When I was 23ish (cerca 1989), Edward Teller visited Miami-Dade Community College, where my dad was the chair of the chemistry department, to give a talk to a small group of college staff, interested students, etc. The talk was in an otherwise empty room with foldy chairs for the attendees (I was one of them) and Teller. Teller, in his foldy chair at the front of the room facing the attendees, had a tall styrofoam cup of coffee on the floor in between his feet, and for the first ten minutes of the talk I kept thinking "man, he is going to kick over that cup of coffee". In about the eleventh minute, he interrupted his talk for a second and said "don't worry, I'm not going to kick over my cup of coffee."

when you remember the guys designing this were doing so with paper, pens, and the field of nuclear physics being about 20 years old, its amazing they managed to accomplish so much

In the early '60s, my father was doing a course of study at a research lab that had a TRIGA reactor (among others). One task that devolved to him, which he hated, was conducting tours - High School classes, Visiting DIgnitaries, and such. The highlight was to visit the TRIGA, which was dialed up to produce the expected Cherenkov Glow. On his first tour, Dad led the group in, looked into the pool, and said, loud enough fro everybody to hear, "Funny, it's never done _that_ before." He was taken off tour duty from that point on. While the fuel mix may still be Oxide, a lot of the TRIGA's features are built into the GEN III and GEN IV current reactor designs, which will fail safe in Loss of Cooling Accidents.

Hey Scott, love your channel. The “I” in TRIGA is short, it’s pronounced more like “tree-guh”. Source: my dad worked at General Atomics. I heard about this reactor numerous times, growing up. One random story. They have a long pole they use, to manipulate things in the pool remotely (which may or may not have a length of line on the end, I don’t recall) - they called it the “fission pole” because it’s a bit like a fishing pole, and they’re using it with/over a body of water. Engineer puns.

Bothers me to no end we can make low/no risk reactors with very minor waste and no one builds them.

In my university in Argentina we have a small nuclear reactor for training, that was built by Siemens in the 70s to train the operators of the Atucha power plant. It still uses the original control panel and it is the coolest retro device I've ever seen, it has nixie tubes and a ton of analog instruments. The safety in this case comes from the fact that it produces very little power, half a watt maximum if I remember correctly, and it is surrounded by a massive lead wall. Another interesting fact is that in case of loss of power, the control rods are designed to spring UP mechanically, instead of falling down due to gravity like almost every reactor.

All these small, low-power research reactors are collectively known as swimming pool or open pool type reactors (with TRIGA being one such design). Many were built starting in the late-1950s through the 1970s at research institutions around the world. They generally operate at low power outputs, say 25MW or less, compared to typical nuclear power reactors which usually produce 700 to 2000MW thermal output. Besides research and non-destructive testing purposes, some are also used for the production of radiopharmaceuticals (isotopes used in PET scans, radiation therapy, and other nuclear medicine uses).

I'd love to see more videos covering the small scale and inherently safe reactor designs from the last 20-30 years. there are a number of designs that are fail-safe in that they rely on neutrino mirrors and either moving the mirror or moving the fuel, so if power fails, the reaction will stop. I remember reading an article a decade or more back about pebble reactors (embed a chip of fuel in a pool-ball sized ceramic ball and then move them through the reactor with only a small number able to be in the focus at a time) There is far too little information about safe reactor designs and far too much fear of nuclear reactors being pushed.

A nuclear reactor should be operated by a man and a dog. The man's job is to feed the dog. The dog's job is to bite the man if he tries to push any buttons.

Scott, Loved the reactor video! My long-time friend, Dr. Keaton Keller, worked on the Manhattan Project. He taught me about the TRIGA and the aforementioned "Blue light" you spoke about in the video, Cherenkov radiation. (photons exceeding the speed of light, or trying to). The one thing you will find interesting that has NEVER been written about or published. Keaton and several coworkers "Took part in a nuclear chain reaction." They had a stack of enriched uranium bricks (sub-critical mass). The men had a live Geiger counter running on speaker. Tick..... Tick ... The group of men went up and put their hands on the pile, and the carbon in their bodies reflected the neutrons back into the pile, and the Geiger counter went crazy fast. When it did, they all backed off, and the pile went subcritical. Dr. Keller told me no one ever wrote about this, he thinks, because they knew it was a young men's foolish curiosity that could have been deadly.

