chess played by computers is the most popular spectator sport...
Until they become self aware that is.
The old movies got it wrong. Skynet is going to go live after being entrusted to win chess games for its human masters. It will unleash pawnageddon upon us all.
Fortunately, the robots created to round up humanity will be easily bested. They'll line up, and move in grids, and they'll patiently wait for us to take our turn.
Asbestos has less to do with the dangers it poses, and more to do with the way we used it freely decades ago. People do overreact, but it's a response to a time in which the stuff was used for everything down to cigarette butts.
I'll agree with you on radiation though. There are far too few people who know enough about physics and biology to understand the problem rationally. Moreover, I think we as a culture are still stinging from the cold war, and the notion that we might one day face the reality of widespread fallout. "Nuclear" is still a dirty word.
Side note: you mentioned genetically engineered chicken as something people hypocritically don't worry about. That isn't the case in my experience; genetic engineering is becoming the new nuke in the eyes of the public. Google "frankenfood", or look at the popularity of food advertised as being free of engineering, in the same breath as advertising it free of pesticides and hormones.
There are no "simple" kinds of life. Dismiss that notion from your mind. It may be what you learnt in school or from popular culture, but it isn't accurate.
Living things everywhere are shaped by evolutionary pressures. The niches they occupy and the threats they face differ, so too do the mechanisms by which they adapt. But from a basic level, there are no orders of lesser to greater life, except those that exist in our collective imagination.
Life does not become more advanced. It becomes better adapted to the challenges. "Survival of the fittest" here means fit in the sense of adapted, not "superior" (which is one reason why the phrase is rarely used by people who know the subject well).
Bigger life forms may be more complex in the sense of having more parts, or possessing intelligence, but they are not more advanced in any meaningful way. Culturally, we draw a distinction between intelligent and unintelligent life, but intelligence itself is simply another survival mechanism. One that we value as a species, but for reasons unrelated to survival itself.
The reason the smallest living things adapt swiftly to new threats like ionizing radiation has to with reproductive span. The faster you breed, the more quickly you can adapt. Larger forms of life breed, and therefor adapt, more slowly. So in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster (or war), the first to recover are naturally the smallest, but not because they are any simpler.
I know you're joking, but it's stories like this I want to show genuine creationists. Just to see if they can weasel out of it.
Of course, the ones with half a working brain already preempted the point by imagining a distinction between micro and macro evolution. Note that there is no such distinction in reality, but imagining there is can provide a handy way of dismissing actual evidence of evolution in action. A variant of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
This method is proof that creationist ideas can evolve, which I find deliciously ironic - when subjected to selection pressure, they develop new mechanisms of denial to cope.:-P
Mars has no better than a patchwork magnetosphere, and what of our own Moon? If we expect to grow plants in "biodomes" for food and use natural sunlight for photosynthesis, then those plants may have to be adapted to accepting something closer to the full brunt of that radiation than they have to endure on the face of this rather well-shielded marble.
One word: Mirrors.
This is mostly applicable to the moon; mars is a different story. Direct lunar sunlight would be bad for plants anyway; it's much more intense than it is here on earth.
So, you make your biodome entirely underground, and use reflective surfaces to direct a portion of the light from above to where the crops are. The light is more diffuse that way, which as mentioned is a good thing, and your plants aren't exposed to as much ionizing radiation.
Of course, how you get through two weeks of lunar night is a separate problem. You'd likely need lamps to provide light for those times.
For martian colonies, the radiation problem is at least reduced by distance, and very slightly attenuated by an atmosphere. You'd likely want plants that can survive on very thin sunlight, or failing that, you'd want to provide artificial light to make up the difference. Unlike the moon, I suspect you'd be alright setting up a dome on the surface without being fried.
Most vegetarians still get animal products via dairy and the like.
Vegans can and do run into nutritional deficiency if they aren't careful. The reason you don't see more of this is that the time it takes for this to be an issue is quite long, and the deficiencies, once they crop up, are very easy to fix. Often they take preventative measures, by way of supplements or specific foods that can cover the lack of animal products. No big deal here on earth.
