David Kirtley

Fundamentally, as a source of energy, in fusion, you're taking these lightweight isotopes, you're bringing them together, you're releasing energy, and that energy is in the form of charged particles.

It's already in the form of electricity.

Fusion itself has electricity built into it without a lot of the steam or thermal system requirements.

And so that's a really nice fundamental benefit of fusion itself.

Also, this reaction that's really hard to do turns itself off.

So you end up with the fusion is fundamentally safe.

And that's really a key requirement of any industrial system is that it turns itself off and it's safe.

You turn the key off on your car, you know it's going to turn off.

In a nuclear fission reactor, you put enough of this fissile material, uranium or plutonium, together such that as these unstable molecules, these unstable atoms crack open and break apart, they release heat, that the component parts of those are actually quite hot.

And so not only are the component parts that the uranium breaks into, and it's a whole spectrum of different atoms and atomic nuclei are hot, but it also releases neutrons.

It also releases more of these uncharged particles.

And if you do it right, this fissile material will be next to other fissile material.

And so that neutron will then go and bombard another uranium nucleus, again, opening that up and releasing more heat and more of these neutrons.

And that's how you have those reactions of a self-supporting chain reaction.

And that chain reaction then continues.

People design fission reactors such that you have just the right balance of enough neutrons are made such that the reaction is continuing, but not so many neutrons are made that it speeds up because you don't want it to speed up.

And then the key is at the same time, you want to make sure that the whole thing is in water, is typically the cooling fluid.

There's some more advanced fission reactors that have different cooling fluids, but water typically, where then that absorbs that both the heat and those extra neutrons.

And so you use the water and the fluid to then run a steam turbine

to do traditional electricity generation and output electricity through your steam turbine.