In the 25th‑episode milestone of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, co‑hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous set aside reactor talk to focus on something different: each other. Michael kicks things off fresh from a week in Cancun, weighing beachside bliss against the itch to keep emailing drafts, while Goran unpacks why an off‑season, high‑fixed‑cost resort can feel five‑star on a three‑star budget. From there the episode gets a bit personal, with Goran and Michael trading two‑truths‑and‑a‑lie, sharing music tastes, pet peeves, and the meanings behind their names. They recount how a stab‑wound hospital visit and a university Christian club shaped their parents’ love stories, revisit the best and worst advice they’ve ever heard, and reminisce on some of their best decisions and their biggest regrets. Tune in for a candid, funny, slightly nostalgic detour before the next reactor deep dive.

In the 24th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous open with a summer catch-up: Goran’s solo Tesla trek from Dundas to Ottawa, complete with full-self-driving lane changes and meditative highway moments, and Michael’s impending family hop to Cancún. A light detour into European favourites follows, where Vienna’s café culture, London’s imperial streetscapes, and France’s sun-drenched south square off against under-whelming Greek ruins and the question of whether ancient monuments should be fully rebuilt or left as evocative rubble. The episode then pivots to another segment of Good Science vs. Bad Science target, a Frontiers in Environmental Economics paper that labels nuclear “an impediment to climate mitigation.” Point by point, the hosts dismantle claims that reactors are uninsurable, uneconomic and fundamentally incompatible with renewables, citing real-world capacity factors, lifetime-extension data and grid-price comparisons between France and Germany. Along the way they spotlight how cherry-picked construction timelines, hand-waved system-costs and “so-called” digs at small modular reactors slip past peer review, and why bad scholarship can still sway policymakers and AI training data alike. A brisk reminder that evidence, not ideology, should guide the energy transition and that sometimes the worst papers make the best teaching moments.

In the 23rd installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous begin by wading into the unexpected torrent of criticism on their recent Conversation article, examining everything from disclosure-doubts to misread safety statistics, and reflecting on when and how to engage with online pushback. They then turn to Ontario’s summer heat wave, where demand has surged to within two gigawatts of the province’s all-time peak, wind is running below 20 percent of capacity and solar covers barely one percent, forcing gas plants into four-times-their-forecast output. What would it really take to replace those peakers with storage or faster nuclear builds? Finally, they probe a SemiAnalysis warning that AI training data centres are drawing full-reactor-scale power and flipping from full load to near zero in milliseconds, threatening grid synchronization unless hardware and software fixes arrive. Tune in for a candid conversation on criticism, capacity and the next frontier of power-grid risk.