David Kirtley

That hydrogen, that heavy water, that deuterium just goes back into the environment safely and cleanly without issue.

And so that's the fundamental safety mechanism of fusion.

And you can compare that with other types of power plants, oil or a coal power plant.

You might have a large pile of coal that then catches fire and burns.

And it's not catastrophic, but you have a large coal fire for a long time releasing toxic fumes that you may have to deal with.

And in nuclear power and a fission power plant, you may have several years of fuel sitting in the core.

And in that case, if something bad happened, you have all that potential energy for things to happen.

But in fusion, you have literally one second of fuel at any time in the system.

And having a tank of deuterium, which we have around all the time, can't do fusion by itself.

It needs that complex system.

So the fusion reaction itself is still fundamentally an atomic reaction.

And so during this reaction, you do create ionizing radiation.

You create X-rays, you create neutrons, and you create all these charged particles.

The charged particles themselves for a fusion reaction are all contained...

in the fusion system.

And the x-ray is similar to think about a dentist's office, although a lot more than that.

But that type of same x-ray and x-ray energy is absorbed by the fusion system.

But the thing we do care about is those neutrals.

And so we do have in a fusion system activation.

During its operation, neutrons are made and leave.