Decouple

James Krellenstein and I continue our deep dive analysis of what went wrong at Vogtle.

As Canada embarks on a new nuclear build out of SMRs and large Reactors, Professor Duane Bratt joins me to provide a political scientists perspective on the history and future of the Canadian nuclear sector.

Noah Rettberg walks us through an in depth exploration on the challenges of decarbonizing process heat.

Ed Conway author of “Material World” joins me to explore the material world underpinning the ethereal world of our perceived reality. He explains how sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium are transformed with technology and energy into the building blocks of our built world and how fragile, vulnerable and complex these processes have become.

James Krellenstein returns to dig into what went wrong at Vogtle and why the nuclear “Renaissance” of the early 2000’s ended up a flop.

Alberta, sitting on massive reserves of oil and gas, found itself teetering on the edge of blackout this week as temperatures in the negative 40 degree ranges led to multiple grid alerts. As a new record for peak demand was set at 12,384 MW, Alberta's 4481MW wind fleet went AWOL. This raises major concerns regarding electricity planning with a country wide federal mandate for Net Zero electric...

Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO at Microsoft and vice chairman of TerraPower joins me to discuss his experience bridging the world of software and nuclear power.

Sec Ernie Moniz and I chat about best practices for “embarking” and “re-embarking” nations as 24 countries pledge to triple nuclear energy by 2050.

Humanity went from inducing the first fissions of heavy elements in 1938 to a nuclear powered submarine in just 16 years. Why has that tremendous pace of nuclear innovation seemingly slowed down to a crawl? Nuclear historian Nick Touran joins me for an in depth analysis of the historic preconditions of nuclear innovation and its opportunities and limits going into the future.

Robert Bryce joins me for a COP28 “reactions” episode and drops some hard truths on the world’s ever increasing appetite for coal.

Dr. Keefer sat down with some of the Titans of the nuclear fuel cycle at the “Net Zero Nuclear Summit” on the sidelines of COP28 in the UAE where 24 countries have pledged to triple nuclear energy by 2050. The topic: How to scale up Uranium mining, enrichment and advanced fuel manufacturing in the context of our emerging multipolar world and the West’s dependence on Russia for almost 1/4 of its en...

The cancellation of the Carbon Free Power Project was a massive blow to US SMR front runner NuScale. James Krellenstein joins me for a deep dive.

Chris Adlam joins me to discuss Ontario’s attempt to imitate Germany’s Energiewende. It began as an attempt to kickstart a green energy industry by retooling struggling automotive plants in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The lucrative 20 year feed in tariff contracts for wind and solar will end up costing Ontario more than 62 billion dollars.

One in 20 American homes are powered by Russian enriched uranium because the USA lacks sufficient enrichment capacity to meet its own needs. Energy and fuel security are supposed to be a strong point of the technology but the US nuclear industry faces further reputational risk because no-one is taking responsibility and adequately planning adequate solutions despite NRC licenses being in place. Ja...

The recent cancellation of two large wind projects in New Jersey are the latest in a series of setbacks for the nascent US offshore wind industry. Mark Nelson joins me to analyze whether the nuclear industry is vulnerable to the same cost drivers plaguing this sector.

James Krellenstein joins me to discuss the rationale underlying small modular reactors and in particular the challenges of getting novel reactor concepts from the experimental stage to reliable commercial operation.

Jacopo Buongiorno joins me to discuss the cost drivers of nuclear and how we can drive them down. For a deeper dive check out this MIT study that Jacopo led. studyhttps://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon-constrained-world/

Dr Keefer’s Testimony at the House of Commons Natural Resources Committee on what Canada can learn from the Inflation Reduction Act’s “good union jobs” provisions. In the words of NYT labour reporter Noam Scheiber “The green economy is shaping up to look less like the industrial workplace that lifted workers into the middle class in the 20th century and more like an Amazon warehouse with grueling...

Muckraking physicist and data scientist Aidan Morrison has thrown doubt on the oft repeated mantra in Australia that wind and solar are the lowest cost option for a clean energy transition. He discovered that the modelling used to justify these claims leaves out the massive investments in storage and transmission required to balance the system treating them as sunk costs. See Aidan’s own excellent...

Dr. Keefer’s speech at Minerals Week in Australia sharing the story of Ontario’s coal phaseout & the decarbonization of its electricity grid.

Enhanced geothermal has been a scientific white whale since the 1970’s but a recent breakthrough announcement is causing waves. Is Baseload cool again? Will enhanced geothermal eat nuclear’s lunch or for that matter renewable’s lunch? The potential to unlock the energy potential of hot dry rocks by leveraging hydraulic fracturing opens up a vast geography for exploitation as 98% of worlds geotherm...

As electricity demands increase Quebec is looking into refurbishing its lone mothballed CANDU reactor Gentilly-2. Mark Nelson joins us to discuss.

Today I am joined by Jigar Shah, the director of the US Department of Energy Loan Programs Office to discuss the future of nuclear, and nuclear finance in the USA.

Charles Oppenheimer, a serial entrepreneur in the software business and the grandson of J Robert Oppenheimer joins me to discuss the Christopher Nolan film, his Grandfather’s legacy and the organization he recently co-founded, the Oppenheimer project.

Physicist James Krellenstein returns for a part two to talk about America’s nuclear future.