Earth's "special property" is that we aren't trying to manage the whole ecology. It's taken care of for us.
In space, all other things being equal, those prospects wouldn't exist. Deficiencies, once they crop up, aren't going away. You need to have everything covered in advance. Everything. Right down to the last trace mineral.
Even if you plan for this, and bring a varied food supply, you'll have to ensure things like adequate trace minerals in the plant soil, to ensure those same minerals get into your diet. We aren't even sure we've got these things figured out yet - nobody has gone very long in isolation.
Note that this has little enough to do with whether the astronauts are vegan, vegetarian, omnivorous or what have you. The main reason I use the "plants only" example for a closed ecology not working is because bringing food animals isn't a good idea - no space for them, and you'll need to know their biochemistry as well as ours and the plants to keep everything in check.
If we want to stay in space for longer than a few months at a stretch, we need a detailed knowledge of human biochemistry and nutrition. We'd need to maintain an ecology large enough to provide for it. Ideally, knowing that, we'd want to also have the means to synthesize whatever we can't provide. Trying this back to the original discussion (which was already pretty far offtopic), building a ship or station like this will take a very large power supply.
Actually, the fuel is a non-issue. You don't "refine" deuterium, at least not in the way you refine oil or uranium. You extract it from hydrogen bearing molecules, water being the most common.
We don't need very much of it, and we already extract deuterium from seawater for use in heavy water moderated fission reactors. Those existing extraction facilities can provide all the deuterium we'd need.
Assuming the method from TFA was viable, then you'd presumably shape an ultradense deuterium fuel pellet on site. You might even do it in the reactor proper, if it isn't stable enough to transport. That might add to the cost, but without knowing more about how they did this, I can't guess at how much.
Even if we want to use a D-T reactor, the only other fuel we need is lithium. We can use a lithium blanket around the reactor to capture neutron radiation and breed tritium. Lithium's available enough, and again, not needed in quantity.
So, forget fuel as a part of the cost of a fusion plant. The real cost will be building and maintaining it.
Magnetic confinement reactors (which are the toroidal "donut" shaped ones) are as you describe... more or less. I would not describe initiating fusion in one as "easy", but it has been done experimentally, and is easier than sustaining it.
Inertial confinement fusion is a bit different. You're essentially firing a laser at (or otherwise zapping) a pellet containing fusion fuel, in the hopes it will react faster than it expands. Getting the reaction to work, and more importantly getting it to produce net energy, is a PITA, which is why magnetic confinement gets all the focus.
The technique in the article could help make an inertial fusion reactor more viable. It could also apply to starting up a magnetic fusion reactor, since there's some overlap between the two, but it'll have no impact on sustaining a magnetically confined fusion reaction.
Never trust anyone trying to sell you something. That goes double if the sale involves shiny new tech that's still on the drawing board.
"Too cheap to meter" was not the point of view held by those who actually knew what it took to build and maintain a nuclear reactor. The engineers and scientists involved were probably rolling their eyes then, as you do now. The politicians and managers make unreasonable promises, and when they're wrong, shift the blame to the people who actually did the work.
Apparently there aren't any fruits which contain Vitamin D, but, regardless, his statement was that "vitamins don't grow on trees", not "some vitamins don't grow on trees".
When I read the statement, I assumed the fact that some vitamins do grow on trees could be taken for granted, and therefor the only correct way to read it was "not all vitamins needed for human survival grow on trees".
Regardless, I got his point. A spacecraft with a closed soil ecology, isolated from earth, with only plants to feed the crew, would not be viable in the long term. Might not be vitamin deficiency that gets the crew, but something would.
The point was that the phrase "less stable than deuterium" described every single element that undergoes decay in the known universe. Kinda like saying something is less dense than a singularity;-)
I was not being particularly serious. What I said is true though - there's a lot of stuff that undergoes radioactive decay that we take for granted.
It's the entry on earth under the HHGTG that lists it as "mostly harmless". I've always taken that to mean the population, not the planet itself. YMMV.
