The Atomic Exchange Podcast

In Episode 87 of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, Dr. Goran Calic and Jennifer Ward trade the things about AI that have surprised them most. Jen shares uses she didn’t see coming, from beehive monitoring that detects hornets by wing sound to OpenAI’s claimed proof on the Navier-Stokes equations and the questions it raises about credit. Dr. Calic digs into why public opposition to AI data centers now rivals, and in some surveys exceeds, opposition to nuclear plants, why AI adoption at work is lower than expected, and why mass layoffs haven’t materialized. They also debate whether AI-generated content should be labeled, and whether affirming chatbots will weed themselves out through competition.

In Episode 86 of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, Dr. Goran Calic and Jennifer Ward sit down with Kyle Faller, co-founder and CEO of Intelline, a Waterloo startup building modular linear engines that generate electricity. Kyle explains how the opposed-piston, crankshaft-free design reaches over 50 percent thermal efficiency, runs on multiple fuels including diesel, natural gas, methanol, and hydrogen, and scales from 50 kilowatt modules to two-megawatt containers. They discuss use cases from data centers facing generator backlogs to mining trucks and locomotives, Intelline’s pay-for-power model, and how it could compete with Ontario grid pricing.Website: https://www.intelline.ca/

In Episode 85 of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, Dr. Goran Calic and Jennifer Ward break down SpaceX’s 14th Starship flight, which delivered working version three Starlink satellites into orbit and shifted Starship from speculative to operational. They explain why reusability is so hard, from the extreme heat of re-entry to the engineering behind the heat shield, and recount the live drama when a booster engine failed and the mission was nearly aborted before the team pushed on to orbit. They discuss what cheaper, higher-capacity launches could mean for science and commercial activity in space, and weigh the environmental costs of frequent launches and satellite de-orbiting against the benefits of innovation, with a focus on making sure those costs are accounted for fairly.

In Episode 84 of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, co-host Jennifer Ward sits down with Karine Glenn, Director of Regulatory Affairs at the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, to explain what nuclear waste actually looks like and how Canada plans to manage it for the next million years. Karine breaks down the four classes of radioactive waste, why facilities store fuel in massive welded steel and copper containers, and the layered "defense in depth" approach behind Canada's deep geological repository. They discuss how the site in Ignace, Ontario was selected through a voluntary community process, what the decades-long timeline looks like, and why every single fuel bundle in Canada is tracked and accounted for.

In Episode 83 of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, Dr. Goran Calic and Jennifer Ward examine how media coverage of nuclear accidents compares to coal and hydroelectric disasters, from Fukushima's muted domestic reporting to the largely forgotten Banqiao Dam failure that killed hundreds of thousands. They dig into surprising material and safety statistics, including why solar requires more concrete than nuclear and how "dragon king" events skew our understanding of energy risk. Drawing on Paul Slovic's landmark research on risk perception, they explore why nuclear sits in the most feared category of any hazard, with public perception diverging from expert assessment by a factor of 10,000.