9:58 i did my physics diploma at the TRIGA in Mainz. we had a process that cools neutrons to "ultracold" temperatures meaning they wouldnt penetrate matter anymore so we could direct them through a metal pipe, trap them in a container and then let them flow out it into a detector like a liquid.

Impressive 12 hour turn around from filming to publishing. Well done!

Another reason why commercial nuclear power reactors might not be interested in a fuel designed to prevent prompt criticality accidents is that with the exception of Chernobyl (which is quite an outlier, thankfully), ensuring that the reactor shuts down and ceases any ongoing nuclear chain reactions (I.e. criticality) is rarely the problem. It’s the decay heat (which these research reactors are a lot less concerned with due to their small size).

That reactor design is amazing. I looked up the papers on it. Even with full power for extended time followed by a pulse followed by losing all the water you still do not get a melt down. the fuel rods stay intact. Thank you for this video

It's pronounced Trig-uh, with "trig" pronounced like "trigger". I worked on two awesome projects associated with this reactor, though oddly enough neither occurred while I was employed at General Atomics. The first was from the 1990s while I was working at a defense contractor on an Air Force project called SNRS, the Stationary Neutron Radiography System, where we punched holes in the side of a Triga reactor to create collimated high-intensity neutron beams which were directed to a real-time neutron imager that was viewed by a sensitive and fast CCD camera. I built the imaging system for the neutron video, performing many image processing steps to finally provide a calibrated image to the radiographer operating the imaging and robotics system. This system exposed military aircraft metal composite skin segments to the neutron beam to search for hydrogen in the form of dihydrogen monoxide and metal hydrides, where the hydrogen would scatter neutrons causing an easily detectable change in the neutron image. I have several great stories about SNRS development, including how we obtained neutron test beams from an unmodified reactor that sprayed neutrons all over the reactor enclosure, causing us to carefully design our test runs to stay within our neutron exposure limits. The system is still working today! The second project was several years later when I was a consultant hired to isolate and remedying a bizarre glitch in the Triga reactor power sensor, an extraordinarily wide-range neutron detector that very accurately covered over 10 decades of neutron levels. More importantly, the instrument provided the first and second derivatives of the reactor power level (why is another fun story). These derivatives were needed to detect an anomalous power transient soon enough for the mechanical SCRAM system to react in time to do a safe and controlled emergency shutdown quickly enough to prevent a hazardous power transient (hazardous to local operators and staff, rather than to the reactor itself). This may be the canonical system for real-time embedded design. The problem was that the glitch was causing unnecessary and apparently unpredictable reactor shutdowns. This was my first "software forensics case". I created a simulator for the neutron sensor, validated it against operational data, wrapped it with a Monte Carlo simulation of neutron flux, then ran the instrument software under emulation. I mimicked each one of the operating scenarios that had triggered the glitch, and was soon able to isolate and independently replicate the flaws in the algorithms used. Remedying those flaws took a while longer, as multiple candidate algorithms had to be developed and tested against each other as well as the original code, and done not only under the known scenarios, but also under a very large number of "fuzzed" scenarios to ensure algorithm stability and robustness. I really wanted to publish the two reports I wrote (one each for investigation and repair), but my NDA prevented it. The Triga was ALWAYS a fun system to work with.

Here in Oak Ridge, Tennessee they are starting a pilot plant for the production of fuel for reactors from the company called UltraSafe and its pretty exciting we may see these little micro reactors come into real use.

