The 8008 1756

I wouldn't dismiss it so lightly. Electricity is difficult to store, especially as a transportation fuel. We're only now starting to figure out a better battery technology than the old standby of lead-acid.

Every form of energy conversion has losses, including generating, transporting, storing and converting electricity. The costs of storing electricity in a fuel cell battery have to compete with the costs of storing electricity in regular batteries (or whatever transportation fuel you want to use).

Any engineered fusion reactor will be built to replace the components whose lives are shortened by exposure to radiation fields. Your qualifier of "solid moderator" is unnecessary, pretty much all fission reactors of a significant power levels have issues with radiation damage in materials, especially close to the core. The damage rate does not vary significantly with neutron energy in the range of fission and fusion machines except that a threshold of 10 keV is required to induce displacement of atoms. The other exception being that high energy neutrons tend to produce more helium along with the radiation damage. That's one of the bigger challenges to materials in fusion systems and the effects of helium are not well understood.

True, but the volumes in a fusion system would be less and the radiation would decay much faster than the spent fuel from fission reactors.

mike -- "When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers your knowledge is a meagre and unsatisfactory kind" - Lord Kelvin