at what costs).""" http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/02/do-we-want-another-manhattan-project/ http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/02/do-we-want-another...

kenneth 6y ago
It's widely believed that the use of the bombs in WWII as a practical demonstration of the technology is what lead to there not being a WWIII and generally a period of (granted, uneasy) world stability throughout the cold war. Thanks to the bomb's use at the end of an almost-finished conflict, everyone was too afraid of the destruction to turn the cold war hot. Without it, the cold war would have turned hot and a lot more nukes would have been used. Who knows what the world would look like today without those two bombs.
- ahelwer 6y ago
  Love too incinerate 150,000 civilians instead of some random atoll with media floating in a boat a few miles away This is just one of many lacklustre attempts at justifying a hideous war crime. From Eisenhower: "I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon."
- pasabagi 6y ago
  I think the USSR was typically very keen to avoid a war for obvious reasons: they had a much smaller economy, exhausted population, significantly smaller military and massively smaller industrial base than the West. America was more keen, but the logistics of actually invading the USSR would make any war essentially unwinnable. Maybe if the nukes didn't exist, the USSR would have annexed western Berlin, but I don't really know how they would have managed more than that, even if they had wanted to. I also don't think nuclear weapons would have prevented a war if the USSR was more aggressive or more close to the USA in military power.

olau 6y ago

Fusion is not going to solve the sea level rise problem. You can see this by comparing it to fission. Fission fuels is not expensive on a kWh base, so cheaper fuel is not really a big advantage. Fusion plants produce radioactive waste too (perhaps less?), so you don't save yourself from that headache. Which isn't actually that big of a problem either, even if the costs are probably underestimated for fission plants. Now, the real killer for fission is the cost of the plants. They are just so incredibly complex and expensive that they are not competitive. Will a fusion plant be cheaper? Probably not. It will most likely, with current tech, be much more expensive. So it won't be able to compete with fission. And fission can't compete (in most parts of the world) with renewables, that are still falling exponentially in price. So fusion may still be interesting from a scientific stand point, and perhaps things will change in the far future. An argument I often see is that renewables need storage, and that's true. But so does a fission or a fusion plant, unless you overbuild and accept a bad capacity factor. Some amount of overbuild combined with storage looks like the most economical solution currently - the specifics depend very much on where you are in the world.

deweller 6y ago
Fusion does not create any long-lived radioactive waste.
- tyho 6y ago
  No, but fast neutrons are created in some processes which induce long lived radiation in reactor materials though.
  - willis936 6y ago
    100 years is not “long lived” in the context of radioactive waste disposal. http://www.acamedia.info/sciences/J_G/fusion.html http://www.acamedia.info/sciences/J_G/fusion.html
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Fusion will likely produce a larger volume of waste contaminated enough to prevent easy disposal. That could very well make the waste more expensive to deal with.

pfdietz 6y ago

Fission was a fundamentally easier problem than fusion. The equivalent of ignition was achieved in 1942 after one year of effort.