Consuming less would definitely rescue the planet but everyone not having a 1.5 ton hunk of steel to ferry a 70kg person from robot to robot while throwing away 40% of food produced goes against our hardwiring of having more and more. instead we hold out for some unproven brilliant technical innovation to save us instead of thinking about using resources rationally.
Or, you know - we could not lower our standard of living.
It's good to be able to visit friends in the next town over in a few minutes, in any weather, rather than having to walk and then transfer in some distant location.
It's good to be able to have our choice of food, rather than having to accept what's left of what the comisar of production allocated to are area.
The nice thing about technology is it will allow us to improve the future, rather than having to don the hair shirts of the past.
Lots of mindsets to overcome, but I'm sure, sooner or later we will forced to get rid of automobile and completely relay on public transport. May be in 50 to 100 years, but there isn't any alternative.
It doesn't ; if anything our hardwiring is always for efficiency and less effort. It's just that there is no easy and low-effort way to avoid those things.
Nuclear fission could, obviously -- I've yet to see anybody propose a reasonable alternative (with a known tech, not just hypothetical handwaving) to cover our enormous energy needs -- and even then some work is needed to migrate direct fossil consumption to electric. Wind and solar consumes ridiculous amount of spaces and the storage is not solved (we need it for too for other purposes, maybe not in the same form, but that does not make the problem disappear for existing usages...). Without storage, it is not a solution (it does not prevent it from becoming one in the future, but we need to start to build things now, while storage is being studied). Hydro is used already, and developing it to the max will not be enough. Nuclear fusion is not there yet.
So even with pervasive nuclear fission we would have a shitload of problem to solve, but at least that would be an immediate first step, and could be replaced if we eventually figure out how to replace it. We haven't figured out that yet.
Storage isn't the problem. The problem is that the governments 'own' all the nuclear material and anybody operating a nuclear plant is utterly dependent on government actors to do something with the 'waste'. It is illegal if the plant operators went about fixing the problem on their own.
And since the government refuses to solve the problem or even really look deeply into solutions then it's not getting solved and it isn't ever going to get solved.
Because of this the solutions to recycle spent fuel is still in it's infancy. Nobody is allowed to do anything, the government isn't really interested in allowing nuclear power to be competitive, so it's just not happening. No money, no motivation.
People in the industry are not going to invest millions in developing these breeder reactors and other ways to recycle fuel if they will never be allowed to use them.
Theoretically you could recycle the fuel to the point to where most of it is spent and isn't much of a danger. Recycle the fuel 60 or a 100 times. Then mix it with clay and cook into into a ceramic so that they are safe to handle, transport, and store. Massively reduce the danger and radiation levels.
Despite all the talk and rhetoric about CO2 emmissions you see coming from the state the petroleum industry is still king. People inside and outside of government are making a lot of money and they have no interest in seeing that go away.
The dirty secret with things like solar and wind is that in order for them to work reliably they need to have large number of natural gas generators. Because of this and other issues they really pose little threat to total fossil fuel consumption.
> Wind and solar consumes ridiculous amount of spaces
Yet the ocean and deserts are massive. More than enough room in the North Sea to provide enough kWh to power Europe each year. More than enough room in Saudi Arabia to power India (not to mention the indian ocean), more than enough room in China to power the far east, in the outback to power Austrailia
Adding another voice to the chorus of fission works, people are irrational, etc.
If you say to me that science proves the world is in grave danger, but we can’t use nuclear fission because it is “dirty” or “dangerous” (or even better, “solving one thing doesn’t matter because the real problem is our culture/capitalism”), I will immediately stop taking you seriously.
Maybe because TEPCO lies? And the history of other nuclear companies or agencies supposed to have fidelity to the public and not betray their trust is also poor?
Successful large scale fusion energy is not enough. It must be cheap enough to replace hydrocarbons and be viable within reasonable time scale.
If the cost and time scale does not matter, fission is already good enough. People are just irrational and can't compare things. Fukushima type accident every few years would be completely acceptable and compared to coal and hydrocarbons.
> People are just irrational and can't compare things. Fukushima type accident every few years would be completely acceptable and compared to coal and hydrocarbons.