Nice video, and excellent explanation. I studied Nuclear Engineering at Berkeley in the '80's and reactor lab was a major highlight. Our TRIGA reactor was deep under the vollyball court next to Etcheverry Hall. Very few students knew they were walking over the top of a nuclear reactor on the way to class! We all looked forward to seeing the reactor pulse. My recollection is that it was like a flashbulb going off. Back then there was a rubber duck floating around in the reactor pool. One time we were down in the lab and got a call from upstairs asking if we had felt the earthquake. None of us felt a thing, but apparently it was a pretty good quake - it made the nightly news and was felt all over the Bay Area. I recently met the demolition contractor who removed the reactor lab when it was decommissioned to make way for a new building. He said that concrete was by far the hardest, toughest, most stubborn concrete he had ever encountered. By the way, everyone called it TRIGA with a soft I....

Interesting. I never knew about the TRIGA reactor's ability to pulse startup and shutdown. I wonder about the design choices that make that possible. --Former US Navy nuclear reactor operator

Thanks for mentioning the SLOWPOKE reactor! I work at the NRU Research reactor 200ft from where the original slowpoke was built

One super safe reactor was used to power a radar station in Greenland. The only problem was the immaturity of soldiers, as apparently the sergeant in charge yanked out the control rod just to scare/haze a recruit.

There's a TRIGA operating about an hour north of me at the USGS facility at the Denver Federal Center. They offer tours, and I plan on checking it out eventually. Always wanted to see an operating TRIGA.

Edward Teller was the main model for Dr Strangelove is the movie by that name. Although he wasn't a Nazi, he hated the Soviet Union & came across uncomfortably enthusiastic about his creation, the H-Bomb.

You are a "gold mine" of information Scott; thank you!

Always good valuable lessons from Scott Manley. I like it more when Scott is so familiar with the material that he is more conversational; and less, reading from a prompter. I shall fly safe!

Hey Scott! My grandfather is a professor of nuclear engineering, and I remember when I was very young, he took us to see the research reactor at Ohio State. (It’s called OSURR, and it’s a Bulk Shielding Reactor) That blue glow is something you never forget, it’s emanating from the water itself and it’s just so unique. While we were there, my older brother had a science fair coming up, so he brought an orange. They used the “fission pole” to drop it down as close to the core as possible. I believe the experiment eventually ended up being “does absolutely blasting an orange with radiation increase how long it’s preserved?” The answer was yes, but not a ton. It goes to show research reactors are literally safe enough for children!

I like this branching out on a still space related subject

I’m always radiated by your content! I almost glow in the dark now after watching your many programs!

Such great work Scott!! Thank you for this :)

12:00 Regarding the barriers to being used in conventional power reactors, I find it kind of appalling that the required research and development into _various_ safer reactor designs for power generation hasn't happened faster. It seems like the sort of thing that could have a massive return on investment if you look at a long enough time scale. It feels like at least from roughly 1980 to 2010 things were entirely stagnant, a whole generation worth of potential progress on that front was lost.

MSRs are a great idea for commercial energy production with a walk-away safe design that's low cost and easy to build

Thank you for another really interesting video! TRIGA is a very intriguing approach to the problem of moderating nuclear reactions.

At the beginning of the video I thought you were talking about the Slowpoke Reactor. Happy you mentioned it later, was able to do a tour of the Whiteshell facility in Manitoba back in the 80's, neat.

Name on patent: Theodore Brewster Taylor. Theodore "Ted" Taylor was hailed by Freeman Dyson as the smartest unknown person, ever. Taylor designed atomic bombs. One of his designs, a fission only device, had a yield of 500 Kilotons. That high a yield is usually only accomplished by a device using a combination fission/fusion processes, wherein a fission bomb is used as the trigger for the fusion fuel.

Scott, your dad jokes are the bomb. 🤣 Thank you for doing this video. 👍

Thank you for this most interesting video! Have seen some of the videos with the TRIGA doing a startup with the accompanying blue flash and always wondered how they work and came into existence. I have to say, they're awesome little reactors! Would pay my last savings to be able to visit one some day.

Scott Manly: your earlier nuclear series are my favourite UKposts videos ever. I love your nuclear physics even more than the space vids!

