Joyce Connery: I learned a lot about trust and about kind of emotional reactions. And it's not going to surprise you that emotions often outweigh reason. And so that flip in your stomach is your emotion versus your reasoning. Carolyn Ford: AI needs power, a lot of it around the clock. And the companies building it have stopped waiting for the utilities to figure that out. So they're calling nuclear. I should mention that nuclear makes my stomach clench. Chernobyl happened when I was in high school, and documentaries and miniseries keep the terror alive for me. My guest has spent more than 20 years on the other side of that fear. Joyce Connery is the owner of Connery Strategies, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council's Nuclear Energy Policy Initiative, and the former chair of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. Here's the tension: utilities think in decade-long rate cases; tech companies think in product cycles. Somewhere in the middle is a reactor. Joyce takes my fear seriously and she explains why it exists. But she started in Kazakhstan shutting down a reactor that could still make plutonium. So I asked her to take us from there to here. Joyce Connery: First, I should probably go back to how I got to Kazakhstan, because that's not a place that a lot of people visit. I kind of look at my career as paralleling what was going on in the world. I think that's true of everybody, that you have an idea of where your life is going to go, and then life takes over, events happen, and it influences what you do with the rest of your life. So I have always been interested in history and international relations. When I was in high school, I had never been on an airplane, I'd never gone anywhere or been exposed to the world, but I was fascinated by this. And I'm fairly old, so I was in high school in the '80s during the height of the Cold War. In 1987, one of my teachers was offering a trip to Russia. So I went home and said, "Mom, Dad, will you sign my permission slip to go on a field trip?" And they're like, "Where?" And I said, "You know, the Soviet Union." They were a little trepidatious at the time, but I had raised the money myself to go, and it was my first experience. And I think, kind of like your first true love, your first overseas experience kind of shapes what you think about the world. So I went to Russia, and I skated on Gorky Park in February when it was snowing, and there were people that were like us. They looked like us; they just didn't speak like us. So when I went to university, I was doing Soviet studies, Russian studies, studying Russian. During a semester study abroad, again shaped by timing, I landed in what was Leningrad. By the time I left, it was St. Petersburg because the Soviet Union had collapsed, right? So it was, "Oh my gosh, like this timing." Carolyn Ford: Wait, how long were you there? Massive change. Joyce Connery: I was only there for about a semester. But it happened to be that I left the day after the August coup in 1991, and then I came back after the changeover. And so, again, I had this Russian language background, and then I went to the Peace Corps. Because of my background, they sent me to Turkmenistan, which is also in the former Soviet Union. I was in one of the first groups there as this brand new country was trying to figure out what to do. That was '93 to '95, and then I went back to graduate school. I was thinking of doing something with refugees or international politics, and then the Department of Energy came and recruited on campus. They said they were looking for somebody to go and live in Kazakhstan to do nuclear non-proliferation export controls. I was very excited about that because, as a Peace Corps volunteer, you don't really get paid—it's a volunteer position—and this was the government saying, "Hey, we'll fly you over there and pay you to live there." I thought that was a good deal. They did it through Argonne National Lab, one of the national lab programs. Carolyn Ford: Right? Joyce Connery: So I went over for a year. Then Idaho National Lab—which at that point was Argonne West—was also doing work there, so they hired me on. This is why I wanted to get through the history of it, because it's interesting: I had gone there to do general non-proliferation and export control work. But after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine famously had nuclear weapons. There was a big push to have them return them to Russia so that there would be one nuclear power versus four. All of those countries did that with various degrees of repercussions. Of course, the situation in Ukraine brings that back to mind as they are being invaded by Russia having given up their nuclear weapons in the past. But Kazakhstan and some of these other countries had infrastructure for nuclear weapons. Senators Nunn and Lugar, a bipartisan duo, pushed to get legislation that would allow the United States to subsidize the protection and dismantlement of some of this infrastructure of the Soviet enterprise that was designed for nuclear weapons. In Kazakhstan, they had a small fast breeder nuclear reactor on the shores of the Caspian Sea. This reactor did a couple of things: it provided electricity for the town, provided process heat, and provided desalinization, basically converting seawater into potable water. Because of the type of reactor—it was a fast flux reactor—they were able to put blankets in it to create plutonium for the Soviet weapons program. So they had a lot of weapons-grade plutonium just sitting in Kazakhstan that was meant for the Soviet program but had never been taken out of the country. The United States supported Kazakhstan in repackaging