David Kirtley

Yeah.

And I think fundamentally it's that in a lot of ways, fusion is hard and fission is easy.

Yeah.

Nuclear fission happens at room temperature, that this uranium and plutonium is so likely to break apart already that simply the adding of one of these neutrons, one extra particle, will then break it apart and release energy.

And if you have a lot of them together, it will create a chain reaction.

Fusion, that doesn't happen at all.

Fusion is actually really hard to do.

You have to overcome those electromagnetic forces.

to have a single fusion reaction happen.

And so it takes things like in our sun, we have what is called gravitational confinement, where the gravity, literally the mass of the fuel itself is pulling to the center of the sun and it's pulling in there.

So there's a large force that's pulling all that fuel together and holding it and confining it together such that it gets close enough and hot enough for long enough that fusion happens.

That's right.

Obviously, the sun is vastly larger than Earth, and so we can't do that same process here on Earth.

Yet.

No, I'm just kidding.

But we have other forces we get to use.

We can use the electromagnetic force, which the sun doesn't get to do, to apply those forces.

And I actually want to take a pause right there and point out a word.

Historically, we've used the word reactor around fusion, but I don't think that's right.

And for me, we're really careful about this terminology when we look to how that word is defined and we can look to how the experts define it.