Atomically Speaking, the Nuclear Energy and National Security Coalition's Official Podcast

In this episode, NENSC Co-Chair Daniel Poneman sits down with Dr. Richard Meserve — former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and one of the rare figures who is both a physicist and a lawyer — for a conversation on what it will actually take to rebuild American nuclear leadership. Meserve traces his unlikely path into the field — a condensed-matter physicist pulled into nuclear by the Three Mile Island accident — and makes the case that the central obstacle to a U.S. comeback is economic: pilot plants will get built, but scaling demands an order book large enough to justify the factories, supply chains, and workforce that real competitiveness requires. He explains why ceding the export market to Russia and China carries genuine national-security costs, how risk-informed regulation and the NRC's global standing can become an American advantage abroad, and why — drawing on his years advising Japan after Fukushima — restoring public and investor confidence matters as much as any technology.

In this episode, NENSC Co-Chair Daniel Poneman sits down with Dr. Siegfried "Sig" Hecker — the fifth director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and one of the world's foremost authorities on plutonium — for a wide-ranging conversation that spans his arc from a European wartime childhood to the helm of America's premier weapons laboratory. Hecker reflects on the pioneering U.S.–Russia lab-to-lab cooperation he later chronicled in Doomed to Cooperate — securing nuclear materials in the closed Soviet weapons cities after the collapse — along with the end of nuclear testing, the birth of science-based stockpile stewardship, and the live debates over resuming testing and recovering the energy value locked in excess plutonium and used fuel. Drawing on seven trips to North Korea and years assessing Iran, he closes on the conviction at the heart of his career: that nuclear technology can do enormous good and catastrophic harm, and that cooperation is the only way to secure the best of it while avoiding the worst.

In this episode, NENSC Co-Chair Daniel Poneman sits down with Johney Green — Director of Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) and President and CEO of Battelle Savannah River Alliance — for a conversation on the part of the nuclear enterprise most people never see: what happens to nuclear material after it comes out of a reactor, and why that determines how far the nuclear renaissance can go. Green explains SRNL's unique niche as the government's deepest bench on tritium, uranium, plutonium, and separations chemistry, untangles excess weapons plutonium from the roughly 94,000 tons of used commercial fuel, and describes what restarting H-Canyon and HB-Line would mean for a domestic advanced-reactor fuel supply and for breaking China's chokehold on critical materials. He also makes the case for putting AI, automation, and robotics to work on nuclear materials handling, where the hot-cell technology is decades old and the opportunity is enormous.

In this episode, NENSC Co-Chair Daniel Poneman sits down with Congressman Chuck Fleischmann — Chairman of the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, one of Capitol Hill's most influential voices on nuclear energy, and, in his spare time, the novelist behind Once Upon an Empire. Representing the district that's home to Oak Ridge and Y-12, Fleischmann talks about turning nuclear ambition into real deployment, why securing a domestic fuel supply has to be a priority, what it takes to move from one-off demonstrations to a repeatable fleet, and how bipartisan dealmaking still gets things done in a divided Congress. A practical, optimistic look at the appropriations and alliances that will decide whether America regains its nuclear leadership.

In this episode, NENSC Co-Chair Daniel Poneman sits down with James P. Danly — Deputy Secretary of Energy, former FERC Commissioner, and Army veteran — for a conversation on why a reliable grid is a national security asset and what it will take to rebuild American nuclear capability from the ground up. Danly discusses how DOE is implementing the nuclear executive orders, the role of the Reactor Pilot Program in moving first-of-a-kind reactors from paper to operation, why restoring domestic uranium enrichment matters for everything from commercial markets to naval fuel and the deterrent, and how the United States can become the preferred nuclear partner for countries choosing between American technology and offers from Russia and China. It's a direct look at the fuel cycle, the National Labs, and the concrete results that will tell us America has regained its nuclear leadership.