Wasn’t the H-bomb (fusion) supposed to be way more powerful and unpredictable than the A-bomb (fission)? Kinda confused here and I’m certainly mixing bombs with energy production. But if you could give me the essential I’d appreciate it. Thank you.
In: Chemistry
>Wasn’t the H-bomb (fusion) supposed to be way more powerful and unpredictable than the A-bomb (fission)
Powerful? Yes. Unpredictable? No. I’m not really sure where you got that from. There’s nothing unpredictable about the yield of thermonuclear weapons. Once we fully understood the process of fusion, there was no mystery. Anyway, bombs don’t work like reactors.
To your question, in general, yes, fusion would be much safer than fission for power plants because a power plant using nuclear fusion does not involve any radioactive isotopes and does not produce any long-lasting radioactive waste. Fission power plants needs hundreds of tons of uranium fuel and the fission process turns that into hundreds of tons of nasty and dangerous radioactive waste that can stick around for hundreds of thousands of years.
Fusion on the other hand is just hydrogen and helium. Some of the helium will be tritium, which is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, but it decays within a few years. Also, the insides of the fusion reactor will become temporarily radioactive from absorbing neutrons, but again, it’s short lived and not super dangerous.
So in short, fusion is much safer than fission because fusion produces basically no dangerous radioactive waste.
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