Dennis Whyte

So, what are the lessons in fusion?

So, one of them is make sure that you're looking at aspects of the holistic environmental and societal footprint that the technology will have.

As technologists, we tend not to focus on these, particularly in early stages of development.

Like we just want something that works, right?

But if we come with just something that works but doesn't actually satisfy the societal demands for safety and for disposal, I mean, we will have materials that we have to dispose of out of fusion.

But there's technological questions about what that looks like.

So will this look like something that you have to, you know, put in the ground for 100 years or five years?

And the consequences of those are both economic and societal acceptance and so forth.

But don't bury those.

Like, bring these up front, talk to people about them, and make people realize that you're actually, you know, the way I would look at it is that you're making fusion more economically attractive by making it more societally acceptable as well, too.

Um, and then realize is that, you know, I think there's a few interesting, you know, boundaries basically.

So one of them, speaking of boundaries, that successful fusion devices, I'm pretty sure will require that you don't have to have an evacuation plan for anybody who lives at the site boundary.

So this has implications for what we build from a fusion engineering point of view, but it has major implications for where you can site fusion devices, right?

So in many ways it becomes more like, well, you know, we have fences around, you know, industrial heat sources and things like this for a reason, right?

For personal safety.

It looks more like that, right?

It's not quite as simple as that, but that's what it should look like.

And in fact, we have research projects going on right now at MIT that are like trying to push the technologies to make it more look like that.

I think that those are key.

And then in the end, as I said, like, so Chernobyl is physically impossible, actually, in a fusion system.