Remember the Manhattan Project? Remember when they realized there was a finite probability of igniting the atmosphere and the did the hard work to realize that

Remember the Manhattan Project? Remember when they realized there was a finite probability of igniting the atmosphere and the did the hard work to realize that probability was exceedingly low? Remember the pile under the stadium at the University of Chicago? Long before building nuclear plants we did a lot of small scale isolated engineering with the basic technology. Learned a lot. Killed more than a few people along the way. Realized where the basic science was sufficient, realized where we needed more, realized where we needed hard engineering. And we generally experimented on small scales. And built on small scales. With this proposal, there really are no small scales. We need to evaluate the risks conservatively since there are many we simply do not yet know how to quantify. And proceed cautiously. As you write, let's do science properly. Small steps. Lots of data. Better models. No dogma.