Depends on whether the bomb is still using a fission primary. They've already got those about as small as they are theoretically capable of. And the fusion stage can be scaled to any arbitrary size, you just don't make them that big anymore, since there don't exist targets for a 50 megaton bomb.
Plus, don't forget that all this does is reduce the energy needed for fusion, and decrease the volume of the fuel. The weight is the same, which is the more important factor in a warhead,
Now, if they can skip the fission stage, that changes things. Then you've got a nuke that can likely be made much smaller (both in size and yield) and much cleaner. Whether this is a good thing depends primarily on what it's used for.
Recycle what's still usable. The USA doesn't do this because of an ill advised cold war ban on reprocessing technology, but Japan and France both do.
Separate the remainder and pitch the low level stuff. Vitrify it, bury it, forget about it. As long as it doesn't get into the water table in large quantity, we're safe. In small quantities, it's negligible. Worst case, we're the only ones who pay the price; low level radioactives aren't a threat to the ecology, especially not when the only water irradiated is in aquifers (we're pretty much the only species that has any reason to fear deep water contamination).
For evidence of the low impact of radiation, witness the resurgent wildlife at Chernobyl - plant and animal life is more loss-tolerant when radiation is concerned than human culture. A 5% increase in cancer rates terrifies us, yet impacts animals little (far less than human activity). This means the minor radioactives are far more a health concern than an environmental one.
What's left after the low level crud is separated, the really nasty stuff, is something like 1% of the total waste. This is the stuff we don't want leaking into the environment, for our sakes or the rest of the high order life on this planet. You're left with 90% of the problem condensed down to 1% of the mass. What you do with that is up to you; cart it offworld, bury it at a subduction zone, build a huge RTG and use it for power - there are several options.
Nope, he's serious. How many tree-grown products do you eat? I'm betting three or four types of fruit, at most.
Some vitamins do grow on trees, but the rest we need from other sources. Meat isn't easy to get in space, since food animals take up rather a lot of room. And isolated soil culture (what you've got aboard a spacecraft) may not have all the trace elements the plants need to draw upon to sustain us and our would-be food animals.
In a way, for long journeys where there's live and mobile crew to feed, it's almost easier to envision a completely synthetic diet. At least that only requires detailed understanding of our own biochemistry, plus the hypothetical technology to recycle waste indefinitely. Taking all the living things we need to survive with us requires understanding the dynamics of several different biochemistries, and how they all interact, which is no mean feat.
I'm not sure where you are in the world, so my comment may or may not be applicable. But my general experience with electric companies doesn't suggest they have to compete to stay in business.
In many parts of the world, the local electric company has a monopoly. In other places, there exist cartels (official or otherwise) that avoid competing with each other. In neither of the above cases do prices get driven down by competition.
Doubtlessly some people would blame this on state-sponsorship, and that is part of the problem. A larger issue underneath however is the high cost associated with building a power plant and the infrastructure to connect it to your paying customers.
Competition occurs most readily when start up costs are low, and customers can freely chose which source they want to get their goods and services from. When the barrier to entry is this high, no new companies come into being, and some of the existing companies would never have existed in the first place if they weren't founded or propped up by the local government.
OTOH, cheap fusion would probably drop the bottom out of the energy market, which might be a good thing. Realistically though, fusion won't be cheap until a long time after we have a working power generator.
Power is still relevant to that discussion though. Ecosystems require energy input. Anything that might substitute for an ecosystem in this context would require similar energy to work.
If the technology existed to support a human being away from earth for anywhere approaching one human life span, the power requirements would be huge. Fusion, fission, or something on the same order of magnitude is practically a necessity, at least if there's no star in close proximity.
Still, relative to deuterium, it's much more radioactive.
Deuterium doesn't decay, at least not on any observable time scale. So "relative to deuterium", anything that does decay is much more radioactive. This includes such notable elements as Bismuth, used in Pepto-Bismol, and Tungsten, used in lightbulb filaments. Nevermind such notables as Americium in smoke detectors.
