The Atomic Exchange Podcast

In the 47th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous welcome Professor Paul Nary of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania to unpack how major industries evolve when a new technology takes over. They explore classic boom and bust patterns, what signals a shakeout, and why predicting timing is so hard even when the signs are obvious. Th...

In the 46th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous break down their new research on how large language models struggle with nuclear regulation. They open with a recap of closed-door briefings at the Canadian Nuclear Association and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, then explain embeddings, how vector spaces and cosine similarity drive retrie...

In the 45th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous take a deep, practical look at radon. They explain what radon is and how it harms, why winter readings run higher than summer, and how long-term lab tests compare to continuous monitors. Then they separate home exposure from miner studies, translate working-level months into everyday Bq/m³, and wa...

In the 44th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous open with quick campus notes and a milestone update, then bring back Good Science vs Bad Science with a deep read of a new study on Germany’s nuclear shutdown. They walk through the paper’s method using a synthetic Germany built from peer countries, the main result of roughly 17 potential life yea...

In the 43rd installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous open with quick updates, a post-mortem on the gaming stream experiment, and a nod to recent guest episodes, then dive into a point-by-point reaction to Elon Musk’s comments on the All-In Podcast. They unpack “near-field solar,” public acceptance of reactors, capacity factor vs nameplate, what batt...

In the 42nd installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous welcome Dr. Henry Conter, vice president of the Eglinton-Lawrence Conservative Electoral District Association, delegate to the Conservative Party of Canada National Convention, who is also a practicing oncologist and hematologist. They trace Henry’s path into public life, ask what a healthy Canada...

In the 41st installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous welcome Professor Andy Wu from Harvard Business School. They start with why a nuclear podcast exists at all and how public opinion shifts from luxury beliefs to practical acceptance, then ask how much of today’s AI demand is real versus bubble, what that means for data centers, and where gas and n...

In the 40th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous open with a quick debrief of McMaster’s Nuclear Renaissance 2.0, then shift to the Business of Nuclear. They compare GE Vernova, NuScale, and Oklo in simple terms, separating what each actually does from the story the market is pricing. Along the way they unpack why gas is powering today’s data ce...

In the 39th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous welcome back Matt to continue discussing Project Phoenix. After a quick recap of last week’s forging choke points, they shift to the operational side: fuel. Together they follow the path from mining, milling, conversion, enrichment, to reprocessing and ask what would count as proof that North Amer...

In the 38th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous welcome lab teammate Matt Player to map the real bottlenecks behind America’s proposed fourfold nuclear buildout. They set the context for why this study exists and what would count as proof that the goal is more than a slogan. Then they dig into the industrial choke point of heavy forgings for re...

In the 37th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous open with a check-in from a Toronto nuclear conference on cybersecurity, where simple devices and supply chain gaps show how human habits can still beat high-tech defenses. Michael shares a behind-the-scenes look at his Georgetown Law group interview and uses its ethics hypotheticals to ask what g...

In the 36th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous open with a quick check-in: a producer from CBC’s Quirks & Quarks reached out after reading their piece in The Conversation, and Michael’s law-school interview season is underway. Then Michael brings fieldwork, door-to-door solar interviews in Castle Rock, Colorado. They compare an earlier, hi...

In the 35th installment of  The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous open with a light check-in that turns into an unexpected strategy lesson: IKEA’s modular design, network effects, and why flat-pack execution often beats “custom” complexity. From there they head to Castle Rock, Colorado, where rooftop solar appears on roughly every other home, and work through t...

In the 34th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous open with a personal check-in, global-events insomnia on one side and a birthday week on the other, before launching into Nuclear in the News. First up: Oklo’s plan for a used-fuel recycling plant in Oak Ridge and the BWXT–Kairos tie-up to scale TRISO fuel, and what that signals for a domestic adva...

In the 33rd installment of  The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous open with light notes on grout, a new smart lock, and Colorado’s wide-open neighborhoods before turning to Nuclear in the News. They weigh the Trump administration’s pause on several East Coast offshore wind projects, asking whether it is a needed security reset or an expensive mid-stream stop, a...

In the 32nd installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous open with weekend notes and then roll into another Good Science vs Bad Science. They unpack their new working paper, "Cooling Under Fire" (now on SSRN), a response to “Atomic Rivers,” asking whether inland, water-cooled nuclear can stay reliable in a warming world. They quantify heat/dro...

In the 31st installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous open with quick updates and note that "Cooling Under Fire" is now on SSRN. They touch on peer-review norms, then dive into another Business of Nuclear episode: this time a winners-and-losers scan. Goran maps the U.S. AI load surge from 30 TWh in 2000 to 600 TWh by 2028, led by Virginia,...

In the 30th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous open with lab updates: early demos of their custom AI for the Canadian nuclear sector with McMaster Nuclear Operations & Facilities and Ontario Power Generation (OPG), plus a check-in on a new workforce input–output model and paper on what it would take to triple Canada’s nuclear capacity by 2...

In the 29th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous start with Goran's recent “less golf, more miniatures” lifestyle change, trading four-hour rounds for meditative tabletop painting and a quick riff on career phases and moderation. Then they dig into Dominion’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project: 2.6 GW across 176 turbines with a $10.7B he...

In the 28th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous welcome their first ever guest, Scott MacKinnon, Senior Director of Logistics & Supply-Chain Network Integration at EtherLog°. Scott recounts how Goran’s McMaster talk on “why standardization can slow nuclear builds” sparked a pub-side debate that now becomes a full episode on logistics. The t...

In the 27th installment of  The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co‑hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous open with two case‑method deep dives. Goran debuts his new Harvard Business School case,  Meta’s Energy Dilemma , where MBA teams weigh Llama’s vertical integration and whether Meta should own its own generation, trading land use, CO₂ and even “annual deaths” in a live financial model. That segue...

In the 26th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co‑hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous open with a lighter detour on “always‑on” careers. Goran recalls his short‑lived stab at professional online poker, where the glamour fades into a smoky 12‑hour grind, while Michael explains why he would be the world’s worst poker player ever. The conversation then pivots to Hamilton, where Prime ...

In the 25th‑episode milestone of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co‑hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous set aside reactor talk to focus on something different: each other. Michael kicks things off fresh from a week in Cancun, weighing beachside bliss against the itch to keep emailing drafts, while Goran unpacks why an off‑season, high‑fixed‑cost resort can feel five‑star on a three‑star budget...

In the 24th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous open with a summer catch-up: Goran’s solo Tesla trek from Dundas to Ottawa, complete with full-self-driving lane changes and meditative highway moments, and Michael’s impending family hop to Cancún. A light detour into European favourites follows, where Vienna’s café culture, London’s imperial str...

In the 23rd installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast , co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous begin by wading into the unexpected torrent of criticism on their recent Conversation article, examining everything from disclosure-doubts to misread safety statistics, and reflecting on when and how to engage with online pushback. They then turn to Ontario’s summer heat wave, where demand has sur...