Does John McCain understand the difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion?

Question

The first one (splitting atoms) is how our nuclear power plants work. The second one (combining atoms) is how the sun works.

The first one produces enough toxic waste to kill us all a hundred times over again. The second one would be clean enough to consider as a viable alternative to fossil fuels.

BUT

We don't know how to control and utilize the second one. Fission is all we know how to do, and it is a disaster. Until fusion can be used, nuclear is not a good solution to the energy problem.

Answer 1

At his age who all he knows is that the Allies won WWII

Answer 2

I suspect he does.  And what's more, he doesn't pronounce it nucular.

Fission isn't going to kill you a hundred times over unless you like to swim in the nucular waste.  You can reprocess the waste so that the actual long-lived components that you have to store indefinitely (or until we figure out a way to make them decay faster) are a very, very tiny amount that could be stored quite easily.  The rest of the waste will decay quite quickly and doesn't need long-term storage.  Unfortunately, although we need to do this sooner or later, it's not legal at the moment (because some pols including Obama would rather play demagogue than fix the problem), so we just store all the waste on site.  There has only been one nucular power disaster in history, and that was in a Russian reactor that was not run to western standards.  The worst thing that's ever happened in the US is Three Mile Island.  To date, there's no evidence that that harmed anybody.  Compare that track record to burning coal which can be linked to substantial increases in cancer deaths (a lot more deaths than Chernobyl).  Or burning anything, for that matter, which may be causing global climate change.

Fusion will be great if the plasma guys ever get it working, but for now, it's not really a part of the energy discussion.  Fission, on the other hand, is a viable means to produce a lot of energy.