Fusion will kill the planet why bother

[sparks]

    Countless time and rescources have been put into neuclear fusion.  Creating star like conditions in a bottle.  The fusion fuel is water and lithium the product is helium and low level radiation.   The risks are huge and no one has ever done an enviromental study on what changing water a vital human need into helium will do to the planet .  Helium is not gonna go away.  It is gonna get into the upper atmosphere where it will be bombarded by cosmic energy and solar energy.  Has anyone ever thought about what effects tetra tons of helium released into the atomsphere is gonna do.  You still have radioactive waste.  Just simple conversion of existing power plants to using resonant circuits would cut fuel to 10 percent or less of what is needed now.  Solar wind geothermal ocean thermal air thermal is all that is needed and very doable.  Why spend billions on fusion when they don't even know if it will go runaway and give the Sun a new neighbor.  Ridiculous people.

[zerotensor]

Yeah, Arthur C. Clarke once pointed out that if a "free energy" system became widely disseminated, the heat released into the earth's atmosphere would screw-up the whole ecosystem.  Imagine the heat-output from 5 billion people, each equipped with a 1MW personal generator...   Perhaps we're doomed one way or the other.

[ResinRat2]

If, as the Sharp Solar website claims, that more energy reaches the earth in one hour from the sun than all the energy mankind uses in a year; then solar and solar energy storage (batteries, hydrogen, ambient heat, etc)  is where we should be spending the majority of our research dollars right now.

Logically, then, the sun could meet all our energy needs if we were motivated enough to develop it into a reasonably affordable alternative. It would also give us the heat balance that everybody is so worried about. Fusion (hot or cold), zero-point energy, etc., all consume some natural resource and produce byproducts and heat.

I just hope we would be motivated enough to research in the right direction.

[sparks]

       The physicists get caught up in their careers and research which is funded by corporations or governments trying to get some kinda edge on somebody or some idealogy.   They exploit the scientists pride factor.  We already have fission.  Hell you can take urine and make it radioactive with a 1/2 life of 15 or 20 minutes.   

[Koen1]

Yeah well... sure, if power companies were to aim for efficient energy production
and use, then they could move toward resonant systems... But that's not their aim, unfortunately.
Their main aim is to keep us paying as much as possible while they do as little as possible.

And some of those arguments against nuclear fusion seem very similar to those against
nuclear fission, back in the day.
There were serious concerns that the first atomic bomb would ignite the entire atmosphere.
But it didn't. Not even when they moved into the megatonnes.

Let's say we do start to use fusion plants and they do produce quite a bit of helium,
then what? According to sources, the concentration of Helium in our atmosphere
remains stable at 5.2 ppm (volume) due to natural evaporation into space, despite the fact that
Helium is continuously produced on earth (by decay and volcanism).
(see http://dx.doi.org/10.1029%2F95JA02208 for example)
So if I follow those sources correctly, Helium just "boils off" our atmosphere.
How would that be dangerous?

Obviously we should try to develop those next generation fission reactors that
can use the radioactive waste from the old reactors as fuel, so as to at least
boost the total efficiency of fission plants and get as much usefull energy out
as possible... and unfortunately that will inevitably use the age-old heat
exchange setup so yes that will still produce quite some heat. Which is
undesirable in warm regions of the world, but in the colder parts it's quite usefull.

Yes, fusion still does produce radioactivity and the fusion vessel will have to be replaced
every n years and stored as radioactive material, so no it's not radiation free.
But still, if we put A-bombs in a bottle and use them, then why not put H-bombs in a bottle?


regards,
Koen