Brian Gitt, the Business Development lead at Oklo, visited the Atomic Show to describe his employer’s business model and current prospects. Oklo is a micro rector and fuel recycling company with an expansive vision for becoming a competitive clean energy supplier. It plans to provide heat and/or electricity as a service from a fleet of smaller manufactured reactors that it owns, operates and maintains. Oklo recently became a public company through a SPAC merger with AltC, a special purpose acquisition company led by Sam Altman, a venture capital investor and the founder and CEO at OpenAI. Oklo ..read more

Atomic Canyon is a six month old company that is developing AI tools to improve the efficiency of routine tasks associated with developing, licensing, building, owning and operating nuclear plants. Their first product, called Neutron, uses AI to modernize searching the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s 52 million page collection of publicly available documents that are currently accessible through the somewhat cumbersome Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS). Trey Lauderdale, Atomic Canyon’s founder, spent the first 15 years of his career in the digital medicine field. At an ..read more

Emmet Penney is an unlikely, but effective pronuclear advocate. He earned his degrees in fine arts and great books and worked for several years as a professional poet – along with working in a bookstore as a way to keep paying the bills. He gradually transitioned from poetry into writing thoughtful essays on a variety of topics. One of those pieces caught the attention of Michael Shellenberger and began the process of converting Emmet into a passionate, erudite pronuclear advocate who reads voraciously about all topics that interest him. That attribute has given him a remarkable depth of under ..read more

Doug Sandridge, Oil and Gas Executive for Nuclear Doug Sandridge is a lifelong oil and gas guy whose father was a geological engineer. While he was growing up, Doug lived a significant portion of his life overseas as his father’s job took the family to several different locations. When it was time to go to college, Doug returned to the United State to attend the University of Oklahoma. He took a brief detour into architecture, but by his second year he shifted his focus to engineering and petroleum-related topics. During the past 40 years, he has pursued a career as a land man, which requires ..read more

James Krellenstein is a physicist, consultant and nuclear energy historian. He is currently employed as a senior advisor to Global Health Strategies. He started up their decarbonization practice with an emphasis on nuclear energy along with renewables. He was the lead author on GEH’s report on ways to reduce global dependence on Russia for necessary supplies of enriched uranium. He had the unusual and fortunate experience of growing up with a father who was a nuclear engineer turned nuclear financial specialist and a grandfather who ran a custom manufacturing machinery production facility. Bot ..read more

Stefano Buono is a physicist and the successful founder of Advanced Accelerator Applications, a multibillion dollar company that pioneered the use of several therapeutic medical isotopes. After making several people very rich, including himself, he sold the medical isotope business and returned to his early 1990s field of study – nuclear fission reactors using molten lead as a coolant. About two years ago, Stefano Buono and some of his colleagues and associates founded newcleo, a company with Italian roots based in the UK. Last year, newcleo ran two successful rounds of start-up funding that n ..read more

Mary Jo Rogers is a trained clinical psychologist who developed her interest workforce safety cultures and leadership in the nuclear power sector while consulting and working for ComEd (later Exelon). At the time she began her work, ComEd was a perennially under-performing utility with new leaders that were committed to turning it into the best nuclear plant operator in the United States. That leadership team included Oliver Kingsley and Chris Crane at the operating level and John Rowe at the corporate level. Dr. Rogers learned many lessons in leadership, and safety culture and observed the wa ..read more

In the past few years, there has been a strong revival of interest in using nuclear fission energy to power space travel and planetary exploration. There have also been new developments in radioisotope thermal generators that will make them more widely available with greater energy density. Though there has been interest in using nuclear energy in space since the earliest days of the Atomic Age, financial support has waxed and waned with changing program priorities. George Bush was president the last time there was this much investment in space nuclear power. Members of the US Nuclear Industry ..read more

Matt Huber is a professor of geography at Syracuse University. He writes about energy, economies and the way that energy sources have influenced modern societies and economies. One of his first books was Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (2013) which is very briefly described as follows: Looking beyond the usual culprits, “Lifeblood” finds a deeper and more complex explanation in everyday practices of oil consumption in American culture. Matthew Huber, associate professor of geography and the environment, uses oil to retell American political history from the triumph of New D ..read more

Alyssa Hayes is a leader in the pro-nuclear movement. She is a PhD candidate in nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee and she has been interested in policy making and politics since interning with her local representative when she was 14 years old. She was involved in the successful efforts to save four nuclear power stations (Clinton, Quad Cities, Byron and Dresden) in Illinois and she was recently named the Generation Atomic Volunteer of the Month. She visited the Atomic Show to share her passion for nuclear energy, her firm understanding of its importance in addressing climate ..read more