CFS has plans for swappable vacuum chambers (1 year lifespan) and the liquid blanket will protect the magnets for a 10 year lifespan.

This talk by the MIT Nuclear Science department head explains the whole rationale behind ARC/SPARC, and this timestamp is where he starts talking about maintenance and the neutron blanket (5 minutes later): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4&t=2400s

> Since neutron bombardment also turns any material radioactive, not only do you need to tear down your fusion plant (or at least the expensive reactor part of it) every few years, but you have to do it with radiation-resistant robots, as human workers can't get close to the reactor after it's been operating for a while.

I bought a new screen cover yesterday for my phone. It came with a full mounting kit that I discarded after the ten minutes that took me to place the cover. The same kit could have been used to mount at least a hundred covers. The small slice of civilization I'm part of is extremely wasteful!

But, let's analyze that waste. First, energy went into collecting and transporting those materials, plus collateral environmental degradation. Now, energy will be spent collecting and processing my waste, and if it can't be recycled, it will end up also provoking collateral damage.

But, if we had infinite cheap energy, recycling all of it would be a no-brainier. Even recycling materials contaminated by radiation would be easy; after all, we already do that to refine fission fuel.

Economic incentives? Those are trivial to legislate, absent the environmental cost and with a promise of green-house gases neutrality. Heck, had we infinity cheap energy, we can pack, move out of planet an leave all of Earth as a bio-reserve.

In other words, nuclear fusion holds the promise of being such a civilization game-changer, that the question of "is it better than solar in the next ten to thirty years?" is moot. With that said, the next ten to thirty years will be vital to attenuate climate change, so nuclear fusion should not be used as a deterrent for other climate investments we can do today.

You're assuming that the plant will produce more than enough energy in one year to power itself, power the country, and power the recycling effort. This assumption is based on nothing - current fusion dreams aren't even close to that kind of power generation.

The nuclear engineering side of fusion has been underfunded for a long time. It's only been in the last couple years that the plasma physics side of the house has been willing to say "OK, we're close enough now that it's time to rebalance the budgets -- even if that means some of us lose our jobs."