DJ, Firefighter, skateboarder, pilot.
No, this isn't a Mad Lips. This is the crossover episode.
You didn't. Know you needed make a nuclear
joint bill zerang of nuclear and their.
Podcast The Future of Nuclear to talk.
About everything from the purpose.
Of healthy hazing, like what's it going to do if I hang his
uniform up in the rafters? Is also a really good way to
like understand the people on your team.
To finding purpose in your work. It's one of the most endearing.
Like you really, you really fall in love with the machine and you
want that machine to run, You want that machine to be healthy
and you want to come in every day to take care of that
machine. It really does mean something to
you. We talk.
About everything under the sun this episode, and we're hoping
you get a little bit more dimension behind the host, IE
the people who are always asking.
Questions. We hope you enjoyed this sit
down conversation between two of maybe the most eclectic voices
in Nuclear. Welcome to the future of Nuclear
and Naked Nuclear. It is a mash up.
And so our conversation today is with a trained flight
instructor, a nuclear talent recruiter, the founder of
Syllable, getting its roots, helping first responders engage
in Spanish speakers in emergency situations.
She studied at Princeton before becoming a firefighter and a
paramedic in Aurora Station 1. She's an aspiring astronaut, a
future Ted talker, a science and physics educator.
She has a personal mission to bring empathy into energy.
Yes, she has a favorite scientist.
Hello, Shannon. She's the IRA Glass of nuclear.
She's the crater and host of Naked Nuclear.
Welcome, Danielle Allen. Thank you so much, Phil.
And it was so funny when you were reading that.
I was like, I've done all that. Oh wow.
I literally have like the memory of a goldfish.
So what a fun intro and I love that we're doing this mash up
episode right now. Yes, it's gonna be awesome, I
think. I mean, I feel like we're
countered Spears to some degree where we both just kind of gone
random directions, doing random things and just like, where can
we help and where does it take us?
And so I think we'll discover a lot more of that today is what
I'm looking forward to. I mean, just reported this.
We were talking about the fact that you met your wife
Deejaying, and she was a DJ as well.
That's right. But phenomenal.
I was like this. That's so cool.
Yeah. There are just so many fun
Nuggets and drinkets just really trying to out here live very
interesting lives. And then just kind of also
stumbled into nuclear a bit. Yeah, I listened to a lot of
your work, so I'm a fan. I follow the pod.
And one of the questions I wanted to jump in a little bit
too. You said something in one of
your interviews and it was actually related to your work on
when you were a firefighter on syllable on the the Spanish
tools to help in emergency situations.
And you had mentioned when you were going after funding that a
lot of the model you were presenting and the funding you
were requesting didn't kind of meet the standard VC, you know,
DECA, corn, you know, huge market.
And they didn't really understand the specific problem
you were solving or, or didn't really have awareness into the
kind of problem yet. All of the firefighters and 1st
responders were like, Oh my God, yes, right.
It's hilarious because that is so identical to what we
experienced at nuclear with our journey.
And so when we talked to press or even when we were doing our
fundraising, we had a specific reaction around, wait, is that
really a problem in nuclear? Right, 'cause you talk about it
and make it nuclear, about how efficient nuclear is.
The fuel is so dense, it uses so little land compared to other
intermittent sources like wind and solar.
The waste can fill up. This can if you used it your
whole life, like all the things about how dense and efficient
nuclear is, but it's the least efficient when it comes to labor
administration, when it comes to bureaucracy, right?
And so we're trying to describe to folks that aren't familiar
with it, we solved this paperwork problem.
We solved this inefficiency in labor and process problem.
And we get that same look of like, is that really a problem?
How hard can it be? And you're like right.
Then you talk to nuclear professionals and they're like
Oh my God, yes. I have had to do the same
research. I've had two keywords, search
fatigue and 1000 page FSR and I spent 4 hours straight until my
hand cramped up. When you're working with VCs and
you're trying to pitch them, you're trying to like bring them
into the story, often times it's just a lived experience.
