Decouple

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 Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinkley Point C, where delays and cost overruns repeatedly pushed risk back onto reactor vendors and national governments.
The conversation then turns to Sizewell C’s regulated asset-base model, which allows investors to earn returns during construction while shifting more risk onto ratepayers and the British state. Chris and Michael also explore Vogtle, VC Summer, NuScale and UAMPS, asking whether private capital can realistically finance new nuclear construction, why government guarantees remain essential, and whether nuclear power should ultimately be treated less like a merchant investment and more like long-lived public infrastructure.
Listen to Decouple on:
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6PNr3ml8nEQotWWavE9kQz
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694?uo=4
• Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1516526694/decouple
• Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/ehbfrn44
• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/23775178/podcast/rss
Website: https://www.decouple.media

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 down the reactor’s fuel channels, steam generators, online fueling machines, and the remarkable operating experience behind a technology that has completed nearly a million online refuelling operations.
The conversation also examines CANDU safety and longevity: large inventories of water, natural thermosiphon cooling during a station blackout, and the engineering behind reactor refurbishment. Chris and Navid discuss pressure-tube metallurgy, robotic inspection and maintenance, cobalt-60 and other isotope production, and why locally manufacturable natural-uranium fuel can offer importing countries greater fuel-cycle sovereignty. A technically grounded introduction to one of the world’s most unusual and capable reactor lineages.
Listen to Decouple on:
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6PNr3ml8nEQotWWavE9kQz
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694?uo=4
• Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1516526694/decouple
• Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/ehbfrn44
• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/23775178/podcast/rss
Website: https://www.decouple.media

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 projects at a deliberate loss, eating roughly 1 billion in 1960s dollars, more than 10 billion adjusted for inflation, across about a dozen plants. This loss leader strategy paid off. Between 1962 and 1976 the US nuclear fleet doubled its capacity roughly every 2 years, a stretch of sustained growth that rivals anything in American industrial history and still constitutes the largest nuclear fleet on earth in 2026.
The conversation traces how turnkey era prices distorted every nuclear cost comparison that followed, why the utilities themselves pushed to abandon turnkey contracts, and how regulatory change, slowing load growth, and across-the-board cost inflation turned the boom into a wave of cancellations. Krellenstein closes on the fundamental question for the present moment: if we want to set off another ordering cycle, someone has to absorb first-of-a-kind risk with a balance sheet large enough to guarantee a firm fixed price, and it is not obvious who that is. Back then GE and Westinghouse could swallow the losses because they were two of the largest industrial conglomerates on earth and commercial reactors were a single-digit percentage of their business. No comparable actor today has shown any willingness to take that risk on, which explains both how the world's largest nuclear fleet got built and why nobody has been willing to repeat the trick since.
Listen to Decouple on:
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6PNr3ml8nEQotWWavE9kQz
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694?uo=4
• Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1516526694/decouple
• Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/ehbfrn44
• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/23775178/podcast/rss
Website: https://www.decouple.media

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 investment story.
The conversation covers the ELIZA effect and why human brains are hardwired to anthropomorphize language models; the structural gap between frontier lab costs and revenues; why hallucination and reliability problems are embedded in LLM architecture rather than solvable through scaling; and why the AGI narrative functions primarily as a justification for otherwise unjustifiable capital concentration. For nuclear advocates, the question is not whether AI demand is real today, but whether the speculative reactor developers pricing in hyperscaler contracts will still have a business if the AI bubble deflates.
Listen to Decouple on:
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6PNr3ml8nEQotWWavE9kQz
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694?uo=4
• Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1516526694/decouple
• Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/ehbfrn44
• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/23775178/podcast/rss
Website: https://www.decouple.media

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 institutions on earth.The conversation covers the materials science at the heart of the technology, where turbine blades operate above their own melting point and components in continuous distress are kept flying for hundreds of additional cycles before refurbishment. We examine why innovation cycles in aviation are measured in decades rather than years, drawing direct comparisons to nuclear's certification constraints and contrasting both with the faster but higher-risk iteration model of the rocket sector. The discussion moves from aviation into power generation, tracing the combined cycle plant's efficiency gains, the AI-driven demand surge now stretching turbine order books to 7 years, and what the scramble to convert end-of-life commercial jet engines for data center power reveals about supply chain limits. The episode closes on geopolitics: why only 3 companies produce competitive commercial jet engines, what reverse engineering cannot unlock, and why Russia's turbine capability was always more dependent on Western materials, machine tools, and maintenance expertise than anyone acknowledged until the sanctions arrived.Listen to Decouple on:• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6PNr3ml8nEQotWWavE9kQz• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decouple/id1516526694?uo=4• Overcast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1516526694/decouple• Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/ehbfrn44• RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/23775178/podcast/rssWebsite: https://www.decouple.media