Decouple

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

Grant Isaac, President and COO of Cameco, joins Decouple to explain why uranium behaves unlike any other commodity. With essentially zero fundamental in-year demand, a spot market that reports prices rather than discovering them, and a long-term contracting structure that ties producers directly to the utilities using the fuel, uranium operates by rules that confound anyone who approaches it through the lens of oil, gas, or base metals. Grant walks through Cameco's history as an integrated nuclear fuel company spanning mining, milling, conversion, and now fuel fabrication and reactor services through its Westinghouse partnership, explaining why that vertical integration reflects genuine customer intimacy rather than financial engineering.
The conversation covers the full sweep of uranium market cycles from the post-Atoms for Peace inventory buildup through the post-Fukushima bear market, Cameco's decision to curtail 70% of its production rather than sell into a floor, and what is structurally different about the current cycle. The historic secondary supply buffer that held prices down for 30 years is gone, Kazakhstan has learned the lesson that producing more into a weak market destroys national asset value, and geopolitical fragmentation is bifurcating what was once a seamlessly globalized commodity into distinct western and non-western supply chains. Grant argues that the long-term price signal, steady rather than saw-toothing, reflects a more durable demand base than any previous cycle.
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

Nuclear construction once hit timelines that today sound implausible. First of a kind reactors completed in under four years, delivered at lower cost than mature designs, and executed with a level of coordination that the modern industry has largely lost. This episode uses the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR) as a lens to examine that moment, not as a historical curiosity, but as a proof point that the constraints shaping today’s projects are not inherent to nuclear technology. The focus is on the underlying conditions that made that outcome possible, disciplined design completion before construction, tight integration between utility, vendor, and supply chain, and a development culture oriented around execution rather than iteration.
Amid growing frustration in Washington with the pace and performance of Westinghouse, there are signs the Trump administration is at least considering whether the ABWR deserves a second look. That tension opens a broader question explored in this episode: whether the industry’s problem is technological, or organizational. The discussion examines how fragmented ownership, incomplete designs, and weak competitive pressure have reshaped project delivery, and what might change if utilities reclaimed the role of developer. It closes by asking whether the path forward lies in new designs, or in rediscovering how to actually build the ones that already worked.
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 episode of Decouple, Chris Keefer is joined once again by Michael Seely of the Atomic Blender to explore nuclear fuel reprocessing and the promise of unlocking vastly more energy from existing nuclear waste. We deep dive how processes like PUREX attempt to separate and reuse valuable materials like uranium and plutonium. Using real-world examples such as France’s La Hague reprocessing plant and the EBR-2 sodium fast reactor experiment, the episode situates reprocessing within its historical roots in perceptions of uranium scarcity and energy security.
While reprocessing is technically impressive, it is complex, expensive, and delivers only modest gains when used with today’s reactor fleet. Keefer and Seely unpack why issues like fuel degradation, handling challenges, and economics limit its impact, and what would need to change, such as the deployment of economic fast reactors, for reprocessing to live up to is most seductive narratives. 
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

In this episode we are joined by Seaver Wang to discuss the physical foundations of China’s industrial dominance in solar, batteries, electric vehicles, semiconductors, rare earth magnets, and aluminum. We examine how these sectors are presented as evidence by climate activists that clean technology is delivering a new kind of green industrial superpower and interrogate that claim at the level of production. 
What sits upstream of the electrotech stack is not a network of modular green technologies, but large scale industrial systems that turn electricity into materials. These products are best understood as “congealed electricity.” In China industrial electricity, in particular, is still predominantly coal fired, often anchored in captive, mine-mouth coal plants tied directly to industrial clusters producing polysilicon, graphite, metals, and intermediates. 
These are not flexible, marginal power sources that can be easily displaced by wind and solar but rather capital intensive systems built for continuous output, with emissions embedded deep in the supply chain and largely invisible at the point of use.
The disconnect between hope and physical reality sustains a form of greenwashing that many climate commentators continue to reproduce, despite the underlying industrial system pointing in a very different direction.
 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