You're quite right, but keep in mind that identifying the problem doesn't make it go away. If public opinion won't accept fission, then we'll need another option even if fission is technically a fine solution.
This is great. I hope they succeed, but the climate crisis isn't solely about emissions.
Yes it's the largest most immediate threat. But we will continue to have the dust bowl, ozone crisis, emissions crisis, microplastic crisis, etc. Unless we fundamentally address our relationship to this planet.
There's an incredible documentary that was way before it's time called "Who's Counting?" by Marilyn Waring. I think it addresses some of the fundamental causes of each crisis that comes up every so often. We're not accounting for the economic value or the "jobs of nature". We might not even be able to, because we really don't fully understand it.
A new theory on fusion. It's actually a government organized strategy to keep nuclear scientists/engineers occupied on a sisyphean task that can never be completed. If they're hard at work on fusion, they're not taking payments from foreign governments to work on weapons or subs. It's pretty great because the cause is so high minded and noble that it can attract all the engineers and it's very difficult so it attracts the brightest too (those suckers are smart). Indeed, it's so difficult that they (the government non-proliferation people) may never have to think up a new way to keep the nuclear scientists occupied. US did something similar in the 90s after the Cold War by hiring/importing all the Soviet scientists, after WWII by hiring/importing German engineers. If you're working for us, you're not working for them.
At some point, maybe weapons engineers could start getting paid to just sit on their hands. Learn to make the bomb, get paid to not make it.
Is fusion a brain sink designed for non-proliferation? It's a pretty effective non-proliferation tool with total US fusion research at less than $1B/yr. Compared to a trillion dollar war or 10s of billions in monitoring etc.
Fusion is scientifically possible; executing it in a cost effective way is just an engineering challenge. That doesn't mean it'll happen, soon or ever, but it's a valid gamble. Yes, the history of fusion has been long and full of false starts, but it's undeniable that huge progress has been made, and it's hardly absurd to think the journey is finally drawing to a close.
Magic wands, warp drives, aliens, or colonising parallel worlds are not comparable. They are not, as far as we know, scientifically possible, and no progress has been made towards them.
Of course, but in a world where, practically, we aren't and won't be able to reduce emissions in time, what do we do? All approaches need to be looked into simultaneously. And it seems like that might be the world we live in.
In many cases it may be far easier to get billions funneled to researchers and scientists for moonshot projects like this than to get world leaders to agree to and enforce billions/trillions of dollars' worth of emissions reductions.
As mentioned in other comments, even if the warming issue itself is solved "out-of-band", there are still lots of other issues associated with what's being released. But it's a start, and might be the difference between turmoil and utter catastrophe. Countless human and non-human animal lives could potentially be saved which might otherwise not be if moonshot projects like this didn't exist. Reducing suffering and death, for all time scales, is the only metric we should be optimizing for at the end of the day.
This problem has to be viewed in terms of what will actually help, not what we "should" be doing. I'd certainly wish the president of my country would sign the Paris Agreement; obviously, we should. But a scientist won't be able to influence that, and probably otherwise won't be able to have much impact lobbying politicians, so they need to find a way to help any way they can.
Fusion is nothing like these things you listed - we can see that it can be done with our naked eyes each day, and we even managed to use it for weapons. The only thing stopping us from doing it now are engineering problems.
Limiting CO2 emission is needed anyway, I don't know why people feel the need to dismiss other parts of solution just to make their favorite parts seem more necessary.
Humans are being completely irrational. Can we create a safe nuclear power plant? Yes, but that doesn't mean we will and it doesn't mean there will be no issues in operation. Not to mention the lobbying for changing rules of what the design life is to keep running the plant after the engineered lifespan has expired or lobbying to continue operation with larger concrete cracks than the engineers recommend. Both these things happen today. I think something like 80% of the plants in the US expired their engineered design life 10-15 years ago and many also have larger cracks than they should be operating with. This is because humans will always be greedy and put their profits first.
Then there's also situations where engineers just make stupid design decisions like in the case of Chernobyl. Or when there's something that engineers just haven't thought of like a failsafe plan for an earth quake as we've seen in Fukushima.
