ATOMICALLY SPEAKING | The Physicist and the Lawyer: A Conversation with Dr. Richard Meserve
In this episode, NENSC Co-Chair Daniel Poneman sits down with Dr. Richard Meserve — former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and one of the rare figures who is both a physicist and a lawyer — for a conversation on what it will actually take to rebuild American nuclear leadership. Meserve traces his unlikely path into the field — a condensed-matter physicist pulled into nuclear by the Three Mile Island accident — and makes the case that the central obstacle to a U.S. comeback is economic: pilot plants will get built, but scaling demands an order book large enough to justify the factories, supply chains, and workforce that real competitiveness requires.
He explains why ceding the export market to Russia and China carries genuine national-security costs, how risk-informed regulation and the NRC's global standing can become an American advantage abroad, and why — drawing on his years advising Japan after Fukushima — restoring public and investor confidence matters as much as any technology.