More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade
But where are the fusion neutrons? (See Voodoo Fusion [1])<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vixra.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1812.0382v1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vixra.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1812.0382v1.pdf</a><p>I&#x27;m a professional fission guy. I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission. These days I don&#x27;t see why we don&#x27;t just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors.<p>Imagining that somehow fusion is going to a) work, b) be cheap (fuel cost is only 5% of total nuclear fission cost so who cares), and c) not have the same stigma as fission is kind of weird in my mind.<p>For example, there are leaks of tiny amounts of tritium at some fission plants and people lose their minds. Fusion reactors will have many orders of mag more tritium. Will people not lose their minds just the same? Tritium is notoriously hard to contain since it&#x27;s so small. It can permeate through metal like a hot knife through butter.<p>Also, lots of people worry about fission and nuclear weapons proliferation. So does fusion get around this? Not really. In fact it&#x27;s worse. Did you know that the two materials you need to make thermonuclear weapons are tritium and plutonium? Tritium breeding is required by almost all practical fusion power plants (the other reactions are 100s to 1000s of times harder, I don&#x27;t care what x random fusion CEO says, they&#x27;re in it for the sweet billionaire side project money).<p>Plutonium is made by irradiating natural uranium from the dirt with neutrons. Practical fusion reactors have lots of neutrons. Really high energy ones too.<p>Anyway let&#x27;s just do fission you guys. It&#x27;s way easier. It has been working fine since the 1950s. It&#x27;s zero carbon. Waste problem is solved (see Onkalo, and reprocessing). It net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution. It runs 24&#x2F;7 on a tiny land and material footprint. We have enough uranium and thorium to run the whole world for 4 billion (with a b) years using breeder reactors (demonstrated in 1952 in Idaho). Get the Koreans over here to build some ARP1400s or the Chinese to build some Hualong Ones until we figure out how to project manage again and then call it good.