You got to live through the pain to understand why this is such a
big problem. And you know, especially for the
nuclear side, I think like there's a lot of people who
lived through the pain of being like this is going to take
forever. I don't want to do this anymore.
I'm tired. I'm on my 17th cup of coffee.
That's not healthy. It's really difficult when
you're doing, you know, a 15 minute pitch or you have a sit
down meeting with investors to really bring up that flavor of
difficulty, the fun parts of raising money.
But also the really tricky part is especially for a lot more
niche industries like nuclear, there isn't really a lot of
outside eyeballs on the industry to know what the problems are.
And that's one of the reasons I wanted to start Naked Nuclear,
so that people get more comfortable with nuclear topics
in general. Yeah, the the the inefficiency
on the labor side is such a interesting problem that people
don't think about. And I think it was recession
with Firefighter X on her YouTube around like, hey, you're
a firefighter and now you're into nuclear.
Why aren't you doing fire OPS at a nuclear plant?
Because it's super boring. They're just in case.
I like to think that like I'm very altruistic in my actions
and I am sometimes, but most of the time it's because I'm
interested in it and it's really cool.
Like what are the real problems that we got going on?
I'm going to be real with my fire OPS folks right now.
When I was first stationed at Sequoia Plant, I was running
plant projects and then I went into the maintenance group and
hung out with fire OPS more than anybody.
That was my secret refuge if I needed to get away because they
had the best food. The cafeteria was one thing, but
fire OPS, they had a rotation. I knew who was bringing chili,
who was bringing Stew, who was having breakfast for dinner.
They adopted me. I mean, it may be boring from
they're not rushing up buildings on a regular basis or or
catching babies, but they're fixing fire equipment and the
maintenance activities. Make sure those alarms are
working. One of my closest buddies, his
name was Topper. And so I don't know what it was
like in Station One, but at Sequoia, everybody had a
nickname, and your nickname was on your hard hat.
And the guy I spent the most time with, his name was Topper.
And they called the Topper because no matter what story you
had, he would top it. There's always got to be one in
a Firehouse that was like, I see your ace and I raised you 2
aces. You're like OK buddy.
I was actually bestowing a nickname from a man on a call.
He wasn't actually involved in the call.
He said that I was looking like a Mango Thunder and I don't know
what that means, but my whole crew was like, all right, this
is now mango Thunder. And I think that's The funny
thing about the fire service and just the camaraderie as well.
A lot of people will come into like a station or Firehouse and
be like, they're cooking Mac and cheese in here.
What's going on? And so that's always the the
nice thing about the camaraderie that's baked in, but then also
just getting to know the people working and troubleshooting.
Were you the social butterfly at Sequoia?
I started corporate, you get hired in and then they figure
out best place for you. And I was doing projects across
the fleet. One of the big projects I had
was a security project. I had to work with the fire OPS
team and it had to do with barrier protections and some
surveillance equipment and some other things.
So I just kind of got to know those folks.
When I moved into a full time role at the plant, the, you
know, kind of gravitated to people I kind of knew a little
bit from my project work. And then it's like, hey, I'm
just one of the folks over here. Nice, it does feel cool like
they accepted me. I'm in.
Yeah, and so it was, it was a good refuge when I left the
project team and I went over to the maintenance side on the.
So there's hazing in every discipline.
On the project side, I worked a lot with modifications,
construction teams and the construction vendors, and there
was quite a few pranks that went on.
I had my hard hat completely filled with ice with my safety
glasses in the middle of it, but up with water frozen for me.
And then I had to go on a scavenger hunt to find it.
And so it was the mods construction lead that did that.
I got some PVC glue and filled his hard hat with that, put it
out in the sun and it became a nice little Silly Putty ball.
But you can still see his name on it, so that was fun.
The pranks level I think in all of these industries.
I worked at 1 station in particular, and we were
literally the prank house. It's almost like if you're not
being teased, you're like, oh, what's wrong with that guy?
