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Comment by maremmano | Hacker News Reader

apparently it worked: https://translate.google.it/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pre...

There's an egregious mistranslation in there. In a section where nuclear fusion is compared to fission, the German article reads

    Das ist ungefährlicher und hinterlässt weniger stark verstrahlten Atommüll

the translation is

    This is dangerous and leaves less severely contaminated nuclear waste

whereas it should be

    This is *less* dangerous and leaves less strongly contaminated nuclear waste

The translation completely negated the sentence. The rest is pretty okay-ish.

less dangerous? or "not more" dangerous?

literally more non-dangerous

literally "safer"

Safer has a connotation of safety whereas ungefährlicher has a connotation of danger.

If something that would have killed you before, is less likely to do so now you would call it ungefährlicher or less dangerous but you wouldn't call it safer unless you're intending to be funny.

Native German here: ungefährlich means "not dangerous" also "safe" or "harmless".

so "=== gefahrlos" ?

Not really a good explanation. Ungefärlich is more like "harmless" in English. Yes, it contains the word "harm", but there's a modifier that inverts its meaning.

it's ambiguous in German as well, but both: a fusion reactor has very little radioactive waste (only the components that get hit by neutrons from the fusion reaction are activated, and hard-to-activate materials are being used there), and it's also less radioactive than the waste produced by a fission reactor.

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