[IAmEveryone]

Being triggered by the use of the word "dirty" for fission reactors, in comparison with fusion reactors no less, is far more telling than the use of the word. It creates radioactive waste. Creating waste is dirty. The promise of fusion is not to do this. Requiring the former for the latter is a strange proposition when viewed threw the only lense that makes sense for fusion power: cleanliness, the absence of dirtiness.

The love for nuclear power some internet communities exhibit has far left the realm of the science people often invoke as their reason and gone into full-on scientism. Nuclear scientists have respect for radiation. They wouldn't take offense with the mere mention that it has unwanted byproducts. They built and ran a couple hundred reactors for a few decades, and only two of them managed to render large swaths of the landscape into uninhabitable wastelands, which is quite a feat. But it was only possible because they didn't minimize the danger with the sort of I-would-love-a-reactor-in-my-backyard attitude that seems to be prevalent now. Which is, by the way, not only getting the science wrong, but also the politics: nuclear power is out not because it is dangerous, but because it is too expensive and, at this point, too slow to build.

While science bros have been huffing isotopes, actual scientists, with the help of some eerily effective subsidies, have improved solar and wind power and battery technology to the point where it is competitive and scalable not just to replace nuclear power, but even coal. Why people keep making the same arguments as they did a decade ago, a time span in which those technologies became 80-90% cheaper and more efficient, cannot be explained by the natural sciences.