Granted, but some of the dangers for fission are true for fusion, no? Uncontrolled reactions, accidents, terrorist attacks, etc. Fusion wouldn’t create nuclear waste, a major advantage, no doubt; but one of the the main environmental problems for fission remains disposing of the super-heated water, which would also be a problem for fusion.
Knorf: But I still wonder: even with fusion power, won’t the boogeyman words “nuclear” and “radiation” still strike hysterical fear into the minds of most of the peeps who at present vociferously oppose fission?
I’d bet that the people who are objecting to nuclear (fission) power merely out of “hysterical fear” can be easily appeased with a little PR terminology like “Clean Safe Solar-Type Fusion Power Generation”. 
And the people who have some rational concerns mixed in with their heebie-jeebies (which IMO is probably a pretty big subset of all nuke opponents) can be reassured by the scientific facts.
Knorf: *[…] but some of the dangers for fission are true for fusion, no? Uncontrolled reactions, accidents, terrorist attacks, etc. *
Are they? I’m not up on the details, but I wasn’t aware that “uncontrolled reactions” were a potential problem; AFAIK they’re still having enough trouble boosting the reactions even up to the breakeven point, they don’t have to worry about the reactions running amok! And given the lack of radioactive bomb-o-genic waste, I don’t see why terrorist attacks would be a worry (unless you’re thinking about sabotage just to stop the plant’s operation, but that’s a potential hazard for any power plant).
Fusion can produce nuclear waste. The fusion reaction produces neutrons, which are difficult to contain in the magnetic bottles typically used by fusion experiments. (Magnetic bottles contain charged particles; neutrons are uncharged.) These neutrons will irradiate the reactor and the surrounding shielding. Radioactive elements will be generated. Thus fusion reactors are not radiation-free.
I believe there are efforts to reduce the radiation, but there will always be some leakage. Decomissioning a fusion reactor will be non-trivial.
If we switch our cars over to hydrogen fuel cells (as seems to be in the cards), we’ll pretty much have to go to nuclear power to come up with enough energy to produce the needed hydrogen, will we not?
IFR (integral fast reactor) can process waste from other reactors (if they are allowed to do so). Such reactors are also breeders (generate more fuel than they use they do this by transmuting non-fissile uranium into plutonium which is then “burned” as nuclear fuel).
You certainly do not stand on a core of any reactor (during, or even after it begins operation) unless you have a death wish. We are dealing with concentrated power here (which is what makes nuclear plants attractive) and it would be about as stupid as standing in a combustion chamber for a steam boiler during start-up.
IFR is a dirty word in the US now because it makes plutonium during reprocessing. There is an effort underway to make the reprocessed fuel less attractive for proliferation purposes.
Personally I feel that the plutonium angle is a non-issue as long as there are adequate safeguards placed around the site. This shouldn’t be too hard since they are small, isolated locations.
On the program I saw, an engineer and the reporter were standing in what the engineer called “the core.” The reporter asked for him to repeat this because the reporter couldn’t believe it, and the engineer stated that they were standing in the core, and that you couldn’t stand where they were in a normal nuclear reactor without dying. The engineer then pointed to a round plate in the floor and said that’s where the nuclear material was. Now, maybe the engineer was simplifying things for the reporter, I don’t know. I think that this was the program I saw, but I’m not positive. I’ve poked around a bit on the site, but haven’t found any mention of the scene I remember.
This is why I am less than enthusiastic about fusion as a power source. Personally, I think the only reason fusion is the panacea of the environmentalist movement is because we don’t have it. Once it’s here (if it ever is), whatever problems it has will be trumpeted as disastrous flaws, and opposition to them will rise up.
In current nuclear plants, the bulk of the waste that comes out of them is ‘low level’ radioactive waste. This includes things like contaminated gloves, handling equipment, lab coats, used radiation detectors, paper towels, you name it. The actual amount of high level waste (spent fuel) is quite small - you could power the entire United States for 50 years with nuclear power, and the amount of high-level waste produced would fit inside a football stadium.
Fusion reactors will produce low-level waste. Neutron bombardment of containment vessels will make them radioactive. Equipment that deals in this environment will also be treated as low-level waste. Depending on the final design of a fusion reactor, there may even be a certain amount of material that it highly radioactive.
I wish I had faith in the good sense of the environmental movement, but I don’t. Remember how they tried to stop the Cassini mission to Saturn? Here we had a billion dollar mission powered by a handful of Plutonium that was enclosed in a casing engineered to survive any sort of failure imaginable. The risks were vanishingly small. But because of that scary word ‘nuclear’, the extremists went absolutely bananas over it. They almost got that mission scrubbed. A mission, by the way, that just this week has successfully entered the Saturnian system, and will be returning incredibly useful data for possibly decades because of its nuclear fuel. No thanks to the ‘greens’.
Yes, Sam, we can read the fun facts at the nuclear industry’s website too. However, the fact that it can fit inside a football stadium doesn’t solve the problem of dealing with it and storing it nearly indefinitely. I think part of the reason that the public at large is so concerned about nuclear power is that people like you on the other side refuse to acknowledge the serious issues and just dismiss their people’s legitimate concerns along with their irrational fears.
I am not saying the problems associated with nuclear fission are not soluble, but this attitude that everything is hunky-dory and there is nothing to worry about and everyone’s fears are totally irrational is the kind of argument that just doesn’t wash, particularly when people see Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and the near-miss with a very corroded seal or some such thing in a plant a few years ago.
And, this argument of blaming the environmental movement doesn’t wash for other reasons. First, it lacks evidence. It seems like nuclear power failed in large part because fossil fuels were cheaper…And, as I noted, Bush is working hard to see that they remain cheaper by relaxing pollution standards on fossil fuel plants. Then he wants to turn around and subsidize nuclear. I have a better idea…Why don’t we subsidize neither of these things, making both pay for their costs (including the environmental ones).
I won’t comment on Cassini because I don’t know enough to say either way whether your assessment of the risk was accurate.
I pulled the transcript from the site in your link and put it into Word, a basic search for “IFR” and “Fast” both turned up nothing. I doubt that this is what you remember.
My guess is that the interview was conducted on top of (the cores are very dense (except in some research reactors where you have some irradiation positions inside the core—and these are at most only a few inches in diameter) and not all that big) the core of a reactor that hadn’t been taken critical yet. Once a reactor goes critical everything in the immediate vicinity of the fuel must be handled remotely. There are exceptions with “zero power reactors” but these don’t jive with the IFR concept.
Another interesting thing about IFR is that it can be made much more inherently safe than other reactor types (of course nothing is foolproof—the human race is far too foolish). At the EBR-II in Idaho two tests were run simulating loss of coolant flow and a loss of heat sink accidents. In both cases the reactor shut itself down passively: With lack of design cooling metallic fuel heats up, swells and takes itself to a sub-critical condition. All this happens with no mechanical safety systems and no operator action.