that material with spent nuclear fuel and rehousing it into large casks. They moved them onto what was the Soviet test site in Kazakhstan and put it under IAEA seal. But they still had this reactor, and the reactor could still in theory produce plutonium. So Idaho National Lab hired me to help on the ground to permanently shut down this reactor so that it wouldn't produce plutonium anymore. We had this consortium where Idaho, Japan (which also had fast reactor technology), and the UK (which had a fast reactor in Dounreay, Scotland) were helping. We were working with the IAEA to develop a decommissioning plan and then to physically, permanently shut down this reactor. I was there in 1999. After a couple of years, I decided I was getting tired, so I talked to my sponsor and bought a plane ticket for September 12, 2001. Carolyn Ford: Oh my gosh. Joyce Connery: At my going away party, 9/11 happened. I continued to go to the airport with my ticket for a number of reasons, one being that I had a cat that I was trying to bring home, so it was a timing issue. Airspace was closed in the United States, but my ticket wasn't direct—there were no direct flights. Carolyn Ford: Heathrow or something? Joyce Connery: Frankfurt. I stayed in Frankfurt for a couple of days—just me, the cat, and all my luggage from having lived abroad for two years—and then I came back to the United States. At first, I didn't know what I was going to do. But as you can imagine, having a background in Russian, having worked on non-proliferation issues, and then 9/11 happening, there was a big push to look at issues of nuclear security and how to protect the homeland. There was a lot of concern at that point in time. 9/11 was a horrible, deadly attack, but it wasn't a nuclear attack or weapons of mass destruction. So I came back to the Department of Energy. Eventually, I became a federalized employee—an actual fed working for the federal government. For a number of years, I worked in that program bilaterally with Russia to protect nuclear material. We were concerned that that material, because they didn't have all the protections they could or should have had due to the economy at the time, could fall into the hands of terrorists or those who wished to use them for nefarious purposes. So we helped with material protection, control, and accounting of that material across Russia. At the end of the second Bush administration, I got a position as a Fed, not a political appointee, to work at the National Security Council under George W. Bush. I worked on issues regarding the IAEA, civil nuclear cooperation agreements, nuclear security, and that whole group of issues. After the election, I transitioned into the Obama administration doing a similar thing. Obama had a big focus on some of these issues. He moved very quickly into trying to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, though that didn't work. Obviously, there was the Iran issue, and the North Korea issue was on a lot of people's minds in non-proliferation. But he also had an effort to secure vulnerable nuclear materials worldwide. He gave a speech in Prague shortly after his inauguration and said that he was going to host a summit of heads of state within a year to talk about these issues. I got to the office that Monday and realized my job was to figure out how to do that. Google "how to throw a summit." My boss, Ambassador Holgate, was fantastic, and we put together a summit of 47 heads of state and three international organizations. We put together a work plan, and it was a tremendous amount of work. Obama also recognized that we had to have a civil piece to it as well. He wanted an effort to create a way to cooperate on nuclear energy. The flip side of nuclear weapons is the promise of nuclear energy and all the good things that come out of that, whether it's electricity or health impacts using radiological isotopes. Now we're using radiological isotopes to put rovers onto the Moon and Mars. He understood there was a civil component to it as well and pushed for that. Right after that, the Department of Energy asked me to come back, working for Deputy Secretary Poneman. We did a lot of work on nuclear because of my background. Then Fukushima happened. At that point in time, we were also trying to build some reactors in the United States at Summer and Vogtle. This was problematic for a number of reasons. The nuclear industry domestically was struggling a bit because it cost a lot of money to build a nuclear power plant. At the same time, we had just had the shale gas revolution, so the price of gas went down. Fukushima put a pause on nuclear power, certainly in Japan, and left the rest of the world thinking more closely about their relationship with nuclear power. Interestingly, I don't believe it had the devastating effects we thought it might have on the nuclear industry. Following that, we realized there wasn't anyone at the National Security Council specifically working on nuclear energy. So I was asked to go back to the National Security Council, reporting up through the National Security Advisor and the National Economic Advisor as Director for Nuclear Energy Policy. This time, my focus was to work with our nuclear companies and help them compete overseas. In addition to having a product they wanted to sell, it was harder to sell in the United States just because of the economics. Some new reactor companies were thinking about deploying small modular reactors overseas first. I worked on trade missions, getting the United States interagency to work together, creating a "Team USA" to support the nuclear industry as they went overseas to work with other countries. When we sell nuclear