Greenpeace

This was the comment I left you. "Sorry but I think you're wrong on the leak in your community. Tritium is only used in hydrogen bombs and nuclear fusion reactors(which havent been officially completed yet, but will be our best source for power in the future), and is safe enough that you don't need protective material to handle it. Plutonium and Uranium are used in fission reactors, which are the current reactors used to produce power."

I commented on it because you said there was a tritium leak at the power plant near your community. This is not possible since tritium is not used in fission reactors, and tritium is safe to handle because all it is is heavy Hydrogen.
As for the 1/3 of the country statement, I got that from the professor of nuclear engineering at TX A&M when he visited my school last year.
Also please don't try to teach me what fusion and fission is, I've known the difference since 7th grade when I did a report on Hydrogen bombs.

As for the waste it creates, here's the answer: none. Since it uses tritium or deuterium, it produces a clean reaction. Why do you think Hydrogen bombs created less radiation than smaller Atom bombs? It's because they required a small fission device to start the reaction. That is why h-bombs produce such a small amount of radiation compared to Atom bombs like the ones dropped on Hiroshima(even though h-bombs power ranges in the megaton range whereas the a-bomb is in kilitons). This is why I support fusion power over our current fission reactors.

Also you wouldn't be using more power to start it because the whole point of a fusion reactor is to have the power output get past a q of 1, which is the break even point(the point at which power output is equal to power input). Once it gets past the break even point, it produces enough energy to sustain itself (for a virtually infinite amount of time on the scale of billions of years, unless you stop the reaction) and also provide excess energy for us to use. This has been successfully done in Japan (they reached a q of 1.25), and was sustained for 8 minutes until they were done testing. In other words they were able to turn off the reaction themselves, with no problem. Also the Z-machine in Sandia Laboratories created a fusion reaction that lasted for 2 milliseconds that released enough energy to power every house in the world for two minutes, and that was done with a machine that was initially never meant to test fusion processes.

Which leads to safety. What happens if it cracks? Well as mentioned above, you can stop the reaction fairly easily since all you'd have to do is decrease the temperatures to below optimal fusion levls, and just let the reaction consume itself in about a blink of an eye.

As for the energy to start it, there are two approaches(and one that's still ho-hum in my opinion). The TOKOMAK way which is superheating plasma energy and containing it with magnetic forces in a toroid, which is the most effective shape based on the hairy ball theory, or inertial fusion which involves either lazers or particle cannons to superheat a ball of tritium to the point that it shoots a shockwave into the center of the tritium to create enough heat and pressure to trigger a reaction. The ho-hum way is cold fusion where you supposedly start a reaction by placing a a metal heavy with deuterium (such as palladium) and placing it in heavy water at room temperatures. Somehow it's supposed to form a reaction, but right now is merely considered pathalogical.

So please don't say that I havent done reasearch. I've been reading about fusion power for over 8 years and have written plenty reports on it for assignments. So it pretty much is "nuclear salvation" as I said, because it will be a limitless supply of energy that is both clean and abundant.