So why is nuclear fusion labeled as clean, but nuclear fission is usually not labeled as clean. I remember something about a regulatory organisation wanted to label nuclear fission as green because it is CO2 neutral, but they got a lot of resistance about that.

Is it because of the nuclear waste? Because nuclear fusion still produces a whole lot of nuclear waste. With fission a part of the waste is the spent fuel, but a whole lot of it is reactor parts. With fusion the spent fuel isn’t an issue, but there is still a whole lot of reactor parts that are turned into radioactive waste. Now I don’t know how these two relate, on average over the lifespan of the reactor, how much waste does a modern fission reactor produce and how much waste does one of these new fusion reactors produce? I’m not sure there’s even an answer to that, since these fusion reactors are very much experimental and nowhere new showtime. Where fission reactors have been around for a long time. And fission has advanced of course, so we don’t know how much waste a fission reactor built at the same time as one of these new fusion reactors would produce? It would be cool if an expert weighs in on this.

And I’ve read about older spent nuclear fuel being used in smal reactors to convert it into a more manageable kind of waste? Not sure how much of that is BS and how much it could actually work.

Or is it all marketing / history and are both equally bad or good?

Any nuclear experts on Lemmy?