"some models of gen iv of nuclear power plants can pretty much do the same"
I'd be interested to know which fission plants make fuel recycling and waste disposal trivial, I could make a lot of money!
In reality, even the gen 4 plants that have interesting approaches to reprocessing still produce a lot of harmful radioactive waste. Not all the fuel can be recycled and the process itself is imperfect and messy.
Landmark paper is a strong term for something that has been repeatedly debunked and then ignored by the nuclear physics community (all its citations are cold fusion journals...)
The theory Widom and Larsen propose violates the laws of physics and has no experimental evidence.
Put simply, the weak reaction needs an enormous amount of energy to happen. The difference between a neutron and a proton is 1MeV, more than the mass of the electron. The electric field at the surface of the metal is of the order of eV and does not account for this. So where are these massive electrons magically getting their energy from?
Nuclear fission is a stable source of energy that does not produce carbon emissions in production. It's pretty much the answer to the climate crisis except that it produces dangerous waste that is horrendous to store and manage.
the CEO of JET (largest working fusion reactor, until ITER is finished) Ian Chapman said in a lecture that renewables (and nuclear fission) are key to holding off climate change until fusion is a more mature technology
why should the research be mutually exclusive though? there's resources and brainpower to pursue both.
The answer is kinda dumb though, most working fusion reactors don't have a way to extract heat yet. But the plan is to use the same turbine (heat water into steam) technology from fission reactors. So you have cutting edge plasma physics in one part of the reactor and old school victorian-era steam turbines in the other.
That article is quite outdated, JET has 2020 D-T campaign.
More importantly, fusion is a thousand times better than fission with respect to waste.
No one is claiming there is no waste at all, but tritium has a half-life of 12.5 years so most of the waste will be safe within a few decades. The rest will largely be neutron embrittled steels/materials (classified as low level nuclear waste) that is easily stored.
Compare and contrast that to nuclear fission which generates high level waste, spent nuclear fuel rods and radioactive liquid which must be painstakingly petrified and processed before safe storage. Even then this waste will still be dangerous for over 100,000 years.
You're confusing the strong and weak nuclear forces from particle physics with the fission and fusion nuclear reactions.
The (residual) strong force underpins the energy release in both fission and fusion reactions.
You've also linked to the debunked pseudoscience of 'cold fusion', (dressed up as low energy nuclear reactions...) from Pons and Fleischman.
Plenty of work is being done in the field of handling radioactive waste from nuclear fission. My field (decommissioning and waste management) is entirely dedicated to it.
I'd be interested to know which fission plants make fuel recycling and waste disposal trivial, I could make a lot of money!
In reality, even the gen 4 plants that have interesting approaches to reprocessing still produce a lot of harmful radioactive waste. Not all the fuel can be recycled and the process itself is imperfect and messy.