>Mike,
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>>If it doesn't melt through the Earth.
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>All these systems depend on magnetic confinement of a relatively small amount of gas, if containment is lost the hydrogen loses it's heat energy very fast and floats away. No more China Syndrome. The tritium also has a relatively short halflife so it's not a long term threat. It's beta decay is at a low enough energy that your skin is an effective radiation barrier.
>
>>If it works there'd be no nuclear waste,
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>well yes and no. The lithium blanket surrounding the reactor used to breed tritium for fuel will become radioactive. But it's not a lot of mass to ultimately bury in a mineshaft when the plant is decommissioned.
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>>but there should still be plenty of harmful radiation, no?
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>Worse than the majority of nuclear plants in operation now. Water based reactors run off the fission caused by thermal or "slow" (low energy) neutrons. Fusion gives off fast neutrons which are more energetic, therefore more harmful, absorbed by the lithium blanket converted to heat to create steam to drive turbines. Some of these fast neutrons interact with the lithium nucleus to create tritium which will be recycled out of the blanket periodically and fed as fuel back into the reactor.
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>The big promise for fusion is that there is already enough deuterium in the worlds' oceans to be equivalent to 500 oceans full of oil.

Very interesting. Thanks!