You kind of got to be teased to get through it.
It's also just like knowing people's sense of humor.
It's also like a really good mini test for like when really
stressful things happen, how's this person going to react?
For me as a probe, it feels like, Oh my gosh, they're
teasing me. But then, you know, after I got
a couple years on the job, it's like you kind of have to test
and push people's boundaries and like, what's he going to do if I
hang his uniform up in the rafters?
How's it going to get it down? Let's see the problem solving.
I definitely have been known to play a few pranks here and
there. But yeah, I think it's one of
those things that it's great to pass the time, but it's also a
really good way to like understand the people on your
team. Yeah.
And when you can navigate inside a nuclear environment or in a
city environment to following all the procedures, you're not
breaking any rules, you're not breaking any laws.
You're, you know, adhering to the MSDS sheet.
You know, I only use it on PVC materials, right?
And if you can follow all the rules, not go outside
boundaries, not put anybody at risk and not put anybody in
harm's way or do anything harmful or hateful to anyone,
you can still pull off something funny like that is a good test
of of your judgement, your patients.
And I think it's really important, especially when
you're the new person, to show that you're willing to take it
right. A lot of times in the trades,
we'll call it, you know, can does he push as hard as he pulls
or the other way around, right, pull his own weight as hard as
he barks at others and pushes other people.
And so it definitely found that that camaraderie and, and the
willingness to to know when someone's pushing your
boundaries and to let them and to go with it.
Like I had my mid shift supervisor tell me he's like
when the new Superintendent comes in, he has to buy BBQ for,
you know, the whole evening shift.
I was like, of course he does. So I, you know, brought in BBQ
the next day and he's like, you know, just kidding.
I'm like, no, you weren't. Yeah, It's like you were joking,
but we're serious. Like, we're joking, but we're
also serious. Yeah.
And a lot of the trades and fire, a lot of it is almost akin
to, like being on a sports team. Like you really have to get
feedback. This is just essentially all a
part of that feedback loop. It's all very information
driven. And I think a lot of times for
newcomers into these industries, it is overwhelming at times
because you are kind of intimidated.
Like especially if you got, you know, a Gray haired guy, he's
been on the job for 30 years in the fire service.
We've got more time on the toilet than you've got in the
whole service and it can be intimidating.
The nice thing is being able to navigate that as a newcomer.
It's essentially all very mapped out.
You know what's going to happen, you can almost expect it when
people are serious with you and be like, hey, we actually can't
do that. That's when you're kind of
seeing that person. They can adjust and mold to the
protocols we have in hand. And I think that's one of the
major things with the nuclear side.
The protocols are very, very, you know, we have to stick to
them regularly on the fireside. It's like, hey, you were doing
this because these are the steps you need to do to save
somebody's life. If you don't do them, you might
not save their life, and I think that's really important.
At the end of the day, the people who work in these
industries can keep on the horizon the real risks of having
a bad day. What does a bad day look like?
I think that's all. Also, the nice thing about the
pranks and the jokes, how people are brought up into these
industries, It's kind of serious and sometimes a little bit
boring if you don't bring in some of that humor one.
Of the corollaries I've always drawn is.
I always thought there should be a television show around nuclear
operations, and I actually know a few people in the world right
now are exploring those things. So I'm very optimistic that that
will come true. But things like refueling
outages have their whole own novella of drama.
It's like, but you could end on a climax.
It's like, oh, they just discovered this in the turbine.
How are they going to recover schedule?
What are they going to be? Here's the drama with this crew
and you know. Like.
You have that in the home builder shows where they have
schedule, pressure, time and constraints.
How are they going to work through it?
You have it in the Firehouse. It's like the office, but the
backdrop is a nuclear refilling outage.
We did like a Women's History Month series at the beginning of
this year. One of the folks that we had on,
she was a project engineer, became a project manager, and it
was really the episode, it was about those changes.
One of the really fun things about the conversation was like
outage season. What does that look like?
And she's like, it can get pretty high stakes.