While that would be a bad thing as far as fairness goes, it would still be an improvement over what we have today.
Plus, in the long haul, all it takes is for the tech to miniaturize to the point where you can install it at home and go off the grid. Failing that, if the technology is cheap enough, smaller utilities might be able afford the start up costs and enter the market, which will introduce competition.
That being said, "cold" fusion is very likely a pipe dream. Fusion power generators will almost certainly be inertially or magnetically confined - "hot" fusion in other words. However, since the tech in TFA is applicable to inertial confinement fusion, the cold fusion debate is not applicable here.
Thin glass is all you need. Tritium is a beta emitter - skin won't necessarily stop it, but just about anything else will. If it leaks out, it'll be as a diffuse gas that will react with oxygen to produce slightly radioactive water - with the quantities in your watch, that's no big deal. It is still somewhat energetic though (probably where they're getting "highly radioactive").
I can see why the method from TFA, if it works, might not be wise to use on tritium. An ultradense block of material that, upon returning to regular atmospheric pressure, expands into a radioactive gas... not a great idea. Tritium, like human beings, is only mostly harmless:-)
If we want off earth for any length of time, we need a power plant that will sustain a manned spacecraft for a long journey. Fusion beats the hell out of fission in that department.
So consider this one small step on the way to a future in which star trek looks antiquated. If it works, that is (I have my reservations upon looking at the claims in TFA).
Slashdot Mirror
As for the movement, they can jump from Boston to New York in one move over a network.
Only if the network is three grid spaces forward, one space to the side ;-P
Failing that, if there are no pieces in the way, they could cross in a straight line, assuming it was either a horizontal, vertical or diagonal.
chess played by computers is the most popular spectator sport...
Until they become self aware that is.
The old movies got it wrong. Skynet is going to go live after being entrusted to win chess games for its human masters. It will unleash pawnageddon upon us all.
Fortunately, the robots created to round up humanity will be easily bested. They'll line up, and move in grids, and they'll patiently wait for us to take our turn.
Food colouring? That was kinda random.
Asbestos has less to do with the dangers it poses, and more to do with the way we used it freely decades ago. People do overreact, but it's a response to a time in which the stuff was used for everything down to cigarette butts.
I'll agree with you on radiation though. There are far too few people who know enough about physics and biology to understand the problem rationally. Moreover, I think we as a culture are still stinging from the cold war, and the notion that we might one day face the reality of widespread fallout. "Nuclear" is still a dirty word.
Side note: you mentioned genetically engineered chicken as something people hypocritically don't worry about. That isn't the case in my experience; genetic engineering is becoming the new nuke in the eyes of the public. Google "frankenfood", or look at the popularity of food advertised as being free of engineering, in the same breath as advertising it free of pesticides and hormones.
Radioactive waste? I eat it for breakfast.
You really shouldn't be going to Taco Bell that early in the day.
And my stomach functions as a breeder reactor, so my shit can be used to generate even more power.
Does that mean the nearest bathroom goes China syndrome around lunchtime?
There are no "simple" kinds of life. Dismiss that notion from your mind. It may be what you learnt in school or from popular culture, but it isn't accurate.
Living things everywhere are shaped by evolutionary pressures. The niches they occupy and the threats they face differ, so too do the mechanisms by which they adapt. But from a basic level, there are no orders of lesser to greater life, except those that exist in our collective imagination.
Life does not become more advanced. It becomes better adapted to the challenges. "Survival of the fittest" here means fit in the sense of adapted, not "superior" (which is one reason why the phrase is rarely used by people who know the subject well).
Bigger life forms may be more complex in the sense of having more parts, or possessing intelligence, but they are not more advanced in any meaningful way. Culturally, we draw a distinction between intelligent and unintelligent life, but intelligence itself is simply another survival mechanism. One that we value as a species, but for reasons unrelated to survival itself.