Future perfect nuclear fusion helps us become carbon neutral. Transportation, structures, agriculture, power generation are now carbon free. Yay!
But it's still not enough.
Carbon is now being added by "natural" causes, in a positive feedback loop. Thawing tundra, burning forests, ocean acidification. With the imminent threat of the ocean burping up all that the frozen methane currently stored on its floor.
Whatever is needed for humanity to become carbon neutral, we need much more to become carbon negative, to remove carbon faster than nature adds it.
Fission isn't far out. Fission has been a readily available solution for decades. The only obstacle is political. The only reason fission is expensive is political.
As the climate situation worsens, more and more nations will overlook that obstacle and roll out large scale nuclear. The only question is, will they be able to do it quickly enough.
I feel like I'm the only person in the room missing something when watching the world focus on 'renewable' technology when a much less resource/labour intensive and much higher energy dense power source is already available. And it's safer too. [1]
Why is renewable in quotes? Because we don't actually have a way to recycle solar and wind installations[2][3]. Nuclear is the only currently available large scale power source that doesn't require a large and continuous supply of mined materials.
Am I missing something? Am I an idiot? Why is everyone so anti nuclear and pro 'renewable' when nuclear is significantly better by every objective metric? Looks like the 'ban plastic straws' activism which ignored that straws make up an insignificant fraction of ocean waste and the vast majority of it is discarded fishing equipment. Inconsequential feel-good activism is a higher priority goal than more difficult but effective solutions?
Nuclear Fission might be too slow to build - at least that's what the report claims. That would not be a problem with Fusion - its energy output should be so high that building it should still be worth it. The 'slow' regarding Fusion is the time taking to research it.
IMHO, researching Fusion is worth it, but we can't rely on it at all for solving our problems, since it's unlikely to be available in time. We'll have to handle our climate problem with more ordinary means.
The real irony is if we truly did solve Global Warming, the propaganda machine would either decide we are creating carbon emissions from something else, or go create a new global crisis to panic about.
IE - the words will change, but the freak out will be the same.
This attitude probably doesn’t help it in securing funding. Not everything can be solved with more money, obviously, but if we were putting a fraction of the money into basic research that we are putting into the petroleum industry I’m pretty confident we would see that timeline jump very suddenly.
The problem is that Nuclear Fusion is always 30 years away. It was 30 years away in the 1970s and it's still 30 years away today. Can't rely on a solution that would probably not be available in time.
You can't predict the exact rate of technological progress, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. We were further away from the goal 30 years ago than today.
Fusion or not, only an abundance of incredibly cheap clean energy is going to turn back the tide on CO2 and other pollutants, and who knows what problems that may bring.
Fusion is cool and it would be a very nice accomplishment for mankind. But it's kind of like going to the moon. The benefits will be offshoots of the journey rather than the journey and goal itself. Basically, if we want commercially viable and global use of fusion, someone needs to fix the problems below (talking here about D-T fusion designs and not aneutronic concepts). Not being negative, just pointing at the walls that need to be scaled.
1. Cost. The big problem here is that fusion does not address the main impediment of current nuclear fission. It's going to be really expensive to build power plants that are about similarly sized to fission power plants and more complicated (ITER is $65B... other projects are in the $5B range). They will still be massive construction projects. Renewables have proven that you have to manufacture your power systems in factories to lower costs rapidly. At the end of the day, fusion is going to be construction with all its associated delays, cost overruns, and low productivity. Can't really fix this without going much smaller and simpler, and that's not really an option based on physical/engineering requirements.
2. No current functional prototype. How long does it take from functional prototype to large-scale deployment, especially considering the massive regulatory overhaul required? eg. 50 years for aircraft? That might be fast enough.
3. Lots of very difficult engineering to deal with all the neutron damage and extreme temperature gradients. Million degree plasmas, 600 degree coolants, -40 degree super magnets, all within a few meters = nightmare. It's quite a hassle, but there are lots of smart people working on this. Can probably throw more money at this.
