No other energy source puts materials under the same trauma

I'm sure people said the same thing the first time we thought about turning a piston with literal explosions.

The engineering challenges are immense, but these challenges shouldn't be an excuse we use to prop up inferior, dirtier power generation.

Is it really waste if you can use all of its "waste" outputs for useful things? Tritium can just be rebreeded into the fusion process, so its 12 year half life will rarely come up. Molybdenum-99 is used in medical imaging and is frankly in short supply, we would eat that up instantly and the world would be better off for it. Tritium is also just very useful medically in general. The largest stable byproduct by far is non-radioactive helium which has many thousands of use cases. The majority of the "waste" (80%) simply dissipates into thin air as pure, harmless neutrons.

You could maybe argue that the internals of a fusion reactor would be embedded with radiation from the tritium supply. Tritium itself is generally not very dangerous to humans. Even if you inhaled pure tritium it cannot enter the blood supply. It would have to be ingested by eating and somehow stay lodged inside of your intestines to do real damage, and in that case it would still be limited by its 12 year half life.

Some of the steel and nickel plating could probably be warped by the fusion process, and this would be considered low-level waste. The less nickel that is in the steel, the less radioactive it will be. Metals are generally not of great concern when it comes to radioactivity because they are very easily sequestered. Even if you were in full body naked direct contact with nickel-63 for a whole year, you would likely be fine. Most of these radioactive metals would decay even faster, generally less than 5 years. The most concerning one is nickel which can become nickel-63 in very small quantities and can last for 100 years. I would like to remind everyone that the sun, rare earth materials for solar and wind, and geologic processes can produce nearly as much radiation as these materials can. We should prevent exposure but even in a nightmare scenario, the situation is manageable and far better than cooking the planet. The highest danger is always from ingestion with fusion materials, but that is very rare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Iran By the way, read about this city if you want to read about a high baseline radioactivity in an inhabited area that occurs from a natural geologic process.

Even your link says that it is not long time waste. Which does not make it zero, but magnitudes better compared to the “usual” waste