The reason the smallest living things adapt swiftly to new threats like ionizing radiation has to with reproductive span. The faster you breed, the more quickly you can adapt. Larger forms of life breed, and therefor adapt, more slowly. So in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster (or war), the first to recover are naturally the smallest, but not because they are any simpler.
I know you're joking, but it's stories like this I want to show genuine creationists. Just to see if they can weasel out of it.
Of course, the ones with half a working brain already preempted the point by imagining a distinction between micro and macro evolution. Note that there is no such distinction in reality, but imagining there is can provide a handy way of dismissing actual evidence of evolution in action. A variant of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
This method is proof that creationist ideas can evolve, which I find deliciously ironic - when subjected to selection pressure, they develop new mechanisms of denial to cope. :-P
Mars has no better than a patchwork magnetosphere, and what of our own Moon? If we expect to grow plants in "biodomes" for food and use natural sunlight for photosynthesis, then those plants may have to be adapted to accepting something closer to the full brunt of that radiation than they have to endure on the face of this rather well-shielded marble.
One word: Mirrors.
This is mostly applicable to the moon; mars is a different story. Direct lunar sunlight would be bad for plants anyway; it's much more intense than it is here on earth.
So, you make your biodome entirely underground, and use reflective surfaces to direct a portion of the light from above to where the crops are. The light is more diffuse that way, which as mentioned is a good thing, and your plants aren't exposed to as much ionizing radiation.
Of course, how you get through two weeks of lunar night is a separate problem. You'd likely need lamps to provide light for those times.
For martian colonies, the radiation problem is at least reduced by distance, and very slightly attenuated by an atmosphere. You'd likely want plants that can survive on very thin sunlight, or failing that, you'd want to provide artificial light to make up the difference. Unlike the moon, I suspect you'd be alright setting up a dome on the surface without being fried.
Most vegetarians still get animal products via dairy and the like.
Vegans can and do run into nutritional deficiency if they aren't careful. The reason you don't see more of this is that the time it takes for this to be an issue is quite long, and the deficiencies, once they crop up, are very easy to fix. Often they take preventative measures, by way of supplements or specific foods that can cover the lack of animal products. No big deal here on earth.
Earth's "special property" is that we aren't trying to manage the whole ecology. It's taken care of for us.
In space, all other things being equal, those prospects wouldn't exist. Deficiencies, once they crop up, aren't going away. You need to have everything covered in advance. Everything. Right down to the last trace mineral.
Even if you plan for this, and bring a varied food supply, you'll have to ensure things like adequate trace minerals in the plant soil, to ensure those same minerals get into your diet. We aren't even sure we've got these things figured out yet - nobody has gone very long in isolation.
Note that this has little enough to do with whether the astronauts are vegan, vegetarian, omnivorous or what have you. The main reason I use the "plants only" example for a closed ecology not working is because bringing food animals isn't a good idea - no space for them, and you'll need to know their biochemistry as well as ours and the plants to keep everything in check.
If we want to stay in space for longer than a few months at a stretch, we need a detailed knowledge of human biochemistry and nutrition. We'd need to maintain an ecology large enough to provide for it. Ideally, knowing that, we'd want to also have the means to synthesize whatever we can't provide. Trying this back to the original discussion (which was already pretty far offtopic), building a ship or station like this will take a very large power supply.
Actually, the fuel is a non-issue. You don't "refine" deuterium, at least not in the way you refine oil or uranium. You extract it from hydrogen bearing molecules, water being the most common.
We don't need very much of it, and we already extract deuterium from seawater for use in heavy water moderated fission reactors. Those existing extraction facilities can provide all the deuterium we'd need.
Assuming the method from TFA was viable, then you'd presumably shape an ultradense deuterium fuel pellet on site. You might even do it in the reactor proper, if it isn't stable enough to transport. That might add to the cost, but without knowing more about how they did this, I can't guess at how much.
Even if we want to use a D-T reactor, the only other fuel we need is lithium. We can use a lithium blanket around the reactor to capture neutron radiation and breed tritium. Lithium's available enough, and again, not needed in quantity.