power overseas, it's a commercial engagement, but it's also a government-to-government engagement. You have to have a government-to-government agreement to do so, and it is an 80-year relationship between the United States and the country buying that plant. You're supporting design, build, and operations, supplying fuel, and supporting its longevity until it gets decommissioned. From a national security and international relations standpoint, that is good for the United States to sell overseas. Our competition at that point was Rosatom. The relationship between the US and Russia had been deteriorating. They have a very large, government-funded, government-run organization, Rosatom, that sells overseas and was making a lot of inroads with countries interested in developing nuclear power, posing major competition to the United States. Carolyn Ford: So it's important for the US to get into this business for money, but it's also a position of power to control these nuclear plants? Joyce Connery: Yeah, it's soft power and relationship building. Now, with pipeline politics and Russia being able to shut off the spigot of gas to Europe, energy independence becomes of keen interest to people. If Russia is building the plant and supplying the fuel, that's another way they can exert influence. It behooves us as a country to support our commercial industries overseas for soft power and economic purposes. For us, this sector is private, while for other countries, it's public. We are competing with vertically integrated, state-owned utilities, trying to piece together and support our commercial sector. I did that until about 2015. At that point, the President nominated me to be the Chair of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. It oversees the parts of the Department of Energy involved in nuclear weapons production during the Cold War and up to now, as well as the waste from the Manhattan Project legacy. I was confirmed by the Senate and spent about 10 years at the Defense Board. When Democrats were in power, I was the Chair; when we were out of power, I was a board member. We were a bipartisan commission whose job was kind of like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but without regulatory authority—we were oversight. We provided advice to the Secretary of Energy on safety concerns at defense facilities across the complex. Carolyn Ford: I'm not going to lie, nuclear still flips my stomach a little bit, so I don't want to... I only have an hour with you. When you decommissioned in Kazakhstan, was it an SMR (small modular reactor), or is it akin to that? Joyce Connery: It's not a small modular reactor; it's like an advanced reactor that we're looking at now. We had a prototype reactor like that on the grounds of Idaho National Lab. It's a different type of reactor. We have light-water reactors in the United States—that's the bread and butter. They are large light-water reactors, and basically, they use nuclear fission to boil water, create steam, and create energy. Carolyn Ford: Back to you getting into nuclear: like I said, it still flips my stomach to think about nuclear. I think about Chernobyl mostly, because that happened when I was in high school, and it's still scary to me. A couple of questions: one, during your last job helping get these nuclear deals in place, how did you guarantee that they wouldn't use them for nuclear weapons, or could you not? Joyce Connery: The US government has strict policies regarding agreements with other countries in terms of understanding how they are going to use these reactors. Most countries want a nuclear power reactor for nuclear power. There is concern, and we safeguard against countries turning around to make nuclear weapons, which is why we have the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency). We encourage countries we do deals with to be part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, join the IAEA, and adhere to international guidelines. We also place bilateral guidelines on them. Without a formal agreement—we call them a "123 Agreement" after Section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act—we cannot trade in nuclear technologies or components. Once that agreement is in place, it serves as the framework by which we can enter into commercial activities. There's a hurdle to go through, and exporting companies must obtain licenses from either the Commerce Department, Energy Department, or NRC to export. We always know what the end use will be. This is why it's important for us to be the ones selling the technology: we hold purchasing countries to a high non-proliferation standard, which reassures us, the citizens of that country, and the purchasing utility. If you're going to spend that much money, you want it to produce for your economy, and you don't want to become a pariah state. Carolyn Ford: So it would be hard for them to sneak one past us and start making nuclear weapons? Joyce Connery: It would be hard. As we've seen with Iran and other countries that took that road, when we detect misuse, we call them on it. We can curtail trade, or the IAEA can call them on it. It's in the international community's best interest to keep this for legitimate purposes. It isn't easy to divert. The paths to a nuclear weapon aren't vast: you need the material and the know-how. Getting the material is tricky. The uranium used in nuclear power plants isn't enriched to a point where you could directly use it in a nuclear weapon. Carolyn Ford: Running out of time, I want to address how nuclear has become mainstream for the populace. It's in the news all the time. I'm in Utah, and there's an effort right now by a private company to