The State of the Atom (2025)

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.