4. Not safer than fission. Yes, no long lived fission products for fusion and meltdowns are more difficult. But reactor damage and tritium release are probably more likely than in fission. Fusion power plant would be a lot more complex (more parts and systems) and has lots of tritium (tritium likes to escape from where you put it and diffuses through metals) with tritium processing facility to breed and fuel the reactor. Tritium has 10 year half life and not good for you when ingested. Essentially, lots of radioactive material handling + lots of equipment to maintain = higher chance of small accidents. See page 10 in link at bottom. Can probably throw more money at this.
5. Proliferation. Fusion reactors have lots of neutrons and tritium. Neutrons can be used to breed weapons material simply by placing normal uranium or thorium in the neutron flux. Tritium is used to boost nuclear weapons (just a bit of tritium drastically lowers the plutonium required). Is the only we to solve this state controlled fusion power? How can that be market competitive?
6. Probably only good for electrical power. While this is really just a limitation, it illustrates that fusion, should 1-5 be resolved, is not a magic bullet. You can't do much with it other than make electrical power. The power plants are too big to use for distributed process heat or hydrogen production.
I think (combined with the statement about hot things next to cold things) you're overestimating how much fuel there is in the plasma. It's density is about a million times less than air. In most other contexts, that's a very good vacuum. I don't think there are any consequences to a fuel leak, but I could be wrong.
The primary issue is neutron activation. The neutrons from the fusion reaction tends to make inert components of the machine radioactive. Again, short half-lifes, but a concern that needs to be mitigated.
[+] [-] safgasCVS|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trothamel|6 years ago|reply
It's good to be able to visit friends in the next town over in a few minutes, in any weather, rather than having to walk and then transfer in some distant location.
It's good to be able to have our choice of food, rather than having to accept what's left of what the comisar of production allocated to are area.
The nice thing about technology is it will allow us to improve the future, rather than having to don the hair shirts of the past.
[+] [-] iamgopal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
It doesn't ; if anything our hardwiring is always for efficiency and less effort. It's just that there is no easy and low-effort way to avoid those things.
[+] [-] KirinDave|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] temac|6 years ago|reply
So even with pervasive nuclear fission we would have a shitload of problem to solve, but at least that would be an immediate first step, and could be replaced if we eventually figure out how to replace it. We haven't figured out that yet.
[+] [-] lazyguy2|6 years ago|reply
And since the government refuses to solve the problem or even really look deeply into solutions then it's not getting solved and it isn't ever going to get solved.
Because of this the solutions to recycle spent fuel is still in it's infancy. Nobody is allowed to do anything, the government isn't really interested in allowing nuclear power to be competitive, so it's just not happening. No money, no motivation.
People in the industry are not going to invest millions in developing these breeder reactors and other ways to recycle fuel if they will never be allowed to use them.
Theoretically you could recycle the fuel to the point to where most of it is spent and isn't much of a danger. Recycle the fuel 60 or a 100 times. Then mix it with clay and cook into into a ceramic so that they are safe to handle, transport, and store. Massively reduce the danger and radiation levels.
Despite all the talk and rhetoric about CO2 emmissions you see coming from the state the petroleum industry is still king. People inside and outside of government are making a lot of money and they have no interest in seeing that go away.
The dirty secret with things like solar and wind is that in order for them to work reliably they need to have large number of natural gas generators. Because of this and other issues they really pose little threat to total fossil fuel consumption.
[+] [-] isostatic|6 years ago|reply
Yet the ocean and deserts are massive. More than enough room in the North Sea to provide enough kWh to power Europe each year. More than enough room in Saudi Arabia to power India (not to mention the indian ocean), more than enough room in China to power the far east, in the outback to power Austrailia
[+] [-] guscost|6 years ago|reply
If you say to me that science proves the world is in grave danger, but we can’t use nuclear fission because it is “dirty” or “dangerous” (or even better, “solving one thing doesn’t matter because the real problem is our culture/capitalism”), I will immediately stop taking you seriously.
[+] [-] adamsea|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabla9|6 years ago|reply
If the cost and time scale does not matter, fission is already good enough. People are just irrational and can't compare things. Fukushima type accident every few years would be completely acceptable and compared to coal and hydrocarbons.
[+] [-] Lazare|6 years ago|reply
You're quite right, but keep in mind that identifying the problem doesn't make it go away. If public opinion won't accept fission, then we'll need another option even if fission is technically a fine solution.
