Re: "in favor of renewable energy sources like nuclear fusion"
> it is taking energy locked up shortly after the Big Bang and dumping it into our environment.
Isn't that exactly what the Sun is doing? :P It won't last forever either.
Fusion has the potential to make its own fuel, to turn Lithium into Tritium + some other stuff. There is a mind-bogglingly huge amount of energy locked up in matter (see Einstein's most famous little equation) so we would never, ever run out if we were to make energy that way. Fusion is as renewable as the sun is. The sun itself is fusion after all.
However, it is not free of chemical or radioactive pollution. There would be lots of that from fusion power. More by weight and volume than fission waste, but fewer active materials, not as long-lived, not as toxic.
It's also quite impractical to get any useful energy out. Unlike fission where we can just run a coolant loop straight through the reactor, fusion has to happen at millions of degrees, and no material can survive that, so it is done in a vacuum. How do we transfer Gigawatts across a vacuum? It's tricky, especially when so much of it comes as neutron radiation.
In any case, it's looking very likely that we will have blown ourselves up with within the next few years, so it's all a bit academic.
