Decouple

In this reactor deep dive, Chris Keefer is joined by Navid Badie, Chief Nuclear Engineer at Candu Energy Inc, to explain the inner workings of the distinctive CANDU reactor. They trace how Canada’s decision to use natural uranium led to heavy-water moderation, horizontal pressure tubes, separate coolant and moderator systems, and the ability to refuel continuously while operating. Navid breaks dow...

James Krellenstein returns to take apart one of the most persistent myths in energy discourse: the idea that there was a golden age when nuclear power was cheaper than coal. The plants people point to, Oyster Creek, Dresden, Point Beach, Quad Cities, were cheap to the utilities that bought them, but they were not cheap to build. General Electric and Westinghouse sold them as fixed-price turnkey pr...

AI hype has bled deep into the nuclear sector, and in this episode, Chris Keefer sits down with returning guest David Helmer, an engineer and AI advisory consultant with a decade advising the US government on machine learning and autonomous systems, to examine what the technology can actually do, who benefits from inflating those claims, and what a correction would mean for nuclear's investmen...

David Helmer spent years working on cooling systems for GE jet turbines before moving to Boston Consulting Group, the Applied Physics Laboratory, and West Point. He joins Decouple to explain why the gas turbine, despite being conceptually understood for centuries, only became buildable in the crucible of the Second World War, and why mastering it remains beyond the reach of all but a handful of in...

Grant Isaac, President and COO of Cameco, joins Decouple to explain why uranium behaves unlike any other commodity. With essentially zero fundamental in-year demand, a spot market that reports prices rather than discovering them, and a long-term contracting structure that ties producers directly to the utilities using the fuel, uranium operates by rules that confound anyone who approaches it throu...

Nuclear construction once hit timelines that today sound implausible. First of a kind reactors completed in under four years, delivered at lower cost than mature designs, and executed with a level of coordination that the modern industry has largely lost. This episode uses the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR) as a lens to examine that moment, not as a historical curiosity, but as a proof poin...

In this episode of Decouple , Chris Keefer is joined once again by Michael Seely of the Atomic Blender to explore nuclear fuel reprocessing and the promise of unlocking vastly more energy from existing nuclear waste. We deep dive how processes like PUREX attempt to separate and reuse valuable materials like uranium and plutonium. Using real-world examples such as France’s La Hague reprocessing pla...

In this episode we are joined by Seaver Wang to discuss the physical foundations of China’s industrial dominance in solar, batteries, electric vehicles, semiconductors, rare earth magnets, and aluminum. We examine how these sectors are presented as evidence by climate activists that clean technology is delivering a new kind of green industrial superpower and interrogate that claim at the level of...

Europe once treated energy as the foundation of civilization. After the oil shocks of the 1970s, it built nuclear at scale, opened the North Sea, and secured long term pipeline supply. That system produced resilience, surplus, and industrial strength. Today, the arithmetic has flipped. Europe consumes roughly 38 exajoules of hydrocarbons and produces about 6. This episode examines how that reversa...

This episode features Joe St. Julian, President of Nuclear at AtkinsRéalis, outlining why Canada may be closer to a new nuclear fleet build than most observers realize. Drawing on his background delivering complex U.S. nuclear megaprojects, St. Julian explains why the recent refurbishment programs at Darlington and Bruce have rebuilt the workforce, supply chain, and execution capability needed for...

The Iranian drone strike on Qatar’s Ras Laffan industrial complex has sent shockwaves through global energy markets, triggering force majeure on 20 percent of the world’s LNG supply and closing the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping. To understand what just happened and what comes next, Decouple is joined by Stephen Stapczynski, Bloomberg’s leading LNG correspondent and one of the few journal...

Nuclear fuel is nothing like the coal or gas it replaces. Where fossil fuels are destroyed in combustion, nuclear fuel must survive years of continuous fission inside a reactor and come out the other end looking almost exactly as it went in. In this episode, fuel engineer Michael Seely breaks down how uranium dioxide pellets are made, why the fuel rod is one of the most sophisticated manufactured...

