Well, I have a big announcement to make today,

程度副詞

情態助動詞 B1

And this may be a little bit of a surprise

I've really tried to solve some big problems:

and health care and diagnosing and treating cancer,

but I started thinking about all these problems,

and I realized that the really biggest problem we face,

what all these other problems come down to,

is energy, is electricity, the flow of electrons.

就是能源，也就是電流，
電子的流動

And I decided that I was going to set out

And this probably is not what you're expecting.

You're probably expecting me to come up here

because that's what I've done most of my life.

But this is actually a talk about, okay --

but this is actually a talk about fission.

and bringing something old into the 21st century.

Let's talk a little bit about how nuclear fission works.

a big pot of water that's under high pressure,

and these fuel rods are encased in zirconium,

and they're little pellets of uranium dioxide fuel,

and a fission reaction is controlled and maintained at a proper level,

the water turns to steam, steam turns the turbine,

This is the same way we've been producing electricity,

but you still boil water and that turns to steam and turns the turbine.

但還是要燒水，變成蒸汽推動渦輪

And I thought, you know, is this the best way to do it?

or is there something left to innovate here?

And I realized that I had hit upon something

that I think has this huge potential to change the world.

So it's not as big as the reactor you see in the diagram here.

that's maybe 25,000 to 100,000 homes could run off that.

Now the really interesting thing about these reactors

這些反應爐真正有趣的地方在於

So they're modular reactors that are built

and they're trucked anywhere in the world,

you plop them down, and they produce electricity.

And this is buried below ground, which is really important.

For someone who's done a lot of counterterrorism work,

how great having something buried below the ground is

And inside this reactor is a molten salt,

they're going to be really excited about this,

because these reactors happen to be really good

at breeding and burning the thorium fuel cycle,

But I'm not really concerned about the fuel.

You can run these off -- they're really hungry,

they really like down-blended weapons pits,

so that's highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium

It's made into a grade where it's not usable for a nuclear weapon,

You know, in the Cold War, we built up this huge arsenal

and what are we doing with all the waste, essentially?

What are we doing with all the pits of those nuclear weapons?

Well, we're securing them, and it would be great

如果能燒掉、吃掉，那就太棒了

So it's a molten salt reactor. It has a core,

and it has a heat exchanger from the hot salt,

the radioactive salt, to a cold salt which isn't radioactive.

「熱鹽」，即放射性鹽
傳到「冷鹽」，即無放射性的鹽

It's still thermally hot but it's not radioactive.

to what makes this design really, really interesting,

是這種反應爐設計最有趣的地方

So going back to what I was saying before about all power

being produced -- well, other than photovoltaic --

being produced by this boiling of steam and turning a turbine,

都要燒水，產生蒸汽，推動渦輪

that's actually not that efficient, and in fact,

it's only roughly 30 to 35 percent efficient.

That's how much thermal energy the reactor's putting out

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