What's so great about fusion?

Question

If we think about the kind of fusion the sun does, it's great. It just consumes plentifully available hydrogen and produces harmless helium and almost undetectable neutrinos. However, from what I've heard, the likely candidates for fusion power generation are hydrogen-1 to helium fusion.

They use more rare isotopes like deuterium or tritium, or even elements other than hydrogen. Finding fuel won't be quite as easy. They might produce more hazardous by-products, such as neutrons, that would have to be shielded, and by absorbing them the shielding might become radioactive waste. Or they might produce light radioactive isotopes as a direct fusion product.

So does fusion have any advantage over fission? Fission also produces a large amount of energy from a small quantity of fuel, and produces no greenhouse gases. It has disadvantages like hazardous, difficult to clean up waste products, and the possibility of accidents, but would fusion be just as dangerous?

SuperCioci@ · Accepted Answer

Tritium and Deuterium are not at all rare.
Deuterium is found in seawater, tritium is not very common in nature but it's quite easy to make from Lithium, which is one of the most common elements in the Earth's crust.
Fission requires uranium, which is not all common on Earth. And it's heavy, which means it would be very expensive to make (as opposed to tritium).
By the way, the Earth is also running out of uranium, which is why scientists are also looking for new 'hybrid' technologies that would use less uranium while enhancing the power output.

Fusion does not produce long lived radioactive waste products; at the moment (with the current technology), only the interior of the reactor would get radioactive (halftime of about 1-2 years, so nothing exceptionally dangerous) because of the interactions between the plasma and the materials that make the reactor.
The reactor does not have to be exposed to air (maintenance can be carried out remotely, with robots) so there is no need of diffusing radioactive material into the atmosphere, plus this problem may be overcome in the future if material science devises some special material that does not interact with the plasma, or whose interaction does not result in radioactive products.
In the case of an accident, all the energy in the plasma will get absorbed by the confinement walls.
It is very unlikely that an explosion will not be contained by the plant/

This is true for magnetically confined fusion, I am not as familiar with inertial confinement.

As far as incidents are concerned, every power source has risks.
Do you know how many incidents connected to oil extraction and consumption there are around the world? All the oil tankers that sink, the oil platforms that blow up?
People are used to this kind of stuff, so a nuclear power plant that has an accident gets far more attention than oil related issues.
It is like when a plane crashes: gets far more attention than car crashes, just because we hear about car crashes every day.
Unless the whole world is ready to go back to the Middle Ages, with no internet, no technology and no electricity, mankind needs a new source of energy.
And it needs to be powerful.
And the bigger you go, the more risk you are going to encounter.

Anonymous · Answer

Well, we can't do fusion. We've not discovered an approachable way to do it. If we discover how, it certainly has some advantages.

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What's so great about fusion?

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