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A couple key points to take away - everybody's heard this but a systems engineer
like myself is one who constantly is constantly herding cats - a little bit
like John in this conference.
So, liquid is a key. [Just as] most of the [industrial] processes in some form or fashion
this system is going to have a liquid component.
And a liquid core is very different from
the solid core that the nuclear industry is usually so comfortable with.
The other thing is that thorium itself - it is the long-term.
It is the real long-term goal that's really exciting.
But, there are a lot of things we can do before-hand
and a lot of trades on what's the first prototype to go forward.
Whether you end up with a system where you have
several large plants producing
or converting the thorium into
reactor fuel and then trucking out that to
smaller plants throughout the country,
where you do the processing there
in the small reactor.
the other is the use of [the term] modular.
It bothered me a little bit because I
wasn't sure whether talking modular or mobile,
what exactly that means.
The main thing from a systems design point
is that the the reactor remains small.
at least the core of the reactor is small, and the reason for that is most of the
modeling equations are going to drive you to bigger core a lot of times and
the benefit, the flexibility, the cost, the infrastructure costs you are going to put up-front -
all that is driving you the other way.
And, in the system trade design and actually doing project management
you are always going to have that push-pull,
and you've got to have that upfront confidence and and commitment to say
"it will remain small, and I will not grow that core too big and become an un-mobile and
highly capital-intense project."
The other is proliferation.
I know it was mentioned in and I want to -
I guess take both sides,
I don't think you can fairly say
there's no proliferation risk.
When you are using a nuclear reactor
that can't be said, and when you're a scientist or engineer
you tend to be very precise and say "there's nothing that's perfect in this world."
However if your design drives towards the small reactor,
one of the keys is your neutron economy.
If I have a smaller reactor,
I barely have enough neutrons to keep the reactor going.
That means I can't steal them for other purposes.
And, if I take fuel out
I always end up shutting down the reactor.
Now in the larger reactors, one can get away with
doing that more stealthily
in a reasonable amount of time.
But, either I have to do it over many years trying to gain material,
or I'm going to shut down the reactor,
which is going to be real obvious to anybody.
So, it isn't perfectly proliferation resistant.
There are a lot of other issues, but again a small core
reduces that in that kind of design.
So some of the ideas that I was going to suggest here,
Government regulations,
international cooperation -
I think we've seen some of that in this meeting.
The industrial and private versus government lead position,
we're seeing that with Space-X starting.
How does the government give up control something that it's always had control of - like space?
and so that's an interesting topic,
and then the other one is working with government agencies
I'm sure that we could all work on our skills in that regard,
at least some of us here more than others.
And, any university research
and national labs - I think there's a lot of important things they need to be doing,
and we need to encourage them to come to these meetings,
and i'm glad we saw some of that this time around.
The last word is, in the end,
improving the economy, making money, those kinds of things,
the increase of wealth has to be with real material, and energy is real.
To grow your economy you have to have something real.
This is not something in -
a ponzi scheme or
a pyramid scheme -
this is something that can actually grow the economy
in all kinds of ways we can't even calculate
because we don't know what will happen with that energy,
or with that funding, that somebody else is saying,
"I don't need to spend it on energy, I can spend it somewhere else".