Building an Engine That Could Beat the Grid (ft. Kyle Faller)

In Episode 88 of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, Dr. Goran Calic and Jennifer Ward look at “Public Attitudes and Sustainability Perceptions Towards Nuclear Power: Evidence from Chinese Social Media Data Mining,” a study analyzing roughly 85,000 posts from 2023. They discuss whether social media is a reliable way to gauge public opinion, why posting spiked when Japan began releasing Fukushima water, and why women tend to be more opposed to nuclear than men. They also explore how people perceive risk, why attitudes toward technology form as bundles rather than single attributes, and where the study falls short of telling us anything new.

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.

In Episode 82 of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, Dr. Goran Calic and Jennifer Ward examine how AI affects each generation differently, from Gen Alpha toddlers using AI tutors to seniors relying on assistive technology for independent living. They debate whether AI-powered education helps or hinders critical thinking, why teenagers confiding in endlessly agreeable chatbots raises real concerns, and how AI is upending university teaching and research. They also discuss AI voice cloning scams, including personal stories of falling victim to fake e-commerce sites, before closing on AI's genuine promise for helping older adults age independently at home.

In Episode 81 of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, Dr. Goran Calic and Jennifer Ward go head to head in a red team, blue team debate over whether SpaceX deserves its two trillion dollar valuation. Goran argues the pro side: launch dominance, technical breakthroughs like rocket reusability and Starship's catch system, Starlink's redundant network, and the public benefit of cheaper access to space. Jenn makes the case against: property damage lawsuits from sonic booms in Boca Chica, a workplace injury rate six times the industry average, worker deaths, and unpaid contractors. They close with an open discussion on whether SpaceX's pace of innovation is worth the trade-offs, and what regulation, if any, should look like.

In this Good Science, Bad Science episode of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, Dr. Goran Calic and Jennifer Ward examine "The Role of Nuclear Energy Base Load Demand in Capacity Expansion Planning for Low-Carbon Power Systems," a paper exploring how AI data centers' constant, always-on energy demand could reshape future nuclear buildout. They break down the paper's modeling of how nuclear penetration in Europe depends heavily on construction costs, comparing it against real-world reactor projects from France to China. The conversation dives into the hidden cost of renewable variability, including price cannibalization and the expensive complements needed to keep grids stable, and why these factors rarely show up in standard levelized cost of energy models.

In this Good Science, Bad Science episode of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, Dr. Goran Calic and Jennifer Ward examine "The Carbon Emissions of Writing and Illustrating Are Lower for AI Than for Humans," a Nature Scientific Reports paper claiming AI produces text and images with far lower carbon emissions than humans, sometimes by a factor of hundreds or thousands. Before diving in, they debate whether AI can ever replicate human creativity in music and art, and what separates a genuine artistic performance from something AI-generated. They break down the paper's methodology, its transparent data sharing, and where its assumptions, like GPU lifespan and model retraining frequency, might miss the mark.Click to view article.