Episode notes
For almost the whole of human history, wood was the main act. It was the fuel that cooked food and smelted iron, the material that framed every house and hull, and the first bulk commodity ever moved at scale over long distances. In this episode Chris Keefer talks with energy analyst Mark Nelson about a material we almost entirely take for granted, starting with a fact hiding in plain sight: the grasping hands, binocular vision, and colour sight that define us were all built by an ancestry lived in the trees. From there the conversation turns to why wood, of all the products of…
Podcast
Decouple
Dr. Chris Keefer · Tech & Science · English
There are technologies that decouple human well-being from its ecological impacts. There are politics that enable these technologies. Join me as I interview world experts to uncover hope in this time of planetary crisis.
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S32 · E10 · 13 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 24 min
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Fusion has spent nearly a century as the energy source of the future. In this episode, I’m joined by fusion scientist Gerrit Bruhaug to ask what has actually been achieved, what remains unsolved, and why progress has taken so much longer than the early pioneers expected. We start from first principles, how fusion differs from fission, why the Lawson criterion matters, and how magnetic and inertial confinement take radically different routes to the same goal. Gerrit provides an in-depth analysis of the National Ignition Facility’s breakthrough and why ignition is better understood as fusion’s…
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S32 · E9 · 6 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 26 min
Sunk Costs & Diminishing Returns of Iran's Nuclear Program w/ Farzan Sabet
Iran’s nuclear program is now more than seven decades old, stretching from the Shah’s ambitious Atoms for Peace-era plans to the Islamic Republic’s pursuit of enrichment, missile capability and nuclear latency. Iran historian Farzan Sabet joins Decouple to explain how energy development, techno-nationalism, the trauma of the Iran–Iraq War and a persistent sense of strategic isolation transformed a civilian nuclear project into an increasingly important national-security instrument.We trace the program through the Shah’s plans for 23,000MW of commercial nuclear power, the revolution, the AQ…
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23 Jul 2026 · 44 min
Ernie Moniz: Reflections on the JCPOA
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S32 · E6 · 16 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 30 min
Fission Impossible? Financing New Nuclear w/ Michael Seely
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S32 · E1 · 24 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 9 min
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S32 · E4 · 17 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 3 min
The Birth of America’s Nuclear Power Industry
James Krellenstein returns to take apart one of the most persistent myths in energy discourse: the idea that there was a golden age when nuclear power was cheaper than coal. The plants people point to, Oyster Creek, Dresden, Point Beach, Quad Cities, were cheap to the utilities that bought them, but they were not cheap to build. General Electric and Westinghouse sold them as fixed-price turnkey projects at a deliberate loss, eating roughly 1 billion in 1960s dollars, more than 10 billion adjusted for inflation, across about a dozen plants. This loss leader strategy paid off. Between 1962 and…
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S32 · E3 · 4 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 32 min
Limits to Growth of LLMs w/ David Helmer
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