David Kirtley

Now, that change per atom and per molecule is actually so small that it's extremely hard to measure.

But it's still there.

And that's the energy that is released.

And you can quantify that.

We use units of electron bolts as a unit of what is the energy in atomic processes or chemical processes.

So for fission, uranium and plutonium, we don't make those nuclei.

Those right now for humanity, those have been made in the primordial universe through supernova and Big Bang and the initial formation of the universe where matter was created.

And so we dig those up.

We dig up uranium, plutonium.

out of the ground.

And in fact, most plutonium we make from uranium, and we can talk about how to enrich uranium if we want to go down that road.

But that's how we get those molecules and nuclei.

For fusion materials, hydrogenetic species, or hydrogens, are primordial in the universe, also only the most common things that are in the universe.

The suns and stars are made up of hydrogens and heliums.

And so the vast majority of atoms in the universe still are hydrogen.

is everywhere, and we particularly use a type of hydrogen called deuterium, which is a heavier isotope of hydrogen.

Hydrogen is typically one proton and one electron, atomic mass of one.

Deuterium is an atomic mass of two, which is a proton, which is a charged particle, and it has a neutron.

in its nucleus, which is an uncharged particle.

And so that's deuterium.