A 'properly designed' DT fusion reactor creates much less waste than an equivalently powered nuclear reactor, and moreover, the waste doesn't last as long: with

A 'properly designed' DT fusion reactor creates much less waste than an equivalently powered nuclear reactor, and moreover, the waste doesn't last as long: with a half life of a dozen years, not thousands. This means that you can store the waste just about anywhere where the higher isotopes of the surrounding material are stable, and keep it there for a hundred years, and cycle it out. Since there's not much waste, and you don't need to keep it contained effectively 'forever', there's not much storage that one needs in order to power the world at a steady state. Of course, the problem is what form a 'properly designed' DT reactor would take. This involves a materials problem that hasn't yet been solved: how to maintain structural integrity under massive magnetic and temperature stresses, while keeping enough lithium around to breed tritium out of outgoing neutrons. Not easy. There are other forms of fusion, so called 'aneutronic' fusion, that would avoid these materials and waste problems almost entirely, but in exchange for a much harder plasma physics problem. Bussard, the one talking in the video, believed that the Polywell might be able to achieve aneutronic fusion, between protons and boron-11. This is generally regarded as difficult; if the electrons and ions thermalize, they'll lose energy faster than the fusion could create it. The Polywell could conceivably avoid this though (I worked on a similar project in aneutronic fusion while I was at Princeton). There are two main technical reasons fusion power is still being pursued: it remains a possibility that it's cheaper at ultrahigh capacities (many GW) than coal or solar or wind (we don't really know, but it is in fact quite a possibility), and it's portable, meaning it could be used on submarines and ships (Bussard had funding from the US Navy, for example) and spacecraft. The third, of course, is that academic and engineering disciplines, and especially those federal funded, have astonishing momentum. :-)