You need a substance and then that substance has to have a property that changes depending on the heat flow, i.e., depending on whether it's sensing that it's the same temperature or different temperature than something else.
There are many nontrivial ancillary challenges too, especially the secondary procedure of actually getting the energy out of the reactor into a useful form, i.e. heat to drive steam-turbines as with all other kinds of thermal power stations, to generate electricity.
Communication skills just don't seem to be Day's strong point--he took some heat in August when RadioShack used e-mail to inform hundreds of employees they were losing their jobs.