Released 12 seconds ago! Wow! So glad to see another nuclear themed video! :)

Little do people know a bunch of 19year olds straight out of high school run all the nuclear reactors for the navy.

Thanks for another excellent video Scott!

Blooming love these videos Scott. Add someone who is interested in science but not particularly science educated, you make the more complex/deeper science subjects accessible. Keep it up mate! 👍

Yet another techno nerd cool video from you Scott! I would argue that nuclear is intimately connected to astronautics. Are the first pioneers on Mars expected to burn wood? Without nuclear power, we will be starved for energy for long duration space missions. It seems to me that nuclear power is a must have for space flight beyond the Earth - Moon system.

Very Interesting Scott!! Thanks for this!! I wonder exactly what kind of reactors NASA is investigating for the Nuclear Thermal reactor driven propulsion they are currently looking at for trips to Solar System destinations. Lots of good options available for this. IMHO that's the only real practical way we're going to be able to get to Mars and other solar-system destinations with crew on board. We can't be sending ships with crew out there for months and months and have to keep the crew happy and healthy and breathing and hydrated and fed over long periods of time, that just becomes completely impractical. Days or even weeks we might be able to do, but months is just not even realistic.

Nice segment on an intriguing bit of nuclear technology - the Triga. I also liked the reference to SNAP10a.

Awesome IntoTheAM shirt, I love their space inspired t-shirts. Love your videos as well!

I truly enjoy not only the content but the way it’s presented. Been watching for years and so cool to watch SM progress. The “dad jokes” humanizes the material and keeps me from leaving bc I’m sooooo ignorant of all this scientific shit….ha. Thanks, Scott. Really appreciate your work. Keep it up!

Yeah, so one of the reasons this can't readily be applied to power reactors is because uranium hydride breaks down at 500C and puts out hydrogen gas. Zirconium hydride (so far as I can tell) decomposes at about 800C. Uranium dioxide doesn't melt until about 2800C. The fuel temperature of rods in power reactors just gets way too high to use uranium hydride even during standard operations. If you ever had a failure to cool the reactor or keep spent rod cooling ponds cooled, uranium zirconium hydride would melt into a critical mass far, far easier than uranium dioxide. I don't think that's a reasonable obstacle to overcome.

Love your content Scott. Keep on :-)

I worked on the TRIGA reactor at the Technical University in Vienna, Austria! To this day cherenkov blue is my favourite color.

Hopefully one day these will be widespread and common. Nuclear power is the solution to the fossil fuel problem.

The history of nuclear reactor tech is quite interesting. There are a few safe designs that haven’t been sufficiently pursued. This and the Thorium fueled molten salt reactors are an example. Check out FLIBE energy for the Thorium MSR.

Scott that was an excellent description of a TRIGA reactor. I operated the original TRIGA Mk 1 reactor in San Diego for three years back in the 90's. I pulsed the Mk 1 and a Mk 5 reactor (in the same facility) many times. We would take the reactor critical at a low power (a few hundred watts) and then fire one or more of the control rods out of the core with a pneumatic cylinder. We had experiments where we would inject enough reactivity into the core that the prompt supercritical event would shake the building. If you were standing over the the reactor pit you would see what the beginning of a nuclear explosion would look like. Also, TRIGA is pronounced like trigger.

This is a wonderful segment! You are an amazing science communicator, and I have hoped to see you do an entire series on Gen4 nuclear and it's place in powering modern society. I'm a Molten salt (fast or thermal) enthusiast, as thorium decay chains lead to LARGE (relative) amounts of Pu-238 for RTGs. I would love, and I think many people would, a deep dive curtesy of the "Astronogamer"!

Scott, a molten salt reactor using thorium is even safer. If the reactor overheats, a fusible plugs melts and the molten salt core drops into a holding vessel below, stopping the reaction instantly. Thorium couldn't be used for weapons, so uranium was favored for military reasons.

Elitists view cheap power granted to the public the same as handing a "machine gun to an idiot child."

This is a very well researched video and so interesting.