For two decades the nuclear conversation has revolved around new builds, advanced reactors, and megaproject risk. Meanwhile, forty Westinghouse pressurized water reactors continue operating at roughly the same thermal output they were commissioned at decades ago, leaving six to ten gigawatts of potential capacity sitting inside existing plants. In this episode, I speak with Robb Stewart and James...

In this episode of Decouple, Chris sits down with Kyle Chan of the High Capacity Substack to unpack what “AI with Chinese characteristics” actually means. Rather than framing artificial intelligence as a simple US–China race to AGI, they explore how each country is building AI inside very different institutional systems. The conversation covers DeepSeek, compute constraints, quantization, and the...

In this special episode of Decouple, Chris Keefer speaks with Ken Petrunik, one of the few leaders in the Western nuclear industry who has taken large reactors from first concrete to operation under budget and ahead of schedule. Petrunik’s career spans Canada’s nuclear golden age and its export era, with senior roles in Romania, Argentina, and China, including leading the Qinshan Phase III CANDU r...

In this episode of Decouple we deep dive the European Pressurised Reactor and what its troubled construction history reveals about the real constraints on nuclear build out in the modern West. The conversation traces how a design intended to satisfy every regulator through a design philosophy of extreme redundancy and conservative safety margins instead exposed the limits of Western construction c...

Why have we built nuclear ships before, proven they can operate, and still not made them commonplace?  Nick Touran breaks down the history of maritime nuclear power, from the Nuclear Ship Savannah and Otto Hahn to Japan’s Mutsu and Russia’s Sevmorput, then pivots to floating nuclear power concepts such as the MH 1A Sturgis and the Offshore Power Systems program. We explore what worked, what failed...

In this episode of Decouple , Dr. Jeff Waksman, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment, explains how the U.S. Army is making a second attempt at making microreactors great again. The discussion situates the Janus microreactor program in the long history of the Army Nuclear Power Program and Project Pele, highlighting why earlier small reactor dep...

The first U.S. nuclear renaissance collapsed under the weight of cheap shale gas, lost institutional expertise, and disastrous projects like Vogtle and Summer. Today, America is planning a fleet of eight AP1000 reactors, backed by unprecedented federal incentives. But can the country actually build large nuclear again? In this video, we break down what really killed the 2000s revival, why Fukushim...

Saudi Arabia burns nearly one million barrels of oil per day to keep its lights on, yet it has cheaper and faster ways to replace this than by building large nuclear reactors. So why is the Kingdom pushing so hard for a civil nuclear deal? This episode walks through the strategic logic that has animated Riyadh’s nuclear ambitions for more than a decade. The answer lies in prestige, industrial capa...

In this episode, Chris Keefer speaks with Hadron Energy founder Samuel Gibson, the twenty four year old entrepreneur pursuing a ten megawatt integral pressurized water microreactor through a one point two billion dollar business combination with GigCapital7. Gibson outlines why he believes light water is the fastest licensing path, how he assembled a veteran nuclear team, and why Hadron shifted fr...

Fan favourite, James Krellenstein, returns for a deep dive into the AP1000. We walk through how its conservative nuclear steam supply system is built from proven Westinghouse and Combustion Engineering lineage, and where its true innovation lies, in a radically passive safety architecture that removes the traditional race against diesel generators during LOCAs and station blackouts.  From core mak...

In late October, amid the choreography of President Trump’s visit to Tokyo, two vast and curiously intertwined announcements were made: an $80 billion strategic partnership between the U.S. government and Westinghouse Electric Company, and a $550 billion investment framework between the United States and Japan. This episode of Decouple , hosted by AJ Camacho of Politico and E&E News , brought...

This week on Decouple , I sit down with Aleksey Rezvoi , a veteran maritime nuclear engineer who began his career in the Soviet Union designing third- and fourth-generation submarine and icebreaker reactors before later working in the U.S. nuclear sector. We explore the hidden history and living reality of Russia’s civilian nuclear fleet —a line that began with the icebreaker Lenin in 1959 and con...