David Kirtley: prediction

Transcript context

…Okay, so let’s return to the basic question. We already mentioned it a little bit, but is nuclear fusion safe? So, are the fusion power plants we’re talking about safe? Yes, fusion power is fundamentally safe. The physics and the reactions of the fusion system itself mean you don’t have runaways. We’ve talked about some of the human factors around power plants, power systems, and industrial scale systems, and that’s something that we build into the design of these from today. We look at how these systems might fail. In fact, some of the analysis we do, we did this analysis for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over the last few years, looking at how to regulate fusion power. As we’re building the first fusion power plant, we need to make sure we’re regulated safely. So we spent a lot of time doing the technical and political case in the United States of how to regulate fusion. The analysis we did assumes you have a fusion power plant that’s operating and then, at any one time, a meteor strikes it. The whole thing is vaporized. What is the impact of that? This is worse than you could ever imagine an actual physical scenario, but let’s start there. The answer is, you don’t need to evacuate the populace nearby the fusion power plant. One of the keys, I think, that I come to when I think about this is the fuel. In a fusion generator, you are continuously feeding in this hydrogen, these deuterium fuels. At any one time, in a Helion fusion system and most fusion systems, you have one second of fuel in that system. So what that means is if you stop turning on… If you stop putting fuel into that system, fusion just stops. But what it also means is that if something really catastrophic happened and for whatever reason you have all that fuel that’s not in the system, and fusion is so hard to make happen, you hit it with a meteor, you do anything of that nature, and fusion doesn’t happen. That hydrogen, that heavy water, that deuterium, just goes back into the environment safely and cleanly without issue. That’s the fundamental safety mechanism of fusion. You can compare that with other types of power plants like an oil or a coal power plant. You might have a large pile of coal that then catches fire and burns. It’s not catastrophic, but you have a large coal fire for a long time releasing toxic fumes that you may have to deal with. In nuclear power, in a fission power plant, you may have several years of fuel sitting in the core. In that case, if something bad happened, you have all that potential energy for things to happen. But in fusion, you have literally one second of fuel at any time in the system. Having a tank of deuterium, which we have around all the time, can’t do fusion by itself. It needs that complex system. I love that there’s like a PowerPoint going on in a secret meeting about what happens if a meteor hits a fusion power plant. Okay, so that’s really interesting. What about the waste? What kind of waste is there for fusion power plants?…

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