This week, we talk about Russian nuclear exports. Michael Seely, host of AtomicBlender, joins me to discuss the rise of Rosatom: Russia’s nuclear energy behemoth that now builds nearly half of the world’s new reactors. We trace its formation after the Soviet collapse, its grip on the nuclear fuel market, and its unmatched “turnkey” model for newcomer nations. Rosatom’s nuclear exports are more than just a commercial endeavour—they can reshape global influence for decades.

Michael's videos on Canada, Russia, and Ukraine.

This week, we travel to the edge of the map with Aleksandr Surtcev, an engineer who has crewed Russian nuclear icebreakers along the Northern Sea Route. We explore how Russia’s Arctic fleet keeps this strategic corridor open, why floating nuclear plants are powering remote communities and mines, and what life looks like in a place where polar bears trail ships for fish and resupply markets pop up on the ice. Beneath the stories lies a deeper discussion of geopolitics, engineering, and the hard logistics of operating in one of the most unforgiving regions on Earth.

This week, Mark Nelson joins us to deliver his second annual “State of the Atom” address. The nuclear power landscape has transformed in the last two years. Russia continues its nuclear export dominance while the West at last awakens from its stupor, driven by an unexpected force: artificial intelligence's insatiable appetite for baseload power. From Amazon's billion-dollar Susquehanna deal to Three Mile Island's resurrection, Big Tech is discovering what nuclear advocates have long known: that when you need reliable electricity around the clock, few other generation sources compare. Nelson maps the new nuclear battlefield where Chinese reactors scale up to 1,700 megawatts, European phase-outs crumble, and Western teams scramble to assemble the talent and capital needed to compete.

This week, we talk solar power—a long overdue topic on Decouple. In the past, guests have often been critical of the value of renewables on grids without extensive storage, and of the quality of jobs that politicians often claim when justifying renewables programs. Today, however, we drop preconceptions and get to the nuts and bolts. My guest is Seaver Wang, director of the Climate and Energy Research Program at The Breakthrough Institute. Despite is imperfections, the solar power has a remarkable story, from its technological origins, to its dramatic cost reductions in the last decade, to the sheer scale of new capacity being added in places like China. We cover these topics and more in this episode: the Solar Masterclass.

Watch now on YouTube.

We talk about

• Historical roots and evolution of solar technology

• Impact of the German Energiewende and feed-in tariffs

• China's rise to dominance in solar manufacturing

• Energy-intensive production processes of polysilicon

• Controversy over Uyghur forced labor in Xinjiang

• Solar’s lifecycle emissions and environmental impacts

• Dramatic cost reductions and economies of scale

• Limitations and misconceptions in distributed solar

• Future integration with battery storage

• Role of geopolitical and ethical issues in solar supply chains

We have an unusual episode today. One, because of its length (1 hour 40 minutes), and two, because I’m the guest. Joined by Aidan Morrison as acting host, I talk about a topic of intense interest to me: the Darlington SMR project in Ontario, Canada. I’ve been critical of this SMR project, which recently received its final investment decision, by calling for a pivot to CANDU reactors at the site.

I use this episode to break down all my reasons for being critical, and to concede ground to this bold SMR project where earned. This is not the first place I’ve shared my reasoning (media interview here, LinkedIn post there), but it is the most in-depth.

If you have time to listen to the full thing, I promise you will leave quite knowledgeable about the ambitious and capable Ontario nuclear sector, which I’ve studied and engaged with for years.

Prompting this episode was the OPG’s final investment decision on the SMR and the revelation of its eye-watering cost estimates. I break down the $4.5 billion price tag for the first unit, the expected learning that will take place, and share why this represents not just a technical and economic challenge, but a strategic mistake that could undermine Canada’s competitive advantage in nuclear power. From the massive excavation challenges of burying a reactor ten stories underground to the national security risks of abandoning proven CANDU technology for American designs, I hope to share some of the hard truths behind the SMR hype.

Read extended shownotes on Substack.

Watch now on YouTube.

