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There are technologies that decouple human well-being from its ecological impacts. There are politics that enable these technologies. Join me as I interview world experts to uncover hope in this time of planetary crisis.
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Can South Korea Rescue America's Nuclear Renaissance? w/ Dr. Eunjung Lim
South Korea emerged from the devastation of the Korean War as one of the world's poorest countries. Within a generation, it had become an industrial powerhouse, mastering nuclear technologies originally imported from the United States and C
How America Gave Away Its Industrial Superpower w/ Stefan Link
By 1927, the United States had more than 22 million motor vehicles on its roads, compared with just 18,000 in the Soviet Union. This staggering disparity reflected one of the greatest productivity revolutions in human history: the mass prod
The Story of the Israeli Bomb w/ Avner Cohen
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 e
The Canada-US Trade War: A Bridge Too Far? w/ Jesse Huebsch
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
Megaprojects: Some Assembly Required w/ Ian MacGregor
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
The State of Fusion Energy w/ Gerrit Bruhaug
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 th
Sunk Costs & Diminishing Returns of Iran's Nuclear Program w/ Farzan Sabet
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 j
Biomass Masterclass w/ Mark Nelson
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 ep
Ernie Moniz: Reflections on the JCPOA
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 negotiat
Fission Impossible? Financing New Nuclear w/ Michael Seely
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, co
CANDU: The Truly Modular Reactor w/ Navid Badie
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 hea
The Birth of America’s Nuclear Power Industry
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, Qu
Limits to Growth of LLMs w/ David Helmer
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
The Gas Turbine: The Final Revelation in Humanity’s Pantheon of Prime Movers (w/ David Helmer)
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 u
Understanding the World's Most Unusual Commodity Cycle
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
The Absolute Best Water Reactor: What Happened to the World’s Fastest Constructed Reactor?
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 ha
Nuclear Reprocessing: Promise vs Reality
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 process
Greenwashing with Chinese Characteristics
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 pres
The Luxury Beliefs That Broke Europe’s Energy System | Doomberg
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 industria
What's happening with CANDU?
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,
The Week LNG Became a Target
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. T
Nuclear Fuel: The Most Sophisticated Industrial Product You've Never Learned About
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
The Most Boring Path to 10 Gigawatts: Why Nuclear Uprates Matter Right Now
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 commi
AI with Chinese Characteristics
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 ex
A Case Study of Excellence from Canada’s Nuclear Golden Age
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
EPR: The Reactor That Tried to Please Everyone and Satisfied No One
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 t
Why Nuclear Shipping Is Inherently Niche
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
Janus: The Army’s Second Attempt at Fielding Microreactors
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 discus
Why the First Nuclear Renaissance Failed: Can America Build Eight AP1000s Now?
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 unprecede