So, forget fuel as a part of the cost of a fusion plant. The real cost will be building and maintaining it.
Depends on the type of reactor.
Magnetic confinement reactors (which are the toroidal "donut" shaped ones) are as you describe... more or less. I would not describe initiating fusion in one as "easy", but it has been done experimentally, and is easier than sustaining it.
Inertial confinement fusion is a bit different. You're essentially firing a laser at (or otherwise zapping) a pellet containing fusion fuel, in the hopes it will react faster than it expands. Getting the reaction to work, and more importantly getting it to produce net energy, is a PITA, which is why magnetic confinement gets all the focus.
The technique in the article could help make an inertial fusion reactor more viable. It could also apply to starting up a magnetic fusion reactor, since there's some overlap between the two, but it'll have no impact on sustaining a magnetically confined fusion reaction.
Never trust anyone trying to sell you something. That goes double if the sale involves shiny new tech that's still on the drawing board.
"Too cheap to meter" was not the point of view held by those who actually knew what it took to build and maintain a nuclear reactor. The engineers and scientists involved were probably rolling their eyes then, as you do now. The politicians and managers make unreasonable promises, and when they're wrong, shift the blame to the people who actually did the work.
Cheap energy is possible, it just isn't likely.
Apparently there aren't any fruits which contain Vitamin D, but, regardless, his statement was that "vitamins don't grow on trees", not "some vitamins don't grow on trees".
When I read the statement, I assumed the fact that some vitamins do grow on trees could be taken for granted, and therefor the only correct way to read it was "not all vitamins needed for human survival grow on trees".
Regardless, I got his point. A spacecraft with a closed soil ecology, isolated from earth, with only plants to feed the crew, would not be viable in the long term. Might not be vitamin deficiency that gets the crew, but something would.
The point was that the phrase "less stable than deuterium" described every single element that undergoes decay in the known universe. Kinda like saying something is less dense than a singularity ;-)
I was not being particularly serious. What I said is true though - there's a lot of stuff that undergoes radioactive decay that we take for granted.
So I used the word "promiximity" in my post. Proofreading would have been a good strategery there, I guess.
Subtle humour, or delicious irony?
FYI: "promiximity" sounds like it ought to refer to a mix of proximity and promiscuity.
You clearly have a more varied diet than most :-)
I was expecting you to name oranges, bananas and apples, tops. That's about as far as fruit gets in most people's diets.
Point still stands though. You've listed plenty of sources of vitamin C. Got anything with A in it?
It's the entry on earth under the HHGTG that lists it as "mostly harmless". I've always taken that to mean the population, not the planet itself. YMMV.
Depends on whether the bomb is still using a fission primary. They've already got those about as small as they are theoretically capable of. And the fusion stage can be scaled to any arbitrary size, you just don't make them that big anymore, since there don't exist targets for a 50 megaton bomb.
Plus, don't forget that all this does is reduce the energy needed for fusion, and decrease the volume of the fuel. The weight is the same, which is the more important factor in a warhead,
Now, if they can skip the fission stage, that changes things. Then you've got a nuke that can likely be made much smaller (both in size and yield) and much cleaner. Whether this is a good thing depends primarily on what it's used for.
Recycle what's still usable. The USA doesn't do this because of an ill advised cold war ban on reprocessing technology, but Japan and France both do.
Separate the remainder and pitch the low level stuff. Vitrify it, bury it, forget about it. As long as it doesn't get into the water table in large quantity, we're safe. In small quantities, it's negligible. Worst case, we're the only ones who pay the price; low level radioactives aren't a threat to the ecology, especially not when the only water irradiated is in aquifers (we're pretty much the only species that has any reason to fear deep water contamination).
For evidence of the low impact of radiation, witness the resurgent wildlife at Chernobyl - plant and animal life is more loss-tolerant when radiation is concerned than human culture. A 5% increase in cancer rates terrifies us, yet impacts animals little (far less than human activity). This means the minor radioactives are far more a health concern than an environmental one.
