"But the old one, the oldest of them that had been on site for long periods, and maybe too long, I think some experts have looked at this in the past was where some of the problems actually happened. And so, I look to that less as a failure of the engineering of the power plants, and more of the humans around those systems. That we should be operating these plants as designed, and then I believe they’re safe. And that gets to some of the atomic weapons questions that I think are the other part around nuclear reactors and fission reactors that are concerning for me."

"Fusion power plants can’t be used to make nuclear weapons. Fundamentally, the processes in fusion aren’t the same processes that happen in nuclear bombs and nuclear weapons. And so it’s actually one reason I started in fusion, and most of our team thinks about the mission of fusion, of delivering clean, safe electricity, is it also can’t be used to make weapons. And I think that’s a little bit of a distinction from traditional nuclear fission reactors, is that while I totally believe as a nuclear engineer we can build power plants now that are safe, that aren’t going to have reactions. They use a fuel, uranium and plutonium, that can be used to make nuclear weapons."

"To understand that, we can actually go back in history a little bit and think about the evolution of some of these approaches to fusion. From our perspective, we look at the technology that we use as built on physics experiments that were very successful in the 1950s. In those systems, the earliest pioneers of fusion said, “I know, we understand the physics. We have to take these gases, heat them to 100 million degrees, and then confine them, push them together so that fusion happens.” So, what is the best way to do that? Some of the earliest programs, we call them theta pinch. And what those programs were, were a linear topology, because we knew how to build these magnets."