Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…The key is at the same time, you want to make sure that the whole thing is in water, which is typically the cooling fluid. There are some more advanced fission reactors that have different cooling fluids, but water typically, then absorbs both the heat and those extra neutrons. So you use the water and the fluid to then run a steam turbine to do traditional electricity generation and output electricity through your steam turbine. 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. So we should say that for reasons you already laid out—maybe you can speak to it a bit more—nuclear fusion is much safer. There’s no chain reaction going on; you can just shut it off. But it should also be said that, as far as I understand, the current fission nuclear reactors are also very safe. I think there’s a perception that nuclear fission reactors are unsafe, they’re dangerous, and if you just look empirically at the statistics, that fear is not justified by the actual safety data. Can you just speak to that a little bit? 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. I look at this from a nuclear engineer’s point of view. I spent a lot of years studying these systems. 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. There are protection systems in place that modern systems are quite safe from an engineering perspective. 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? And so those are where I think the real challenges happen, is more with the humans around these systems than the engineering of the power plants themselves.…

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