David Kirtley

And so those are where I think the real challenges happen is more with the humans around these systems than the engineering of the power plants themselves.

So with Chernobyl and Fukushima, I actually put Three Mile Island in a different category.

In fact, some of the recent news in the last year is that we're going to be restarting Three Mile Island because there's such a need for clean baseload power.

So that's actually a very interesting other topic we should talk about is why and how we're doing that.

But more than that, going back to the accidents that did happen, in both of those systems, you can point to the human failure rather than the engineering failures of those systems.

That in Fukushima specifically, there were multiple nuclear fission reactors on the same site.

that successfully kept running through the tsunami, totally successfully, and were only later shut down for more political reasons.

But the old one, the oldest of them that had been on site for long periods, and maybe too long, I think some experts have looked at this in the past, was where some of the problems actually happened.

And so I look to that less as a...

a failure of the engineering of the power plants and more of the humans and around those systems that we should be operating these plants as designed, and then I believe they're safe.

And that gets to some of the atomic weapons questions that I think are the other part around nuclear reactors and fission reactors that are concerning for me.

Fusion power plants can't be used to make nuclear weapons.

fundamentally, that the processes in fusion aren't the same processes that happen in nuclear bombs and nuclear weapons.

And so it's actually one reason I started in fusion.

And most of our team thinks about the mission of fusion or delivering clean, safe electricity is that also can't be used to make weapons.

And I think that's a little bit of a distinction from traditional nuclear fission reactors, is that while I totally believe as a nuclear engineer, we build power plants now that are safe, that aren't going to have reactions.

They use a fuel, uranium and plutonium, that can be used to make nuclear weapons, that we know that if you take enough fissile material together, enough uranium and plutonium, put it in a small volume,

that it will not just create a reaction, but it will create a super critical reaction that will then continue and grow and release a tremendous amount of energy all at once.

And that is a bomb.

That is a bad situation.