As to the Mississippi River flow estimate that’s something like 6 orders of magnitude larger than what I am referring to. Still, the other way of looking at that statistic is if half of the Tritium used per day was dumped into the Missisippi every day it would be considered safe to drink when well mixed.
Realize also that what has to be constrained is the cumulative leakage from all fusion power plants, not just a single one. The world would need on the order of 10,000 1GW power plants, to displace fossil fuels.
Globally, I do think fission or potentially fusion has a minor role because it could be important for a few countries locally even if it’s not cost effective in most areas. But realistically their only really competing with each other.
Nuclear fission looks unable to compete with renewables at current prices in almost all the world. There's a zone around Poland where it does the best. But even those zones go away as renewables and storage proceed down their experience curves. If there are very minor niche uses, fission would work just fine vs. fusion, particularly in high latitude countries that are already members of the nuclear club.
Circling back to my original post, it’s clearly not needed any time soon. I think it’s worth doing in much the same way building the ISS was worth doing. That said, I was trying to avoid being dismissive of possible upsides which seem unlikely but still possible.
Whatever the opposite of devils advocate is.
JET already had robust procedures for handling Tritium. It wasn’t that difficult because we are talking about such small amounts and the T is lighter than air so minute releases aren’t a major public hazard. Don’t forget Fission reactors actually produce Tritium.