And arguments from authority ain’t.

What's the point of this argument?

You could maybe argue that the internals of a fusion reactor would be embedded with radiation from the tritium supply. Tritium itself is generally not very dangerous to humans. Even if you inhaled pure tritium it cannot enter the blood supply. It would have to be ingested by eating and somehow stay lodged inside of your intestines to do real damage, and in that case it would still be limited by its 12 year half life.

Some of the steel and nickel plating could probably be warped by the fusion process, and this would be considered low-level waste. The less nickel that is in the steel, the less radioactive it will be. Metals are generally not of great concern when it comes to radioactivity because they are very easily sequestered. Even if you were in full body naked direct contact with it for a whole year, you would likely be fine. Most of these radioactive metals would decay even faster, generally less than 5 years. The most concerning one is nickel which can become nickel-63 in very small quantities and can last for 100 years. I would like to remind everyone that the sun, rare earth materials for solar and wind, and geologic processes can produce nearly as much radiation as these materials can. We should prevent exposure but even in a nightmare scenario, the situation is manageable and far better than cooking the planet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Iran By the way, read about this city if you want to read about a high baseline radioactivity in an inhabited area that occurs from a natural geologic process.

Enjoy living in your gaudy pollyanna bubble.

Notice that we're also running out of time, so things feasible in principle are not reachable in the time window still at our disposal. The next 2-3 decades should make that clearer.

Just beacause the fuel isn't radioactive doesn't mean the whole reactor becomes nuclear waste since it's constantly bombarded with radiation.

I don't know why this marketing lie is always presented as fact.

faq9

(www.ipp.mpg.de)

And this still doesn't solve the problem once you're a little too far off the equator.

A utility scale solar installation comparable to an average fission plant would take 15 square kilometers. Not to mention how complicated the infrastructure to actually transmit that power is.

Space is only one challenge though. You have no energy production at night, and energy generation can drop by half to almost three quarters during winter at higher latitudes.

fusion companies are essentially giant bubbles of debt owed to venture capital currently

There's a couple of loud, commercial fusion companies sucking up VC money, but all the serious projects are nationalized (China) or are projects run by public institutes with government funding (EU).

Helium, what, have you smoked waccy tobaccy today?

It was a joke, but fusion technically produces helium even if it also consumes it for cooling.

https://nomad-laboratory.de/uploads/publications/th/Fusion-Helium_supply_20131213.pdf

In the case of the HCLL reactor with lead as multiplier,
various Pb isotopes are produced in the (n, 2n) reaction
[26], and there is no α-particle emission. The amount of
helium produced annually remains at 0.39 t.

Fission reactors need to use helium as a coolant too though if they're high temperature (like gas reactors) and they don't produce shit except waste.

The issue with fusion and especially tokamaks is the triple challenge of mechanical loads + radiation loads + high heat flux. There's really no material known to mankind which can maintain the necessary high-temperature strength, while moving enough heat out of the reactor to keep it economical, without critically degrading in a matter of weeks/months due to fast neutron irradiation (let alone decades, as is standard for nearly every other thermal energy source). Hence, the heat sink will need to be replaced regularly.

Add to that the fact that fusion companies are essentially giant bubbles of debt owed to venture capital currently and you don't have a formula for a successful and cheap energy source.

But anyway, we already have fusion energy and it was probably partly used to charge your phone! It comes from the big floating fusion reactor in the sky, only requires a few panels of silicon, and is the cheapest and greenest energy source in existence.