What's left after the low level crud is separated, the really nasty stuff, is something like 1% of the total waste. This is the stuff we don't want leaking into the environment, for our sakes or the rest of the high order life on this planet. You're left with 90% of the problem condensed down to 1% of the mass. What you do with that is up to you; cart it offworld, bury it at a subduction zone, build a huge RTG and use it for power - there are several options.
Uh. That was a joke, right?
Nope, he's serious. How many tree-grown products do you eat? I'm betting three or four types of fruit, at most.
Some vitamins do grow on trees, but the rest we need from other sources. Meat isn't easy to get in space, since food animals take up rather a lot of room. And isolated soil culture (what you've got aboard a spacecraft) may not have all the trace elements the plants need to draw upon to sustain us and our would-be food animals.
In a way, for long journeys where there's live and mobile crew to feed, it's almost easier to envision a completely synthetic diet. At least that only requires detailed understanding of our own biochemistry, plus the hypothetical technology to recycle waste indefinitely. Taking all the living things we need to survive with us requires understanding the dynamics of several different biochemistries, and how they all interact, which is no mean feat.
I'm not sure where you are in the world, so my comment may or may not be applicable. But my general experience with electric companies doesn't suggest they have to compete to stay in business.
In many parts of the world, the local electric company has a monopoly. In other places, there exist cartels (official or otherwise) that avoid competing with each other. In neither of the above cases do prices get driven down by competition.
Doubtlessly some people would blame this on state-sponsorship, and that is part of the problem. A larger issue underneath however is the high cost associated with building a power plant and the infrastructure to connect it to your paying customers.
Competition occurs most readily when start up costs are low, and customers can freely chose which source they want to get their goods and services from. When the barrier to entry is this high, no new companies come into being, and some of the existing companies would never have existed in the first place if they weren't founded or propped up by the local government.
OTOH, cheap fusion would probably drop the bottom out of the energy market, which might be a good thing. Realistically though, fusion won't be cheap until a long time after we have a working power generator.
Power is still relevant to that discussion though. Ecosystems require energy input. Anything that might substitute for an ecosystem in this context would require similar energy to work.
If the technology existed to support a human being away from earth for anywhere approaching one human life span, the power requirements would be huge. Fusion, fission, or something on the same order of magnitude is practically a necessity, at least if there's no star in close proximity.
Still, relative to deuterium, it's much more radioactive.
Deuterium doesn't decay, at least not on any observable time scale. So "relative to deuterium", anything that does decay is much more radioactive. This includes such notable elements as Bismuth, used in Pepto-Bismol, and Tungsten, used in lightbulb filaments. Nevermind such notables as Americium in smoke detectors.
While that would be a bad thing as far as fairness goes, it would still be an improvement over what we have today.
Plus, in the long haul, all it takes is for the tech to miniaturize to the point where you can install it at home and go off the grid. Failing that, if the technology is cheap enough, smaller utilities might be able afford the start up costs and enter the market, which will introduce competition.
That being said, "cold" fusion is very likely a pipe dream. Fusion power generators will almost certainly be inertially or magnetically confined - "hot" fusion in other words. However, since the tech in TFA is applicable to inertial confinement fusion, the cold fusion debate is not applicable here.
Thin glass is all you need. Tritium is a beta emitter - skin won't necessarily stop it, but just about anything else will. If it leaks out, it'll be as a diffuse gas that will react with oxygen to produce slightly radioactive water - with the quantities in your watch, that's no big deal. It is still somewhat energetic though (probably where they're getting "highly radioactive").
I can see why the method from TFA, if it works, might not be wise to use on tritium. An ultradense block of material that, upon returning to regular atmospheric pressure, expands into a radioactive gas... not a great idea. Tritium, like human beings, is only mostly harmless :-)
Hey, one thing at a time :-)
If we want off earth for any length of time, we need a power plant that will sustain a manned spacecraft for a long journey. Fusion beats the hell out of fission in that department.
So consider this one small step on the way to a future in which star trek looks antiquated. If it works, that is (I have my reservations upon looking at the claims in TFA).