David Kirtley

It doesn't really apply to fusion.

So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the NRC, defines reactor as... I have it right here.

A nuclear reactor is an apparatus other than an atomic weapon designed or used to sustain nuclear fission in a self-supporting chain reaction.

And there's two big parts to that.

That one, fission reaction...

obviously fusion is not that, we've talked about why, but also the self-sustaining part in that a reactor is self-sustaining.

You take your hands off of it and it keeps going.

In fusion, that doesn't happen.

And we know, because we have to do it every day and it's really hard to do.

And so we actually use the word generator because we don't talk about, for instance, a natural gas reactor.

is that if you stop putting in fuel, it turns off.

And the same thing happens in fusion.

And so we're pretty careful about making sure we talk about that as a generator, where you're putting in fuel, you're getting electricity out.

And then when you stop putting in fuel, it just shuts off.

And you can go even one step further and say, what am I going to do with this fusion that powers the universe?

And what does humanity want out of this?

And what we want is electricity.

We don't simply want a set of reactions or even heat and energy.

That's great.

But what I really want is electricity.