Is fusion safer than fission as an energy source?

Question

If fusion ever becomes available, will it leave any waste?

Answer 1

Fusion is available now.

Why build a fusion reactor when we already have a safe and reliable one bathing the planet in energy every day?

Answer 2

The only way to truly understand, would be to look at our own souls. Where have we been? What have we done? Why are we here? These are just a few examples of the questions that the corporate machines don't want us asking, because these questions initiate knowledge of the war machine that feed the government device that controls the social robot in each of our heartcomputers. I have some stuff that you should read.

Answer 3

Nuclear fusion produces helium, which is inert, whereas the fission of uranium-235 forms many dangerous substances which are also radioactive, such as caesium-137 and strontium-90. Also, nuclear fusion produces more energy, so a meltdown would be more dangerous for those living nearby. However, since not as many radioactive substances are released, a fusion explosion would not have as great an aftermath (compared to something like the Chernobyl disaster, from which radioactive particles still remain).

Answer 4

The product of fusion of Hydrogen is Helium. Helium is harmless. However, we won't really know how safe fusion is until  we learn to contain it.  

Answer 5

Fission reactors produce waste products or isotopes that are highly radioactive and require 'cooling' ponds during their peak activity. Accidents such as the one that occured in 1957,  when the graphite core of a British nuclear reactor at Windscale, Cumbria, caught fire, releasing substantial amounts of radioactive contamination into the surrounding area and the 'Three Mile Island' partial core melt down in 1979 along with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster have highlighted how radioactive isotopes can enter the environment when things go wrong at fission reactor plants.

However, fusion is as of yet - not a commercial reality. I'll try to explain.

The cores of all stars contain fusion furnaces. Very young proto stars and small, cool stars burn deuterium and tritium in a fusion process that liberates 17.6 Mev of energy per fusion. The H-bomb may well use lithium six deuteride as its secondary fusing fuel. Needless to say, that both of these fusion processes require extreme conditions to initiate them. For a star, the extreme pressure at the core, due to the gravity of this massive body, provides the necessary conditions for fusion driven energy liberation. For the H-bomb, a small primary fission device sets up the initial conditions for a fusion driven detonation.

For perhaps forty or so years, now physicist and engineers have been using doughnut shaped machines called a tokomaks to magnetically confine fusing plasmas. The magnetic fields used to confine the plasmas are immense with field strengths in the region of 5 Tesla's. These fusion machines, overall, consume more energy than they liberate. The most notable examples of these are the JET or Joint European Torus (in the UK, 1991), which liberated 1.7 million watts of controlled fusion power and the Princeton University Tokomak (1993), which liberated 5.6 million watts of controlled fusion power. Each of these reactors consumed more power than they produced and tended towards failure when run at full power.

A second approach to controlled fusion is the laser trapping by inertial confinement of tritium and deuterium fuel pellets. This approach has yielded some promising success in yielding controlled fusion energy liberation.

Thus, fusion devices are already with us but as of yet are perhaps twenty-five or more years away from a commercial reality.

Answer 6

the byproduct of fusion would be helium. so fusion would be the cleanest energy source foreseeable in the near future. the problem is, at the moment we have no way to efficiently use fusion as an energy source.

with our ways of fusing hydrogen, it takes more energy to fuse than it gives off. which is obviously the opposite of what you would want to happen.

in thermonuclear bombs, a smaller fission charge is ignited that fuses the hydrogen together. but thats not too practical for energy purposes, because who wants a reactor that is literally an atomic bomb.

someone talked about a meltdown in a fusion reactor. as far as im aware, thats not possible. fusion isnt a chain reaction, like fission is. so theres no possibility for a meltdown.