David Kirtley

You end up with complicated systems of flowing liquids and flowing water, balancing the heat.

A lot of fission reactor design comes from that thermal balance of keeping this reaction going, making sure it doesn't speed up, because that's an uncontrolled chain reaction, which you would not want.

and balancing the cooling and the output of getting the water out of it.

Yeah, we've been talking about the reaction processes themselves.

But I think fundamentally, let's take a step back and look a little broader and say, let's look at what we care about, which is the power plant making electricity.

And I look at this from a nuclear engineer's point of view.

I spent a lot of years studying these systems.

And modern fission reactors, I believe, are engineered to be safe.

They're engineered in ways where as those reactions maybe speed up,

and those systems get hotter, they actually are built to expand and cool down passively and natively.

and there's protection systems in place that modern systems are quite safe from an engineering perspective.

And so I believe that we have figured out how to build nuclear fission reactors in a way where the engineering of the power plant is safe.

I would say that I look back at the history of what we've built over time, and the challenge hasn't come to the engineering, actually.

I believe the engineers have solved these problems.

The problem comes from humans, and the problem comes from

other things around nuclear power.

You have to enrich that uranium to put it in a plant, and the plant's safe.

But you had to enrich that uranium, and that is some of the problem.

Or a plant is designed to run for a certain number of decades safely.

But do we run it longer than that?