Fusion reactor risks
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Transcript
- Question
- Are Fusion reactors potentially very dangerous?
- Dr Jack Bacon
-
Certainly anything that is hot is dangerous. I just toured the Tiwai Point electric smelter for aluminium a couple of days ago, and you’ve got molten aluminium running around everywhere that’s hot, and yet that is a standard part of modern industry, we melt metals, we melt stone, we create super-heated steam. Energy concentration is not necessarily bad. If you can’t diffuse the waste heat into the environment, you may locally effect the ecology, so certain fish species and things sensitive to a thermal environment may migrate elsewhere, but the thermal load that we put out as a waste product of our heat is nothing compared to the effect we are having on solar power with out carbon in the atmosphere. The greenhouse gases are causing much more heating of the atmosphere than we create just by burning the fossil fuels in the first place.