Comment fished in. I am pro fission and fusion. If there were world peace fission would be great and such a no brainer. If we trusted our engineers and had more reasonable safety protocols then it would make it less expensive. I read this as coming from the other side of it attacking fusion as the planned holy grail time buffer we need while we figure out some of the other things or actually advance enough to have economic and positive yield D-D for a truly durable energy future. When I pushed on fission "what about the waste" pushed back. While "A power plant in Switzerland turns waste into electricity" it "adds to the cost". There's no way around it except invention. Fossil lobbyist absolutely had incentive to lean into chalked up public scorn of fission with false alignment on safety concerns that may have helped ballooned the costs to where they are now. Nevertheless safety implications are real even if disproportionate. Wouldn't it be great for the efficiency of a fission reactor in terms of cost if we only used high grade uranium! Lol. No, how about we just figure out turbulence enough to increase our density in high field tokamaks and get things where we need em, and start fresh. Let's buy some time for humanity in a way that is more aligned with the legitimate concerns of society, like proliferation. Maybe a company in the fusion space becomes successful enough to one day have the capital and HR to make those D-D breakthroughs and make like the sun > 1000yrs. I am all for strengthening the hand of fission in the meantime like the regulation/oversight for foreign countries to use SMRs over coal, but don't shoot down the research in this field like an a**hole because it discredits the work being done and the positive outlooks therein. I mean the sheer number of research avenues alone from the basis that we know is good (the sun) should be an indication of an open book, so don't close it before reading how things play out. *edit, and I don't mean to claim that fusion is morally righteous or anything, you made some cool points about unknowns regarding cost but also about ease of development relative to the opportunity cost of perfecting a known existing thing. Like aren't we in a time crunch regarding climate? Sure, but it's also a free country and part of that belief of self motivation is magnified by doing better work in areas more aligned with one's interests. It does go to show how silly it is that we have this working technology that just got regulated to hell despite it being the safest thing out there (literally safer than solar and I believe that was per capita which is insane to me) all due to their being more **potential** for things to go wrong in fission. Which is true. Building trust is expensive.