Love this. I visited the Triga reactor at ICI Billingham in the 1980s, and the Cerenkov glow was wonderful to see. By the way, UKAEA Winfrith had an I inherently safe reactor called Dragon. Shaped like a funnel, you fed new fuel pellets in the top.

Just like the FAA is the biggest impediment to aviation advancement, so to, the NRC and DOE is to advancements in nuclear energy. Nobody is willing to foot the bill and take the time to get a new design 'certified', so we plod along with designs from the 1950s because they're able to be used w/o the extra cost and endless review cycles of something new and "scary".

What I like best about molten salt reactors is exactly this, that thermal expansion damps out the chain reaction. With a freeze plug, if it still gets too hot or the electricity to the cooling circuit goes away the molten salt drains away and disperses. Even a spill of molten salt freezes in place and clean up is going to be straight forward

I run experiments in a number of these TRIGA's, and even with the colorful pronunciation, this video is excellent.

Thanks Scott - a very instructive video

I would love to see the TRIGA reactor concept revived and explored, not because I'm a madman wanting nuclear devastation, but because I believe that we will have to use nuclear power if we want to reduce our dependence on carbon based energy, and I'm all for anything that reduces the US's dependence on foreign powers. We will also need safe reactors for power beyond Mars and the Asteroid Belt. Also, I 100% agree with Scott's pronunciation of TRIGA, because I use the same reasoning to say that it's GIF with a hard G, not GIF with a soft G. After all, we say graphics with a hard G don't we? :P

When I was a young man, there was a nuclear reactor across the street from me, in the middle of the city. It had a sinister looking geodesic dome. It belonged to the local engineering school.

Great job explaining the nuclear theory! There's a good UKposts video from the Texas A&M Nuclear Science Center TRIGA reactor pulse.

Very well explained, Mr. Manly

I submit that the LFTR reactor developed in ORNL and currently being brought online in China is the ideal and safest reactor possible.

When discussing safe nuclear reactors, we often forget the lowly septic tank: the need for regular injection of fuel rods, commonly found moderator fluids, and eerie brown glow are all key design features of this safe technology that even kids can use.

This was absolutely a fantastic introductory explanation. I know its not your usual video type but I'd love to see more like it.

Thanks for the info . Very interesting. 👍

My college has/had one of these nuclear reactors. I remember nuclear engineering majors telling me about how they’d joust with control rods…after they got in trouble for jousting with fuel rods.

The patented Manley Dad Joke 🤣

Thanks Scott. My recollection is some of these operate in downtown school buildings.

Yeah I got into this years ago. One of my favorites is the pebble bed design. Germany has been experimenting with them. They intentionally initiated a "meltdown", but the reactor didn't melt down. It self regulated. The graphite "skin" on the pebbles became less efficient as a reformer as heat rose. There are ways to design reactors that are meltdown proof.

There was a research reactor at UCLA when I was a kid, I wrote a paper on it with lots of photos when I was in junior high school. Sadly, I don't recall enough about it to know if it was this kind of reactor or not. Sounds strange now that they let a little kid climb around on a reactor back then, but then again I spent the first 12 years of my life downwind of the nuclear testing in Nevada. Not to mention all the lead in the air from leaded gasoline. It's a wonder any of us are still alive.

You want to really solve climate change, you need to build and deploy safe nuclear reactors.

Great descriptions! I love that you went into enough detail to even mention that weapons grade uranium reactors can't practically operate with a prompt negative temperature coefficient. That's not really an issue for civilian reactors, but military reactors usually use weapons grade uranium. For those wondering why: longevity. Weapons grade uranium can last decades, non weapons grade fuel needs to be replaced every few years.

I thought this was going to be about the pebble-bed reactor design based on the title, but this I hadn't heard of at all before now!

A handheld solid-state nuclear reactor capable of continuously generating electrical power would be quite useful.

Living in times when one country can throw the world into relative chaos I've been wishing humans would get their head out of their butts and built a lot more safe nuclear power plants. Thanks for making this video Scott. I've heard that thorium reactors could be much smaller and safer than the weapons grade stuff most reactors use. I only know enough to wish for it to be though.

