Decouple

How did a tiny, impoverished country whose principal exports included Jaffa oranges become the world's sixth nuclear power? Nuclear historian Avner Cohen, author of Israel and the Bomb and The Worst-Kept Secret, joins Decouple to tell the extraordinary story of Israel's clandestine nuclear weapons program. From David Ben-Gurion's determination to prevent another Holocaust to Shimon Per...

The Canada-US trade war is escalating, threatening to unravel decades of economic integration between two of the world's closest allies. Chris Keefer is joined by returning guest Jesse Hoops to examine how we got here, what Washington hopes to achieve, and how Canada can respond to an increasingly unpredictable neighbour. From tariffs on aluminum and autos to the potential collapse of Canadian...

Canada is once again attempting to build nuclear megaprojects after a long pause, making the experience of people who have actually delivered recent large industrial projects increasingly valuable. Ian McGregor is a veteran Alberta engineer, entrepreneur and industrial project developer who helped conceive and build the $12 billion Northwest Sturgeon Refinery and the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line. In...

Fusion has spent nearly a century as the energy source of the future. In this episode, I’m joined by fusion scientist Gerrit Bruhaug to ask what has actually been achieved, what remains unsolved, and why progress has taken so much longer than the early pioneers expected. We start from first principles, how fusion differs from fission, why the Lawson criterion matters, and how magnetic and inertial...

Iran’s nuclear program is now more than seven decades old, stretching from the Shah’s ambitious Atoms for Peace-era plans to the Islamic Republic’s pursuit of enrichment, missile capability and nuclear latency. Iran historian Farzan Sabet joins Decouple to explain how energy development, techno-nationalism, the trauma of the Iran–Iraq War and a persistent sense of strategic isolation transformed a...

For almost the whole of human history, wood was the main act. It was the fuel that cooked food and smelted iron, the material that framed every house and hull, and the first bulk commodity ever moved at scale over long distances. In this episode Chris Keefer talks with energy analyst Mark Nelson about a material we almost entirely take for granted, starting with a fact hiding in plain sight: the g...

Former U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz joins Decouple to examine the history of Iran’s nuclear program and the negotiations that produced the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. As the agreement’s lead American technical negotiator, Moniz offers a rare inside account of his intensive discussions with Iranian nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi, explaining how personal trust helped make an ex...

Why are nuclear power plants so difficult to finance, and who ultimately pays when megaprojects run late or over budget? Chris Keefer is joined by returning guest Michael Seely, The Atomic Blender, for a deep dive into the capital costs, construction risks and financing structures that determine whether nuclear projects move forward or collapse. They examine the troubled European EPR experience at...

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...