Once visited my favourite NP.... the Super Phenix on the Rhone, a marvel of French engineering.... Had the adverse effects hitting me a few years later.... hair started growing from my ears and doctors tell me it will only get worse, supposedly, so set my monthly appointment with the parrucchiere to trim it down.

The problem with nuclear power is it provides an avenue of nuclear proliferation. Realize that there is only 1 use of fissionable nuclear material that is peaceful. And even then, it is hard to make peace with it, even if it is your friend.

Dave,

What is a side product of having a fusion reactor?

You can use it to "un-smelt" the naughty bits.

The part about the nuclear mess that is a problem is we cant live without it. Mankind still needs the bomb because we, as a world, haven't figured out how to do away with it yet. The concept is simple to do, but impossible to enact. Oppenheimer knew this almost at the same time the first bomb succeeded. That in his zeal in a race to save a world, he uncorked the jennies bottle, releasing a nightmare he called, in the end, "the destroyer of worlds."

"unsmelt"?

Courine, you do know that fusion creates heavier elements from light elements, and that fission does the opposite?

The fission products from uranium have shorter half lives than uranium itself.

The practical limits of fusion mean that we can only fuse hydrogen to make helium (exactly what happens inside the sun). Technically, it is deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen.

The only way to make heavier elements is one atom at a time inside a particle accelerator, or incrementally in a breeder reactor. Heavier elements are more unstable, so they have shorter half lives.

Perhaps you are getting sidetracked by the subject of fast breeder reactors?

Dear D,
The point is not that I want to stop you from bringing power to the people. Its that it’s a tool that most of the world just cant handle. Not from its brilliants, but its stupidity.

As technology vastly improves our lives, its effects can be as deadly. Every reactor increases that chance every time, as nuclear fuel use also equals nuclear weapons proliferation. Whether or not a bomb.

I’ll get to smelting in a “bit”..