I love how there's nuclear reactors and centrifugal particle accelerators being run by students. We have a cyclotron in our city being run by the university. Got the chance to see it and it was quite cool but also a bit weird to see that tech being so... Well... Accessible.

I'm glad you mentioned the Canadian SLOWPOKE reactor. The low numbers of the SLOWPOKE reactors built is attributed to the Chinese building clones of it and selling them internationally at a much lower price. The purpose of the SLOWPOKE was to neutron bombard samples in a sample chamber to produce radioactive isotopes for research. It was proposed to use SLOWPOKE reactors to provide district heating for remote northern communities and even to power a 8 man civilian research submarine called the Sagan through sterling engines (it was to be called the n-Sagan if nuclear powered, they built the hull but a taxation dispute between Canada and France killed the project). There was also reports at the Royal Military College about retrofitting the old Oberon class submarimes with the SLOWPOKE reactor with sterling engines to be able to recharge batteries while submerged but I believe those were student papers (note there were also papers proposing using RTG's to do the same albeit more slowly).

The most current designs use water as both moderator and coolant. So if the fission process ran away and causes the coolant water the boil off, then the moderators is also gone. With the moderator gone, fission is no longer possible this will shut down the reactor.

The problem with LWR is the waste, due to excessive amounts of other breed materials than Pu-241, with long decay periods. A better way is like the Candu reactors using PSHWR(Pressurized steam heavy water reactor) because only fast neutrons will influence the material, breeding Pu-241 in the process. Because heavy water acts as the coolant and moderator, depressurizing would also not sustain the fission reaction. However in case of meltdown there are many safety features. In my point of view the Americans with all their waste and light water reactors are being not efficient and could learn a lot from the Canadians.

we used to have one of these little guys in the basement of Etcheverry Hall at UC Berkeley. I had a class just down the hall from the control room/access to the thing. Used to hang out there when I was early for my class. Remember one day when the lead door with the safe/unsafe to enter indicator above the door went from "safe" to "unsafe". Saw some folks running up the passage between the lower lead door and the top one. Thought it was a good time to head on over to my class. A number of years later, on a Sunday morning, it was carted away, probably to the INL. Would like to visit it someday.

I love learning about nuclear tech. Thanks for making this video. BTW where did you find that shirt? I love the design.

it's a a shame that the research in safer reactor designs isn't getting the funding it needs, I have no doubt that if it could be used for weapons they wouldn't have any funding issues, One of the reason that MSR got funding that it was going to be used in ARE (Aircraft Reactor Experiments) for powering bombers

When the choice is nuclear energy or no internet or smartphones, or air conditioning or TV, watch how quickly nuclear is accepted.

Great videeo nad exxcellent explanation of nuclear energy. Thank you.

As a licensed operator on a TRIGA reactor I can say that this is definitely one of the better explanations of how neutron upscattering from the hydrogen in the fuel causes the negative temperature coefficient.

"The inventors of "foolproof" designs, underestimate the ingenuity of the fools." - old saying. And of course, it still does not solve where to put that highly toxic and slightly radioactive waste.

I've always questioned Teller's use of the bomb to cure slums, poverty, and homelessness.

Interesting concept

Scott, as someone that did my studies on a TRIGA and was an actual student operator for the University of Arizona (now decommissioned), the pronunciation that was used is like trigger, so treh'GUH. Also of note, the TRIGA at the University of Arizona was the first one that went to a University and initially was installed as a TRIGA mark 1, but was later upgraded to a TRIGA mark 3 some years later. As such, being one the oldest TRIGAs, it had a relatively lower power compared to others without our highest steady state power being 100kW thermal. The UofA's TRIGA is no more as it was decommissioned in the late 2000s/early 2010s.

While I understand the proliferation concerns for HEU reactors on Earth, is that really going to be a problem in space? If a country can figure out how to get to my reactor on the Moon or Mars to steal my HEU, they probably already have their own and don't need mine.