build around 900 small nuclear reactors on public ground. Regular people are hearing about nuclear a lot more. My theory is data centers, but let me ask you: why is the general populace hearing about nuclear a lot more these days? Joyce Connery: Data centers are part of the story, but it also used to be a very partisan issue. Conventional wisdom—and I associate with the Democratic Party as a Democratic appointee—was that Republicans liked nuclear and Democrats didn't. That's not really true. There was a knee-jerk correlation between being anti-nuclear weapon and anti-nuclear power. Regardless of the presidency, whether President Carter or President Bush, speeches were made concerning the proliferation aspects of nuclear power. Our experience with nuclear in the United States was very optimistic at the beginning, and we built a lot of nuclear power plants. People aren't aware—because we are always aware of accidents rather than the good parts—that about 19% of our electricity comes from nuclear power plants across the country. Carolyn Ford: Really? See, every time you say nuclear, my stomach turns. Joyce Connery: We have a tremendous safety record in the United States. You were going to ask me about getting a social work degree in 2023. I'll bring that up now. Partway through COVID, when I was a regular board member rather than the Chair, I went to school part-time to get a master's degree in social work from our local university. I wanted to do it because I like learning, I like the discipline, I'm involved in my community, and humans are complex machines. The social scientist in me, having been in this hard science world, saw connections there. For my practicum, I worked mostly with court-involved youth at risk. I learned a lot about trust and emotional reactions. It won't surprise you that emotions often outweigh reason. That flip in your stomach is your emotion versus your reasoning. People need trust. When you think about nuclear power, we've been inundated with the Homer Simpsons of the world, documentaries, and scary things. Carolyn Ford: I didn't realize 19% of our power came from nuclear. Joyce Connery: To buy into nuclear power, you have to trust that the people running the plants aren't Homer Simpson, that they are educated and have a safety culture, and you have to trust the regulating government. While there were instances where government actions eroded trust, in nuclear, we have decades of very strong regulatory support. It is the most regulated of all utilities. Like your reaction to Chernobyl, we have an outsized psyche reaction to bad things. Carolyn Ford: And nuclear weapons—when you say nuclear, it's Chernobyl or nuclear weapons. Joyce Connery: Accidents are rare, but we can all name them: Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island. In comparison, Three Mile Island wasn't really an accident; it was just very scary. When you think about oil and gas, you might reach back to Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon. Carolyn Ford: Yes. Joyce Connery: Because it happens so much, we've become callous to it. Gas explosions are very tangible—seeing towns disappear is terrifying. With nuclear, you can't see radiation, and you don't know a lot about it. Movies are made out of this. Humans often have a "dread risk bias," actively tending to avoid catastrophic things. That's logical, but they don't think about the actual probability of that thing happening. We go to extreme lengths to avoid things that can harm us, even though the actual chances are disproportionately small compared to our fear. It's like hiking when you're afraid of snakes: you're terrified the whole hike, but what are the chances a snake will bite you or that you'll even see one? Carolyn Ford: I live in rattlesnake country and hike in the desert all the time, and I've only been lucky enough to see a rattlesnake twice in my lifetime. Joyce Connery: Because people are so afraid, we've gone out of our way to say nuclear is safe, which acts almost like a trigger word. In the regulatory space, we are cautious about construction, containment, impact on others, and mitigating or dealing with consequences if things happen. It evolves based on the threat environment. It is very carefully thought out, unlike how other industries approach things. Why are we hearing about it now? Part of it is AI data centers, but climate change also creates massive electricity demand. Decarbonizing means driving electric cars, which requires electrification. That means getting off oil and gas. Nuclear is baseload and carbon-free. Solar and wind only get you so far because we lack the battery storage to keep them from being intermittent. Data centers need 24/7 electricity to run. Models show you must have nuclear to address carbon demands. Additionally, electricity demand has shot way up faster than expected. Big companies recognize their electricity needs are so great that they can't wait on utilities. So they are putting capital into nuclear in ways we haven't seen before—entering power purchasing agreements or investing in restarting Three Mile Island. It is being viewed as a supply chain for a data center rather than just a grid input. Carolyn Ford: We're going to take a quick break to hear from our sponsor, Owl Cyber Defense. When we come back, we'll get into big tech's nuclear shopping spree. This episode is sponsored by Owl Cyber Defense, a cybersecurity company delivering US-made data diode and cross-domain solutions trusted to protect sensitive government and commercial networks worldwide. Owl enables secure, near-instant collaboration across network boundaries. To learn more, visit owlcyberdefense.com. And we're back. I'm Carolyn