[hunterpayne]

"My question is more about the safety of locating one smack in the middle of a city. "

We don't put any other type of powerplant in a city, so why would we do it for fusion? That being said, fusion won't happen in our lifetimes and even when we do get it, we probably will never really use it. Fission is just better in almost every way. It makes 5x the power per amount of fuel, it makes far less neutrons, and the temperature generated is far more usable. Oh, and fusion absolutely makes radioactive waste and a fusion failure makes a meltdown (which doesn't have to be a failure case for fission) look like a Sunday picnic.

[MisterTea]

> We don't put any other type of powerplant in a city, so why would we do it for fusion?

How did you write something so ignorant? NYC has multiple fossil fuel plants in the city centers. It would take you all of 15-30 seconds to look this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_New_...

[BizarroLand]

Stop your fearmongering. Fusion's radioactive byproducts are not nearly as dangerous as fission's byproducts, and they should only be radioactive for a year to a decade at most.

From https://www.iaea.org/topics/energy/fusion/faqs

Does Fusion produce radioactive nuclear waste the same way fission does?

Nuclear fission power plants have the disadvantage of generating unstable nuclei; some of these are radioactive for millions of years. Fusion on the other hand does not create any long-lived radioactive nuclear waste. A fusion reactor produces helium, which is an inert gas. It also produces and consumes tritium within the plant in a closed circuit. Tritium is radioactive (a beta emitter) but its half life is short. It is only used in low amounts so, unlike long-lived radioactive nuclei, it cannot produce any serious danger. The activation of the reactor’s structural material by intense neutron fluxes is another issue. This strongly depends on what solution for blanket and other structures has been adopted, and its reduction is an important challenge for future fusion experiments.

Can fusion cause a nuclear accident?

No, because fusion energy production is not based on a chain reaction, as is fission. Plasma must be kept at very high temperatures with the support of external heating systems and confined by an external magnetic field. Every shift or change of the working configuration in the reactor causes the cooling of plasma or the loss of its containment; in such a case, the reactor would automatically come to a halt within a few seconds, since the process of energy production is arrested, with no effects taking place on the outside. For this reason fusion reactors are considered to be inherently safe.