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 the mystery with incentives, politics, ROI math, and what might really be driving adoption when prices and policy do not fully explain it. The episode then shifts to AI power at industrial scale, unpacking Elon Musk’s Colossus data centers, 122-day build timelines, gas turbines staged just over the Mississippi–Tennessee line, the path to a gigawatt site, and how funding from personal equity, Gulf capital, and intercompany charges could fuel a winner-takes-most race. They close by asking what a Musk playbook would look like in nuclear, from radical simplification to factory-built units, and whether utilities should keep options open for a new wave of fast, standardized builds. Tune in for a practical, numbers-first tour of consumer tech, rooftop economics, and AI-era electricity.

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 advanced-fuel supply chain. Then to London, where WNA said it is “difficult to overstate” institutional investor demand while Microsoft joined as the Association’s first big-tech member, alongside new data on industrial “clustering” around nuclear sites. Back home, they parse Reuters’ build sheet, about 114 GW of new U.S. gas in the pipeline vs about 36 GW hydro and about 8 GW nuclear, and weigh pro-nuclear rhetoric against near-term gas realities. Along the way they ask whether to recycle fuel now or prioritize R&D, why TRISO is interesting, how depreciation rules (MACRS) tilt LCOE, and which messages actually move public support. Tune in for a candid, numbers-first tour of fuel cycles and finance signals.

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, and what government intervention does to project risk, financing, and ratepayers. From there, they dive into how risk really shows up in power prices, unpacking levelized cost of electricity through the lens of capital cost, firming, and both technical and non-technical risks. Examples include why nuclear in Ontario carries low completion and fuel risk, why gas looks very different in Texas than in Europe, and how solar and storage depend on long, fragile supply chains. They close by sketching a risk-adjusted LCOE framework and a case study idea comparing identical gas plants in Texas and Germany. Tune in for a practical look at policy shocks, project finance, and why the true cost of power depends on more than a single headline number.