#485 – David Kirtley: Nuclear Fusion, Plasma Physics, and the Future of Energy

The following is a conversation with David Kirtley, a nuclear engineer, expert on nuclear fusion, and the CEO of Helian Energy, a company working on building nuclear fusion reactors and have made incredible progress in a short period of time that make it seem possible like we could actually get there. there as a civilization. This is exciting, because nuclear fusion, if achieved commercially, would solve most of our energy needs in a clean, safe way, providing virtually unlimited clean electricity. The problem is that fusion is incredibly difficult to achieve. You need to heat hydrogen to over 100 million degrees Celsius and

contain it long enough for atoms to fuse. That's why the joke in the past has been that fusion is thirty years away and always will be. Just in case you're not familiar, let me clarify the difference between nuclear fusion and nuclear fission. By the way, I believe, according to the excellent sample size subreddit post by PM Goodbeer on this, the preferred pronunciation of the latter in US is nuclear fission, like vision, and in the UK and other countries is nuclear fission like fusion.

mission. I prefer the nuclear fission pronunciation because America. So uh today's nuclear power plants use nuclear fission. They uh split apart heavy uranium atoms to release energy. Fusion does the opposite.

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