Nuclear fusion reactor in South Korea runs at 100 million degrees C for a record-breaking 48 seconds

[NNadir]

6. I'm sorry, but I read science, not science fiction, because I'm a scientist, not a kid watching SciFi cartoons.

Nuclear fission has a 70 year commercial history and all, every last damned one, 100%, of the very stupid and dangerous objections rely on selective attention. It is the only form of energy that people insist must be perfect, with the result that we're killing the planet with fossil fuels to which there seems to be no "challenges."

The only "severe" challenge to fission energy is the widespread application of mysticism and stupidity in connection with it. It works, and has a spectacular record of saving human lives despite intellectually and morally challenged people who can't count, as in count the 80 to 90 million people who died from air pollution while morons carried on about Fukushima and compare that to the number of radiation deaths from Fukushima.

The number of radiation related deaths, for one example of a public festival of ignorance, Fukushima, is reported in this paper (by a set of scientists whose whole scientific life is connected to studying the effects of radiation at Fukushima:

Comparison of mortality patterns after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant radiation disaster and during the COVID-19 pandemic ( Motohiro Tsuboi et al 2022 J. Radiol. Prot. 42 031502)

It's open sourced, but an excerpt is relevant:

However, in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant(FDNPP) accident, no direct health hazards due to radiation, such as acute radiation injury, were observed, while various indirect health effects were reported even in the acute phase [2, 3]. Major health effects are attributed to the initial emergency evacuation and displacement, deterioration of the shelter environment, evacuation from nursing homes, and psychological and social health effects. In addition, there were also the effects of medical collapse, where lives that could normally be saved by medical care could not be saved due to a lack of medical resources [4, 5]. It is known that these effects are particularly susceptible to the socially vulnerable [6].

.

I added the bold.

Now the rest of the cited text - some of these authors live and work in Fukushima and have always done so; their institution is Fukushima Medical University, Fukushima City, Japan - indicates that the fear of radiation killed people, but radiation itself didn't. By the way, this group has published hundreds of papers on the topic.

I take the "severe challenge" being one of pure easily spread ignorance.

On a planetary scale the fear of radiation - which is the only fucking "severe challenge" to there being common sense and decency with respect to the climate crisis being addressed by existing, operative, readily accessible technology, commercial nuclear fission - is killing 19,000 people every damned day. It's called "air pollution." Note that this number does not include the people killed in Pakistan when 1/3 of the country went under water because of melting glaciers, it doesn't include the dead from the wildfires that, for one example, struck in a firestorm that destroyed Fort McMurray in Alberta, the people killed by smoke from the Canadian fires that blanketed the Northeast last summer.

The fucking planet is on fire now, and we have assholes here whining now about the release of dilute tritium from the Fukushima reactor and then saying, "Oh we don't need tritium, because we have deuterium."

It is immoral, dangerous, and deadly to take this kind of shit for brains nonsense seriously.

The crap about lithium breeding is decades old. It has never been demonstrated in a fusion system. Neither has the D-D fusion bullshit "in case D-T doesn't work." In decades of lectures on the topic there have been zero people who have demonstrated D-D fusion confinement.

Am I being addressed like someone whose knowledge of nuclear energy comes from reading cartoons and bullshit in the NY Times, or do I get any credit for listening to at least 50 lectures on fusion from primary researchers in the field, as well as having a son who can discuss helium embrittlement in tungsten and in fact was just a coauthor on a scientific paper on the topic, a topic that the fusion community is nowhere near to addressing?

But...but...but...Arthur C. Clark says...

And personally, I couldn't give a rat's ass what Arthur C. Clark says or said. The 2001 movie was produced many decades ago; it was cute fiction, but guess what? Space aliens from Jupiter didn't show up either.

Look, all day long I have been working at my job on projects in connection with gene therapy. It's not easy; it's hard. And anybody who wishes to do handwaving to say it was inevitable has never worked on it, doesn't know anything about it and has simply never been near the front lines of it. It has never been inevitable "if we only try."

And then I come home to "Arthur Clarke says if we can imagine it, it will happen." Did he ever imagine eternal life, because he's dead? He died 3 years and 8 days before the Sendai Earthquake which led to a vast outpouring of stupidity that none of his science fiction novels predicted, or in climate time, the time scale I like to use, 40.16 ppm of increases in the concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO₂ ago.

While we all do the fusion happy dance, the data as of this morning:

April 14: 425.27 ppm
April 13: 425.70 ppm
April 12: 424.80 ppm
April 11: 425.41 ppm
April 10: 427.35 ppm
Last Updated: April 15, 2024

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2

Guess what? The people who died on the Titanic were not saved because someday the helicopter would be invented. They drowned. The invention of the helicopter was too damned late for them. Maybe someday someone will solve all of the intractable problems with fusion, but it is irrelevant. It's already too late. People are dying now because so many people are too morally and intellectually challenged (there's that word "challenged" again) to embrace the last best hope we have on a commercial scale, nuclear fission, invented and developed by some of the finest minds of the 20th century. As a result of this morally and intellectually challenged set, the catastrophe is underway and its worsening by the hour on a faster and faster pace.

The lack of seriousness here is appalling, because frankly, it kills people, and is in fact, killing just about every ecosystem on this planet.

Have a nice evening.