french win bid for ITER, what do you think? Options

[*kryogenix*]

The site for the international fusion reactor will be in France.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8385911/
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/06/28...reut/index.html
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?t...storyID=8913865

Your thoughts?

I'm a bit disappointed. I wanted Japan to build the reactor solely because I like Japan's mentality better (smaller, cheaper, better).

Plus, they said that if they didn't get their way, they would act unilaterally and design their own fusion reactor. I hate how they complained when the US acted unilaterally, but when they don't want to play with the other contries, it's ok.

[sadolakced acid]

sure, let's put itn in japan where it can hurt people and cars when it blows up.

better to put it in france, you know. less people would get killed.

[*kryogenix*]

sure, let's put itn in japan where it can hurt people and cars when it blows up.

better to put it in france, you know.  less people would get killed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#...onmental_issues

Safety and environmental issues

Accident potential

The likelihood of a catastrophic accident in a fusion reactor in which injury or loss of life occurs is much smaller than that of a fission reactor. The primary reason is that the fuel contained in the reaction chamber is only enough to sustain the reaction for about a minute, whereas a fission reactor contains about a year's supply of fuel.

Effluents during normal operation

The natural product of the fusion reaction is a small amount of helium, which is completely harmless to life and does not contribute to global warming. Of more concern is tritium, which, like other isotopes of hydrogen, is difficult to retain completely. During normal operation, some amount of tritium will be continually released. There would be no acute danger, but the cumulative effect on the world's population from a fusion economy could be a matter of concern. The 12 year half-life of tritium would at least prevent unlimited build-up and long-term contamination.
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Waste management

The large flux of high-energy neutrons in a reactor will make the structural materials radioactive. The radioactive inventory at shut-down may be comparable to that of a fission reactor, but there are important differences. The half-life of the radioisotopes produced by fusion tend to be less than those from fission, so that the inventory decreases more rapidly. Furthermore, there are fewer different species, and they tend to be non-volatile and biologically less active. As opposed to nuclear fission, where there is hardly any possibility to influence the spectrum of fission products, the problems can be further reduced by careful choice of the materials used. "Low activation" materials like vanadium, for example, would become much less radioactive than stainless steel. Such materials would have half-lives of tens of years, rather than the thousands of years for radioactive waste produced from fission. This involves the design of new alloys with unusual chemical compositions; a complex process as the chemical composition also affects the materials' mechanical properties.

Nuclear proliferation

Although fusion power uses nuclear technology, the overlap with nuclear weapons technology is small. Tritium is a component of the trigger of hydrogen bombs, but not a major problem in production. The copious neutrons from a fusion reactor could be used to breed plutonium for an atomic bomb, but not without extensive redesign of the reactor, so that clandestine production would be easy to detect. The theoretical and computational tools needed for hydrogen bomb design are closely related to those needed for inertial confinement fusion, but have very little in common with (the more promising) magnetic confinement fusion.

As you can see, fusion is very much different from fission, and fusion is safer than fission.