There have been many reactor designs since that are "meltdown proof" (basically, the thing is physically incapable of getting hot enough to melt). Pebble beds, thorium, SMRs etc. Most work well at a physical level but turn out to not scale up to power plant size, or need constant refuelling (an inherently unsafe procedure moving lots of fuel around the country), or can't get hot enough to operate a supercritical steam turbine - in other words, they're very safe but uneconomic. Which is the story of nuclear power generally - it is such a complicated way to boil water that if its safe its expensive, and if its cheap it's not safe.

In the 1960's, some San Diego Science Fair exhibitors took a field trip To General Atomics. I and a friend won Junior Division Sweepstakes for a manipulator 'thingy' we built from washing machine parts and automobile power seat motors. The project was partially inspired by the manipulators used to handle radioactive materials in labs. One stop on the field trip took us into GA's TRIGA REACTOR facility. Everyone we met at GA pronounced it TREEEEEGA Reactor.

Thank you for the well researched explanation. I worked at General Atomics back in the day. It was pronounced like ‘TREE GA’ by everyone there. Just for the record, it was Dr William Whittemore behind the ingenious design of the fuel. I had never heard of Teller being involved but that was before my time. I think it would be difficult to use the UZrH fuel to a power reactor at scale. It was designed specifically for generating high flux neutron pulses, not so much for steady state operation at high temperatures as would be required for large scale power production. The hydrogen would diffuse out. The blue light is from Cherenkov radiation.

really interesting i wonder how it would compare to a liquid fluoride thorium reactor. in safety, efficiency, cost, etc.

The problem is we have political leaders and the voters who select them who base their decisions on the feelings they had when they watched movies. They watched Bambi and created the wild land management policies that have led to giant and lethal wild fires. They watched One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest and created policies that have led to much of the homelessness crisis. And they watched China Syndrome and decided nuclear power is bad and instead we spent billions and billions of dollars on wind and solar which now causes shortages of electricity during times of peak demand.

I loved the trigger joke, well done, Sir.

Thank You very much for talking about this! I have, of course, been aware of the good and evil aspects of nuclear energy for almost all of my life. (Born in the UK in 1949, living in USA since 1961.) Even though I lived under the cloud of "Mutually Assured Destruction" (or deterrence) I have always been in favor of using nuclear energy for non-military purposes. I remember a few of my favourite science-fiction writers sometimes using "pocket reactors" (nuclear was implied) in their plot lines. But I was not aware that was an actual possibility until seeing your presentation here. I believe much of the US public opinion about nuclear energy is still shaped by the end of WW-II, the years of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, the Three Mile Island (TMI) incident, and the Chernobyl fiasco. Most do not know (or don't believe, or don't care) that the TMI hearings showed that the TOTAL release from TMI was much less than the average DAILY dose in the US Capitol Building room used for the hearings. Even with the current push on science and engineering education, most of the public appears to be either uneducated about - or willfuly ignorant of - the basic facts about how safe nuclear energy really is, and how low-cost it can really be. For example, I used to work in a US Navy shipyard that serviced nuclear powered submarines. Frequent testing at the radiological facility always showed that the river water coming INTO the building had higher radioactivity levels than the water goiung OUT OF the building and being released back into the river. Of course, the river water orginated in moutains having minerals that naturally contained radium, uranium, thorium and so on - but some fools thought that was "safer" because is was "natural". My wife used to work for a company that reprocessed used nuclear power fuel rods - removing the fission products that reduce efficiency, and refeshing with fresh uranium pellets. They started building a new production plant, but eventually shut down because the NRC wanted to apply the same seismic and other safety standards to the old building (which was going to be shut down) as were required for the new one. Insanity. Thus nuclear power in the US is so expensive because the fuel must always be made from newly-mined uranium, instad of reprocessed fuel at economical cost savings. (Yet another advantage nuclear has over fossil fuels: you cannot reprocess burned coal or petroleum to make new fuel!