Atomic Insights

Atomic Show #350 – Dr. Shannon Bragg-Sitton, Associate Laboratory Director, Energy & Environment Science & Technology, INL

Rod Adams — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 15:28:46 GMT

The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is best known for its nuclear engineering and pioneering reactor testing programs. Somewhat lesser known is the Lab’s cutting edge research in all other energy sources including wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, biomass and batteries. The Energy and Environment, Science & Technology (EES&T) Directorate, one of five directorates at the Lab, focuses ...read more

Potential next step after demonstrating a reactor under DOE authorization

Rod Adams — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 11:26:16 GMT

Deployable Energy leaders show off their Unity micro-reactor The Reactor Pilot Program (RPP) has been a rousing success. The group of four reactor criticalities achieved during the early phases of the RPP mark a major step forward in the process of designing, developing, testing, iterating, refining and licensing new types of nuclear fission power plants that have not yet become commercially ...read more

Atomic Show #349 – Josh Gillespie, COO National Reactor Innovation Center (NRIC)

Rod Adams — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:20:17 GMT

Idaho National Laboratory (INL) was born in 1949 as the National Reactor Testing Station after the Atomic Energy Commission decided they needed a place to test controlled nuclear fission power systems. Before being taken over by the AEC, the land was controlled and used by the U.S. Navy to test refurbished weapons , up to and including the 16″ guns carried by battleships. After a five decade ...read more

Atomic Show #348 – Abdalla Abou-Jaoude MARVEL Program Lead

Rod Adams — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 22:19:19 GMT

MARVEL, a creative acronym meaning Microreactor Applications Research Validation and EvaLuation , is a trail blazing reactor development program designed to help the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and the nuclear industry remember how to build and operate small nuclear reactors for testing and demonstration. The program was initiated in 2020 and has created many opportunities to learn and improve ...read more

Celebrating the arrival of the Golden Era of Nuclear Power

Rod Adams — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 16:26:29 GMT

The dawn of the Golden Era of Nuclear Power in the United States was celebrated on June 25, 2026 with music, lights and inspirational speeches. A crowd of several thousand people at Idaho Falls’s Mountain America Center included nuclear professionals from the Idaho National Lab, representatives from the Department of Energy, local dignitaries and entrepreneurs. Each of the speakers chose ...read more

Atomic Show #347 – Dr. Jeff Waksman, Project Pele and Project Janus

Rod Adams — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 10:25:24 GMT

The U.S. military has a strong and growing interest in using small and micro nuclear reactors as a means of reducing logistics challenges and improving operational resilience. They like nuclear reactors for their ability to operate independently of the grid for years without needing any new fuel. Almost as important is their ability to be designed to retain byproducts and reduce heat signatures for ...read more

Atomic Show #346 – Greg Piefer, CEO and Founder, Shine Technologies

Rod Adams — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:44:10 GMT

Shine Technologies is a unique nuclear fusion company. The conventional path for nuclear fusion projects is to raise and spend billions of dollars and decades of research and development in efforts to successfully find a path over, around or through the technical barriers that have prevented nuclear fusion from becoming a large scale energy production source. Until relatively recently, that ...read more

Atomic Show #345 – Bobby Gallagher, CEO Deployable Energy

Rod Adams — Mon, 18 May 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Deployable Energy is a young company with a guiding principle. They believe that nuclear energy should be a product, not a project. Founded in 2025 after a period of intensive study and design work, the company has developed a product branded as the Unity Nuclear Battery (UNB ). It’s a 1 MWe (3 MWth) micro reactor whose general features arise from a unique combination of nuclear fuel, reactor ...read more

Atomic Show #344 – Jarret Adams, Founder Full On Communications

Rod Adams — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:33:48 GMT

There are few industries in the world that have a greater need for skilled communications than the nuclear industry. It’s a challenging technology to understand and to explain to those who are not really interested in the nitty gritty details. There is a significant portion of the industry that believes in silently going about its tasks, partly because there are so many parts of the field that ...read more

Atomic Show #343 – Yasir Arafat, CTO Aalo Atomics

Rod Adams — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:07:27 GMT

Aalo Atomics is a three year old company that is focused on designing, manufacturing and deploying nuclear reactors. Their stated goal is to achieve an electricity production cost of less than $0.03 (3 cents) per kilowatt hour. It’s moving fast. It built a 40,000 ft² pilot scale manufacturing plant in Austin, TX in just one year. It plans to achieve initial criticality for Aalo-X, its ...read more

Atomic Show #342 – Christo Liebenberg, President, LIS Technologies

Rod Adams — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 22:42:50 GMT

LIS Technologies (LIST) is a young company with deep historical roots. CRISLA (Condensation Repression Isotope Selective Laser Activation), its laser isotope separation concept was developed and tested during the late 1980s and early 1990s under the leadership of Dr. Jeff Eerkens. Unfortunately, the path towards commercializing the technology hit a multi-decade detour as the result of terrible timing ...read more

Atomic Show #341 – Ho Nieh, Chairman U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Rod Adams — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 10:41:21 GMT

Ho Nieh, Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission , visited the Atomic Show for a wide ranging discussion about the agency, its role in enabling the safe use of nuclear energy, the importance of its mission to the energy future of the United States, the benefits of having organization led by a five person commission of decision makers and the ways in which the NRC is evolving to better serve ...read more

Atomic Show #340 – Zion Lights, Author of “Energy is Life”

Rod Adams — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 12:59:33 GMT

Energy is Life begins with an alternative timeline – Zion Lights describes what her life would be like if her parents had not made the decision to emigrate from their village in India to become factor workers in the burgeoning Manchester manufacturing area before she was born. It’s a sobering and enlightening depiction of the daily struggle for sustenance and survival in a place that ...read more

Atomic Show #339 – Greyson Buckingham, CEO Disa Technologies

Rod Adams — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 10:52:18 GMT

Abandoned uranium mine waste has been a big deal for decades, but almost no one had an inkling about what we should do to solve the problem. The scale of the challenge is huge, with about 75 million tons spread over more than 10,000 sites, nearly all of which are in western states and Native American sovereign nations. The Navaho Nation is the jurisdiction with the biggest burden – about 40% of the ...read more

Atomic Show #338 – Craig Bealmear, CFO Oklo

Rod Adams — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 10:56:17 GMT

Oklo is rapidly becoming a household name, at least among households with members who pay attention to energy industry developments and/or the headliners in the financial press. Oklo is in the process of designing and permitting a family of small modular reactors that it plans to own and operate to produce electricity, heat and isotopes that it will sell to its end customers under long term power ...read more