In this episode, NENSC Co-Chair Daniel Poneman sits down with the Honorable Dan Brouillette, the 15th U.S. Secretary of Energy. Brouillette’s path into the field was anything but conventional — a Louisiana pipeline welder and Army tank commander who rose to lead the U.S. Department of Energy. He explains why the Department is really a national-security agency, and how the Nuclear Fuel Working Group he helped lead exposed America’s dependence on Russian enriched uranium and set the course for rebuilding domestic enrichment and a HALEU supply from essentially zero.
He makes the affirmative case that nuclear is the answer to surging AI-driven electricity demand, argues the United States must win the global reactor-export race against Russia and China, and returns throughout to a single conviction: fixing the fuel cycle is the most urgent task, and the time to do it is now.
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