Ford with Tech Transforms, here with Joyce Connery, owner of Connery Strategies and distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council's Nuclear Energy Policy Initiative. Microsoft is bringing Three Mile Island back online. Does it matter that customers are now tech companies instead of utilities? Joyce Connery: Yes, it changes who writes the checks, the timelines, risk tolerance, financial structures, and potentially the type of reactors being built. A utility looks at a decade-long rate case; a tech company looks at a product cycle. Tech companies need electricity quickly, requiring capital deployed early. That's why they are looking at retired plants—restarting an existing plant or uprating it is faster and cheaper, like leasing a building versus building from scratch. There's also a public policy conversation around delivery, grid capacity, and how ratepayer costs are managed. This trend has freed capital for new nuclear. The government is putting more time into nuclear than I've seen in my career, including using public lands to test reactors. Carolyn Ford: They're trying to do this in Utah, Joyce, and we don't want it! Joyce Connery: Repurposing lands that already had industrial activity, like national labs, makes sense to me because you're using existing assets to lower future costs. Small modular or advanced reactors can be built for smaller grids, are cheaper to replicate on assembly lines, or can be factory-manufactured and transported. Carolyn Ford: What about water resources, specifically in desert areas like Utah? Joyce Connery: It depends on the reactor type. Innovation campuses help explore technologies that don't necessarily need to be sited by an ocean. Tech money going into this provides capital to invest in these types of products. Carolyn Ford: Having spent decades worrying about nuclear safety, what do you ask first when new reactors are proposed? What should a CEO ask before regulators do? Joyce Connery: Every reactor must submit a safety analysis to the licensing authority. I'm comfortable with testing on lab campuses under Department of Energy safety envelopes. Public lands involve the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Using probabilistic risk assessments is fine, but reviewing different reactor types makes standardization more complex. Smaller reactors contain less material that could cause detrimental health effects. We know how to do safety; it's about putting the work in. Carolyn Ford: And a really good track record. I'm soothing myself right now. Joyce Connery: While Silicon Valley brings a "move fast and break things" mindset—which you don't want in nuclear—their tech can be applied as "AI for nuclear." Pairing nuclear physicists with tech experts allows modeling for better operational pictures inside reactors, bolstering safety cases. I don't see new reactor types causing a major incident that shuts down the industry, though some business designs will inevitably fail or be absorbed. What you cannot lose is the safety culture. Carolyn Ford: I want you to talk to me about that safety culture. We've talked about keeping nuclear reactors from melting down, but let's flip to AI for nuclear, because there's a cybersecurity component. How do you apply cybersecurity to nuclear reactors to keep bad guys out? Joyce Connery: Adversaries target easy underbellies, so we must ensure nuclear systems and surrounding critical infrastructure like water supplies are hardened. Nuclear moved slowly into digital instrumentation and control deliberately because cybersecurity must be treated as a safety function, not an IT compliance checkbox. A compromise affects safety margins, emergency response, and plant availability. You need to address single points of failure, supply chain integrity, software provenance, and hardware assurance. Safety, digital I&C, and cybersecurity must form one integrated system owned jointly, ensuring no seams are missed. With smaller workforces operating these reactors, everyone must maintain high cyber-physical literacy to spot anomalies. Moving fast is fine if done deliberately, maintaining human-in-the-loop oversight and two-person checks. Carolyn Ford: How should leaders measure whether nuclear innovation is delivering? Joyce Connery: Are there electrons on the grid? Just because you can design everything yourself doesn't mean you should. Small companies shouldn't try to build, secure, and operate reactors entirely in-house—outsource and partner with experts. Carolyn Ford: Time for rapid-fire Tech Talk questions. Which sci-fi power source would you pick for a data center—Mr. Fusion, Tony Stark's Arc Reactor, or the Enterprise's Warp Core? Joyce Connery: Mr. Fusion. It solves two problems at once by using garbage rather than plutonium. The Tony Stark one would require FDA approval! Carolyn Ford: Most eye-rolling nuclear moment in a movie? Joyce Connery: Indiana Jones surviving a nuclear blast at the Nevada Test Site inside a lead-lined refrigerator. Carolyn Ford: One takeaway for leaders regarding nuclear in the age of AI? Joyce Connery: We sit on decades of research, regulatory experience, and safety culture. Integrate new tools with that experience, and stay transparent—because once you break trust, you can't get it back. Carolyn Ford: Where can listeners connect with you? Joyce Connery: Email me at joyce@connerystrategies.com. In DC, we also host casual "Friends of Nuclear" happy hours to build industry relationships offline without the drama. Focus on positive possibilities over destruction. Carolyn Ford: Thanks for tuning in! Tech Transforms is produced by Show & Tell and sponsored by Owl Cyber Defense. Stay curious and keep imagining the future.