odin wrote:
Fusion is the future and I think fission will be a necessary evil for the near future :\. Wind/water/solar power will never be able to generate enough energy. Not to mention that dams destroy habitats..
I used to think like that, but the trouble isnt in trying to get the containment stable enough for a break even reaction. the real trouble lies in neutrons. the fuel proposed for commercial nuclear fusion reactors is Deuterium, which produces Helium-3 and a neutron as waste products. this thermal neutron is intended to react with the liquid lithium-6 blanket surrounding the reactor core, to produce the actual heat transfer and other by-products. trouble is the neutrons also react with the materials used to provide the infrastructure and the lithium vessel causing these to become physically degraded and INCREDIBLY radioactive.
some have suggested the use of a proton-Boron reaction, but this requires the Boron to be pure Boron-11 (producing 3 alpha particles which arent a problem) - but the trouble again, is impurities: 1 part per 100000 of hydrogen is deuterium, D + B11 produces a neutron.
Boron exists as 75% B11, and 25% B10 (IIRC) - but even heavily purified, there will still be enough of a presence of B10 to affect the reaction products.
Procession of nuclear waste already is a huge problem. German waste gets shipped to France, from where it pollutes the Atlantic together with Sellafield.
Burying nuclear waste sounds like a really bad idea. There's been talk of using emptied salt deposits here in the north of The Netherlands as storage area for nuclear waste, but I'm not convinced it's geologically stable enough. We humans have a knack of doing something harmful to the environment (and ultimately ourselves) only to find out about it decades later (DDT springs to mind..).
yes, burying it is a really bad idea - I suppose at least that the radioactive by-products of Fusion only have half lives of a few 10s of years (in the main), but fission by-products can be radioactive for millenia.
of course, we can reap big dividends merely by being more clever in our generation methods, and being a bit cunning with distribution - not to mention being very tight on energy efficiency.