[+] [-] pjc50|6 years ago|reply
This is the most delusional thing I've ever read about nuclear feasibility. No country will ever accept more than one of those.
[+] [-] jefflombardjr|6 years ago|reply
Yes it's the largest most immediate threat. But we will continue to have the dust bowl, ozone crisis, emissions crisis, microplastic crisis, etc. Unless we fundamentally address our relationship to this planet.
There's an incredible documentary that was way before it's time called "Who's Counting?" by Marilyn Waring. I think it addresses some of the fundamental causes of each crisis that comes up every so often. We're not accounting for the economic value or the "jobs of nature". We might not even be able to, because we really don't fully understand it.
[+] [-] hairytrog|6 years ago|reply
At some point, maybe weapons engineers could start getting paid to just sit on their hands. Learn to make the bomb, get paid to not make it.
Is fusion a brain sink designed for non-proliferation? It's a pretty effective non-proliferation tool with total US fusion research at less than $1B/yr. Compared to a trillion dollar war or 10s of billions in monitoring etc.
[+] [-] V-2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viach|6 years ago|reply
How dare people say just limiting consumption and CO2 pollution could have any effect. Let's just bet everything on zero.
[+] [-] Lazare|6 years ago|reply
Magic wands, warp drives, aliens, or colonising parallel worlds are not comparable. They are not, as far as we know, scientifically possible, and no progress has been made towards them.
[+] [-] meowface|6 years ago|reply
In many cases it may be far easier to get billions funneled to researchers and scientists for moonshot projects like this than to get world leaders to agree to and enforce billions/trillions of dollars' worth of emissions reductions.
As mentioned in other comments, even if the warming issue itself is solved "out-of-band", there are still lots of other issues associated with what's being released. But it's a start, and might be the difference between turmoil and utter catastrophe. Countless human and non-human animal lives could potentially be saved which might otherwise not be if moonshot projects like this didn't exist. Reducing suffering and death, for all time scales, is the only metric we should be optimizing for at the end of the day.
This problem has to be viewed in terms of what will actually help, not what we "should" be doing. I'd certainly wish the president of my country would sign the Paris Agreement; obviously, we should. But a scientist won't be able to influence that, and probably otherwise won't be able to have much impact lobbying politicians, so they need to find a way to help any way they can.
[+] [-] ajuc|6 years ago|reply
Limiting CO2 emission is needed anyway, I don't know why people feel the need to dismiss other parts of solution just to make their favorite parts seem more necessary.
[+] [-] furgooswft13|6 years ago|reply
EDIT For the young'uns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7aeWQCF1jM
[+] [-] noonespecial|6 years ago|reply
We put our bets on everything that might help, long shots included.
[+] [-] The_rationalist|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hanniabu|6 years ago|reply
Then there's also situations where engineers just make stupid design decisions like in the case of Chernobyl. Or when there's something that engineers just haven't thought of like a failsafe plan for an earth quake as we've seen in Fukushima.
[+] [-] legulere|6 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300
[+] [-] specialist|6 years ago|reply
Future perfect nuclear fusion helps us become carbon neutral. Transportation, structures, agriculture, power generation are now carbon free. Yay!
But it's still not enough.
Carbon is now being added by "natural" causes, in a positive feedback loop. Thawing tundra, burning forests, ocean acidification. With the imminent threat of the ocean burping up all that the frozen methane currently stored on its floor.
Whatever is needed for humanity to become carbon neutral, we need much more to become carbon negative, to remove carbon faster than nature adds it.
[+] [-] gridlockd|6 years ago|reply
We have processes to do this, cheap electricity would really help there.
[+] [-] simonblack|6 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, they've kept saying that every year since the 1950s. If it were truly possible, we'd be doing it already.
[+] [-] legulere|6 years ago|reply
Nuclear energy too slow, too expensive to save climate: report
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...
Fusion is even further out than fission.
[+] [-] missosoup|6 years ago|reply
As the climate situation worsens, more and more nations will overlook that obstacle and roll out large scale nuclear. The only question is, will they be able to do it quickly enough.