You're called people up at 2:00 AM like, hey, this thing broke.
We've got to send somebody on a plane, get on a train, whatever
form of transportation. It's like a unicycle if you need
to, but you got to get there. And I'm like, man, that would be
so great for television because I think often times there's so
many people within the public that if you ask them, hey, can
you like, picture a nuclear power plant?
Almost always the only thing they're going to bring up is
nuclear cooling towers. But there's so much more
happening within a power plant that I'm like, oh, my gosh, it
would make for such great television.
Also, my personal thought, we have way too many fire shows,
and most of them are bad. I think television deserves a
nuclear outage feeling drama because, yeah, there's too many
fire shows. We need some new content.
Yeah, have you ever spent $50,000 on a single roll of
tape? I have.
There are just so many things that you could definitely just
wow the general public with. Private jet just for a roll of
tape. Manufacturing line spun up just
for one roll of tape. It gets expensive.
Gets expensive. I had a conversation
specifically about the Inc and the fact that some of these
pieces of equipment are obsolete and like what do you do if
nobody makes them anymore? You know, like, well, you got to
get creative and the levels of creativity found within kind of
this whole subculture of, you know, keeping these power plans
up and running. I was like, this should be a
show in and of itself. This is an incredible even maybe
a graphic novel. Like, I don't, I don't know, I'm
creative. I'm not that artistic though.
So maybe just stick figures running around with the tools
we'd kind of chatted about before.
It's just how do we like bring to the attention of the general
public all of the the really interesting things that are
happening within the nuclear space.
And especially when we're like, hey, we need workforce, we need
this, we need that. Do you think we need to do a
retrofit or do you think we need to just market it different?
Like so for example, when I got into the nuclear industry, going
around with the plants, looking around, it's like, Oh my God,
everything's so dated. It's like a 20 year old kitchen.
You're like, oh, I just want to RIP this out, put a new kitchen
in. But if you go back far enough,
it's vintage, it's retro, it's cool.
Yeah, the kids are wearing 90s clothes again, so I'm pretty
sure we're fine. They're going to go in.
They're like, oh, wow, this is really cool.
It's like a time capsule. I was watching a group of high
schoolers enter the grocery store the other day and 90s
grunge is back. I wonder if some of the kids
feel the same, if that would be just as interesting to get into
working with a nuclear operator to see how they're actually
operating. 3 dimensional tactile controls, that's how we operate
the plant. So you just you just got to come
up with the right branding. It's state-of-the-art analog
equipment. You can't just get that
anywhere. State-of-the-art analog.
Yeah, I like that. How do you attract talent into
the nuclear industry when it's not the most state-of-the-art
technology anymore? Yeah, I think it's interesting
in terms of just what the kids are interested in these days.
A lot of it is generally just the environment.
I'm a really big bird nerd. I was listening to a birding
podcast the other day. It was fascinating because on
the podcast it was a lady who was like, let me go out and do
birding with the kids. What are the kids interested in?
And of course, they were really interested in all the different
birds. And one of the things she said
was devastating. This 7 year old was at the pond
with them and she's like, this is not going to be here very
long. I was taking a climate class and
it sounds like we're going in the wrong direction.
The lady of the podcast is also like, oh, the younger
generations are having this very wide awareness of the
microclimate catastrophes that are happening within these
little pockets of the world we live in.
And so I think that's one of the reasons why the nuclear is
actually starting to sell itself a bit.
I think it's the culture. The nuclear culture is what the
kids aren't super sure about. The idea that nuclear is the
best for the environment where, you know, low carbon emissions
is pretty straightforward. But it's like, OK, the paperwork
and the kind of the bureaucracy and how slow and how attention
details we're having, that's all the other type that I think it
is. You kind of have to sell the
kids on. I can see that the amount of
paperwork in nuclear is what we built our whole business on.
So it is real. It's no joke.
As technology, it's more widely adopted as we continue to to
grow and improve on the AI space and the tech space that that
burden of monotony, you know, quickly evaporates and you get
to do more interesting. That's a problem solving.
