[ RadSafe ] Absurd? Oh, the irony!

[Franta, Jaroslav]

>As a public issue, quantities are apparently irrelevant. 
>So I don't see the difference between fusion 
>and fission radioactive wastes as a public issue. 
>This is a strange world we are dealing with!
=============


Indeed !
The public issue appears instead to be that ITER "seeks to mimic the way the
sun produces energy," or "reproducing the sun's power source" (warm & fuzzy
image), while NIF & other inertial confinement fusion schemes "simulate
fusion reactions that occur in hydrogen bombs" (horror!) -- and of course
fission reactors "split atoms, like A-bombs."
In fact, our fusion reactors are very much UNLIKE the sun, in both operating
conditions and fuel type, fusion marketing propaganda notwithstanding.

Fusion reactors and the Sun don't even operate on the same physical force,
and there aren't any D-D or D-T reactions in the Sun -- both accounting for
the fact that the Sun burns for billions of years, instead of blowing up.

The Sun *depends* on reactions using the weak nuclear force, while reactors
& bombs use fuels that can be fused quickly & relatively easily using the
strong nuclear force only.

In his seminal book "Principles of Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis,"
Donald Clayton writes concerning p-p fusion that the weak nuclear
interaction is so exceedingly rare, that the deuterium (D)  that has been
formed never actually encounters another D.
As Clayton explains, "after the deuterium has been formed [in the p-p
fusion], one could imagine that He-4 might be produced by the reaction D + D
--> He-4 + u. 
This reaction, however, suffers from..... the fact that the deuterium
abundance is kept very small by its interaction with protons [in the
reaction D + p --> He-3 + u, following which the helium nuclei fuse
according to He-3 + He-3 --> He-4 + p + p ].
.....That these are the major reactions comes about because..... D can build
up only to a very small abundance." [ie. two Ds never bump into each other
in the sea of protons....]

According to
http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/phys/people/vdhillon/teaching/phy213/
phy213_fusion3.html , "This [p-p] reaction occurs via the weak nuclear force
and the average proton in the Sun will undergo such a reaction approximately
once in the lifetime of the Sun, i.e. once every 10 billion years" (the
sun's life) ...this in spite of the fact that the protons undergo
approximately 10 billion collisions per second with other protons in the
solar interior.


Jaro 
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