Dennis Whyte

So, it's interesting, humans and all animals have…

evolved on earth where we're immersed in that all the time yeah there's natural source of radiation all the time yet we have zero ability to detect it like zero

It would probably overwhelm us, actually, if we could see all of it.

But my main point goes back to your thing about fire and self-protection.

If ionizing radiation was such a critical aspect of the health of organisms on Earth, we would almost certainly have evolved methods to detect it, and we have none.

So it goes to the set of criteria that I talked about before about getting high energy gain.

So in the end...

What are we after in fusion is that we basically assemble this plasma fuel in some way, and we provide it a starting amount of energy.

Think of lighting the fire.

And what you want to do is get back significant excess gain from the fact that the fusion is releasing the energy.

So it's like the equivalent of we want to have a match, a small match, light a fire, and then the fire keeps us hot.

It's very much like that.

So as I said, we've made many of the, and what do I mean by we?

It's like the fusion community has pursued aspects of this through a variety of different confinement methodologies, is that the key part about what happens, what was the threshold we had never gotten over before was that if you only consider the plasma fuel, not the total engineering system, but just the plasma fuel itself,

We had not gotten to the point yet where basically the size of the match was smaller than the amount of energy that we got from the fusion.

Yes, yes.

There is, well, there's several special definitions of this.

So, one of them is that if you, like in a fire, if you light a match and you have it there and it's an infinitesimal amount of energy compared to what you're getting out of the fire, we call this ignition, which makes sense, right?

This is like what our own sun is as well, too.

So that was not ignition in that sense as well too.