War Liberal

Looks like their just building a really big, really new research tokamak.

My geography prof in college was doing the Greenpeace boilerplate about energy and one of his concerns (echoed by the Greenpeace spokesman in the article) was what kind of horrible new nuclear weapons fusion could produce.

Since I didn't like my prof, I chose not to tell him those weapons (hydrogen bombs) are already the backbone of the US, Russian and Chinese arsenals. Unless he was concerned about fusion being used to power the Death Star. He'd be on to the something there.

Wow, I thought this technology was at least a decade away. This is huge... if it works.

I bet it still is a decade away. But at least someone is staring the building process now. That's great news.

Yeah, it's not a power plant, just another research reactor.

In the Sixties and Seventies, I think there was some apprehension about the possibility of fusion bombs that needed no fission trigger, which could make them much easier to produce. But it's hard to see how the research on usable fusion power could lead to anything like that.

The Greenpeace statement about the plant is just stupid.

...by the way, fusion plants probably would involve radioactivity: this is deuterium-to-tritium fusion, tritium is unstable, and it involves the production of neutrons, which would make the interior of a reactor radioactive. But to say that the problems of waste disposal and accidents are the same as for fission plants makes no sense.

Gah! That should of course be "deuterium plus tritium to helium" above. The points about tritium radioactivity and neutrons stand.

Yeah, I knew that. Well, I didn't know that but I looked it up after I posted because I figured as much. Helium. An inert gas that the Earth's gravity can't hold. This is the waste disposal Greenpeace is afraid of. And anyone afraid of greenhouse gases who opposes this research is a fool.