I feel like I'm the only person in the room missing something when watching the world focus on 'renewable' technology when a much less resource/labour intensive and much higher energy dense power source is already available. And it's safer too. [1]
Why is renewable in quotes? Because we don't actually have a way to recycle solar and wind installations[2][3]. Nuclear is the only currently available large scale power source that doesn't require a large and continuous supply of mined materials.
Am I missing something? Am I an idiot? Why is everyone so anti nuclear and pro 'renewable' when nuclear is significantly better by every objective metric? Looks like the 'ban plastic straws' activism which ignored that straws make up an insignificant fraction of ocean waste and the vast majority of it is discarded fishing equipment. Inconsequential feel-good activism is a higher priority goal than more difficult but effective solutions?
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
[2] https://recyclinginternational.com/editors-top-picks/critica...
[3] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/waste-crisis-looms-a...
[+] [-] dahdum|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yyyk|6 years ago|reply
Nuclear Fission might be too slow to build - at least that's what the report claims. That would not be a problem with Fusion - its energy output should be so high that building it should still be worth it. The 'slow' regarding Fusion is the time taking to research it.
IMHO, researching Fusion is worth it, but we can't rely on it at all for solving our problems, since it's unlikely to be available in time. We'll have to handle our climate problem with more ordinary means.
[+] [-] The_rationalist|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] programminggeek|6 years ago|reply
IE - the words will change, but the freak out will be the same.
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aalleavitch|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lrem|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yyyk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chapium|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gridlockd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hanoz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] option|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hairytrog|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imtringued|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hairytrog|6 years ago|reply
1. Cost. The big problem here is that fusion does not address the main impediment of current nuclear fission. It's going to be really expensive to build power plants that are about similarly sized to fission power plants and more complicated (ITER is $65B... other projects are in the $5B range). They will still be massive construction projects. Renewables have proven that you have to manufacture your power systems in factories to lower costs rapidly. At the end of the day, fusion is going to be construction with all its associated delays, cost overruns, and low productivity. Can't really fix this without going much smaller and simpler, and that's not really an option based on physical/engineering requirements.
2. No current functional prototype. How long does it take from functional prototype to large-scale deployment, especially considering the massive regulatory overhaul required? eg. 50 years for aircraft? That might be fast enough.
3. Lots of very difficult engineering to deal with all the neutron damage and extreme temperature gradients. Million degree plasmas, 600 degree coolants, -40 degree super magnets, all within a few meters = nightmare. It's quite a hassle, but there are lots of smart people working on this. Can probably throw more money at this.
4. Not safer than fission. Yes, no long lived fission products for fusion and meltdowns are more difficult. But reactor damage and tritium release are probably more likely than in fission. Fusion power plant would be a lot more complex (more parts and systems) and has lots of tritium (tritium likes to escape from where you put it and diffuses through metals) with tritium processing facility to breed and fuel the reactor. Tritium has 10 year half life and not good for you when ingested. Essentially, lots of radioactive material handling + lots of equipment to maintain = higher chance of small accidents. See page 10 in link at bottom. Can probably throw more money at this.
5. Proliferation. Fusion reactors have lots of neutrons and tritium. Neutrons can be used to breed weapons material simply by placing normal uranium or thorium in the neutron flux. Tritium is used to boost nuclear weapons (just a bit of tritium drastically lowers the plutonium required). Is the only we to solve this state controlled fusion power? How can that be market competitive?
6. Probably only good for electrical power. While this is really just a limitation, it illustrates that fusion, should 1-5 be resolved, is not a magic bullet. You can't do much with it other than make electrical power. The power plants are too big to use for distributed process heat or hydrogen production.
Lidsky's often ignored 1984 paper: http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trou...
[+] [-] drjesusphd|6 years ago|reply
I think (combined with the statement about hot things next to cold things) you're overestimating how much fuel there is in the plasma. It's density is about a million times less than air. In most other contexts, that's a very good vacuum. I don't think there are any consequences to a fuel leak, but I could be wrong.
The primary issue is neutron activation. The neutrons from the fusion reaction tends to make inert components of the machine radioactive. Again, short half-lifes, but a concern that needs to be mitigated.
[+] [-] foolzcrow|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] m4r35n357|6 years ago|reply
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