This week, we return to nuclear power. Specifically, nuclear construction and “learning curves.” It is intuitive that doing something over and over makes you better at it. In industry, this means driving down costs and timelines and boosting efficiencies. In many industries, the truth of learning curves is readily apparent. However, in Western nuclear construction it has been largely absent for decades. Robbie Stewart, CTO of Alva Energy, joins me to dissect why the nuclear industry struggles with what other industries take for granted, and highlight a few cases in nuclear that managed to buck this trend. From France's standardized reactor fleet to China's recent AP1000 acceleration, we explore the prerequisites for nuclear construction learning and why it takes more than just good engineering.

We discuss:

• Wright's Law and its application (or misapplication) to nuclear construction

• Why nuclear is fundamentally different from factory-floor manufacturing

• The three categories of nuclear learning: fixing mismanagement, technology insertion, and construction optimization

• Statistical analysis of what drives successful learning rates in nuclear programs

• France's P4 series and South Korea's OPR-1000 as learning success stories

• China's dramatic improvements in AP1000 construction times through supply chain mastery

• The critical role of integrated project management and utility ownership

• Prerequisites for learning: standardized design, sequential builds, and institutional commitment

• Why inter-site learning is harder than intra-site learning

• The developer model as a potential solution for geographic learning constraints

• • Ontario's SMR program as a test case for modern nuclear learning
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Read extended shownotes on Substack

This week, I’m joined by Kyle Chan, author of the recent NYTimes Op-Ed titled "In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant." Exploring the intense competitive pressures of Chinese “involution capitalism” and America’s fixation on shareholder returns, we discuss America’s waning relevance in global technology and manufacturing, and how critical choices made now could shape the economic and geopolitical landscape for decades.

Chan is a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, adjunct researcher at the RAND Corporation, and the author of High Capacity.

This week, I’m joined by Patrick McGee, a journalist and author of Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. I recommended this book on LinkedIn as a MUST READ, and stand by it.

Apple in China is an in-depth corporate history which examines one of the most important symbioses in economic history. It explains Apple's meteoric rise in market capitalization/revenue, as well as China's newfound dominance in precision manufacturing. McGee argues convincingly that neither outcome would have happened without this relationship.

To back up this extraordinary claim, McGee closely maps how Apple systematically sent top engineers from around the world to train up hundreds of factories in China, pressed for demanding specifications at “ridiculously high yield,” and invested sums directly into China that made the post-WW2 Marshall Plan look small. The result? China now leads in 57 of 64 critical technologies, as measured by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, dominating everything from smartphones to electric vehicles.

As Trump threatens iPhone-specific tariffs and Tim Cook promises impossible reshoring timelines, Apple finds itself captured by the very system it helped create. Having accidentally armed its greatest competitor, there is no clear pathway for the U.S. to regain the lead it helped China take.

Find transcripts, extended shownotes, and more on our Substack.

Last week, U.S. President Trump signed four executive orders to accelerate nuclear power deployment:

1. Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security

2. Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base

3. Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

4. Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy

To help us understand the implications of these executive orders, I was joined by Thomas Hochman, director of infrastructure policy at the Foundation for American Innovation. We discuss the policy shifts needed to bridge political divides and streamline regulation as the U.S. grapples with rising energy demands driven by artificial intelligence and national security concerns. Are these executive orders enough? Is America’s nuclear resurgence is feasible, or merely rhetorical, amidst a competitive global landscape dominated by China and Russia?

This week, we look beyond the physical infrastructure supporting our lives to the owners taking over that infrastructure: asset managers. Brett Christophers, an author, professor, and economic geographer at Uppsala University in Sweden, joins me to explore the troubling transformation of infrastructure ownership in today's economy. From housing to energy to water, massive asset management firms like Blackstone and Brookfield have positioned themselves more and more between citizens and essential services, extracting wealth while taking minimal risk. Christophers explains how this shift from public to private control has reshaped our relationship with everyday infrastructure, particularly as we attempt to transform our energy supplies. He argues that the profit-driven approach of these financial giants is at odds with the public good, creating a system where even as things like renewable technology get cheaper, their deployment slows due to insufficient returns for investors.