UkrainianKozak said:
dgpcolorado said:
Among the claims of proponents: fusion won't produce radioactive waste like fission power. Nope, the intense radiation of the fusion reaction will make containment vessels and other process components radioactive.
Yes, but it is much better then to have a contaminated process components then to have radioactive waste from the reaction on top of it.
You can reuse contaminated components and materials in many cases, you can't say so about radioactive waste from current nuclear plants.
Why worry about pipe dreams, thorium salt reactors are proven 1950's technology and make 90-99% less waste than a uranium reactor, cost about the same but use less fuel, cannot support a sustained melt down and do not make plutonium in any significant portion.
Read superfuel, there are 1000's of years worth of thorium in sands throughout the US.
Also we definitely need population controls, because of our nature having the number of people on the planet that we do we are running in a massive energy deficit just to produce factory food, believe me, if we need to ACTUALLY DO THE RIGHT THING at some point and depend on crop rotations and mother nature like we did historically there will be a massive dieoff. just look at what happened in n korea after they couldn't produce enough synthetic petrochemical nitrogen fertalizer, then compare to what happened when a well prepared Cuba when they encountered the same issue. neither faired well, people did starve and go malnourished, Cuba did much better because they prepared but inevitably could not produce as much food using correct and proper methods of agriculture.
We destroy our surroundings to survive, it is our nature, even more so if anything starts becoming hard.
its unfortunate people can't get along and use common sense on these types of issues.
realistically 1 billion souls can be sustained in harmony on this planet while maintaining the wild portions of the world, what good does it do to be foolish and allow hard limitations to kill us because we have no common sense or self control.
sadly we forget
1. reduce (the most important element) remember only 50 years ago most homes were not over 40 degrees in the dead of winter. Depression era houses DID use less energy because people did not expect an incubator of one temperature. As a people we do not live in ways that are sustainable; MANY things will need to end going into the future especially if we continue to overpopulate an already fully populated world.
2. reuse the 2nd most important, nothing should be trashed but re-used
3. recycle - if the item is worn beyond reuse then recycling is more efficient than making from virgin stock but it should not be our primary method of dealing with waste.