Re: "super-heated plasma that turns the Earth into another star" - @Lomax
"You're carefully ignoring"
No I'm not, that's the "well, almost". You are correct that the shielding material does become irradiated, and it also needs to be replaced with some frequency - a fact that goes to the heart of how ITER has been designed: a lot of effort has gone into developing a system for replacing the shielding elements with minimal downtime (and risk). I don't know where you read that the shields are made from uranium - AFAIK the ITER design uses stainless steel, lead and lithium as shielding materials (the lithium actually breeds more tritium when exposed to neutron radiation). But while used shielding elements will need to be disposed of safely, the level of radioactivity and amount of material is far lower than in a fusion reactor of comparable size.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
