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Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

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  • They settle out all of the heavier radioactive elements. They then dilute the remaining heavy water with additional water to drive the level of tritium to an acceptable level. It is then dumped into the ocean and rapidly mixes with the surrounding seawater. If you were to look at a map of ocean currents you’d see generally where it would go from there, but it doesn’t really matter because tritium isn’t really a significant concern. If they were dumping significant quantities of cobalt 60 you should care more, but they aren’t, so you shouldn’t.





  • Beyond just trying to maintain a reaction, we’ll need a design that allows for the extraction of working energy. At present, all designs require tons of additional energy to keep them cool. We’re very far from any design that is power positive in a real sense. Any time you ask one of the fusion fanboys about this there’s a lot of hand waving, but I’ve never seen any actual proposals to extract working heat from the reactor. Any designs that require supercooling are especially problematic. It’s really difficult to extract heat capable of turning a turbine through the supercooled magnetic containment.

    Fusion will happen, but not before a whole lot more money and time (in decades) disappears into the money pit.