Dennis Whyte

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1,833 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2023 last heard Jan 2023

Dennis Whyte’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Lex Fridman Podcast · #353 – Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy · 21 Jan 2023 podcast

So it doesn't say that there's zero.

So you asked about the other feature of it, that it's safe.

So it is, the process itself is intrinsically safe, but because it's a complex technology, you still have to take into consideration aspects of the safety and

So it produces ionizing radiation instantaneously.

So you have to take care of this, which means that you shield it.

Think of like your dental x-rays or treatments for cancer and things like this.

We always shield ourselves from this.

So we get the beneficial effects, but we minimize the harmful effects of those.

So there are all those aspects of it as well too.

So, it relies on the same underlying physical principle, but it's exactly the opposite, which actually the names imply.

Fusion means bringing things together.

Fission means splitting things apart.

So, fission requires the heaviest instead of the lightest.

and the most unstable versus the most stable elements.

So this tends to be uranium or plutonium, primarily uranium.

So take uranium.

So uranium-235, this is one of the heaviest unstable elements.

And what happens is that this is, fission is triggered by the fact that one of these subatomic particles, the neutron, which has no electric charge,

basically gets in proximity enough to this and triggers an instability effectively inside of what is teetering on the border of instability and basically splits it apart.

And that's the fission, right?

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