That part's great. I think it's definitely
interesting the perspectives my generation had the backdrop of
the Cold War and we're going to get naked out of existence with
bombs. And so we I probably won't live
to 30 anyway as a 12 year old, 15 year old versus climate
change is going to destroy the planet and we're all going to
die and we're going to use up our resources and kill the
planet. Every generations had their
backdrop of disaster and, and, and this generations kind of
taking it seriously and bit of anxiety based or you know,
consternation based, whereas maybe it was just my bubble, but
it felt like my generation took it as well.
We're all going to die anyway. Let's party it up.
What are you going to do? I think a little bit more of it
is really in terms of I was having a conversation
specifically about the nuclear industry to recruit people into
it, but also to retain them, that retention piece.
I think any I was looking at workforce development research
that they were doing and they're showing like that one to 10 year
gap is where they're like they have the highest attrition rate.
I was like, well, why? What's going on there?
The expectations you get recruited into the industry was
are not necessarily the same ones that will keep you to stay
keeping everything in terms of, you know, hey, like, you know,
we got state state-of-the-art analog.
I think that's fine. But I think the other part of it
is the nuclear culture required to keep these plants running,
the attention to detail, getting kids more excited, shifting the
culture through technology that might help.
Nuclear is already attracting young folks, but it's the
retention part of how do you retain some of these kiddos?
And I think a lot of it is just they're so used to a very
fast-paced world anyway, and nuclear is not necessarily that
way all the time. Yeah, I think it was Tory Bage
gave me a stat from NAYGN, some studies they did and I'll
probably get this wrong. There was a large number that
within the first five years they leave nuclear.
I want to see this 25%. I could have been north of that.
And so there was that retention. It was a challenge and it's just
not you think nuclear And there's a couple folks that that
we've had on the podcast that got a nuclear engineering degree
specifically because they wanted to go in the nuclear and there's
just not very good knowledge of all the other ways you can go
into nuclear. You're doing a great job
promoting that. I'm not just an engineer, I'm a
nuclear engineer. It's like, you know, it sounds
super awesome when you talk outside of your circles, right?
Another side job I had back in the day was I was also a
diversity instructor on the side and that's some really cool
people there. One of the big focus areas is
recruit, retain, develop and on the recruit and retain side you
need to make things welcoming. One of the larger utilities I
worked at, and I won't say their name, I went through their two
week onboarding orientation process.
They have a great name for it and it's all branded and they do
a great job. And I went through that whole
process, got on the job and I ran in like 2 months later to my
my instructor that did all my onboarding and you know, how's
it going? What was the name of that
company you were telling me about?
I really want to work there. Yeah, right.
Because where I work is nothing like what you told me about.
And I think it's the bait and switch a little bit.
Like I feel icky a little bit. Who's one of the books that I
really enjoy. I've reread it like probably a
dozen Times Now. It's called Corruptible by Brian
Class and it looks at like what creates A corrupted system or a
corrupt system. And a lot of it was just like
how you recruit like and who you're recruiting and
essentially the system you create when trying to retain
people. This is not a shot at doctors.
All the people in my family are doctors, My mom and dad, my
aunt, my uncle. One of the things that they were
showing is doctors, lawyers and police officers, according to
this book, have some of the highest the rates of sociopaths,
especially surgeons. I love telling my mom that I'm
like, but within the book, it's not that, you know, like all
doctors are sociopaths. It's just the way that you
recruit and and the the the environment you create in
medical school for people to survive, you have to be
cutthroat. She would tell me about opening
up her books at Columbia Med School and they were all blacked
out. People had redacted the books.
And this is like in the 80s. So like, there's no like going
on to the Internet to like beep, boop, beep boop.
And so I think that was one of the things that was like
fascinating to me is just like, Oh yeah, the environment that
and how you recruit and the environment you place people in
once you've recruited them is very important to kind of the
types of people that you're going to be producing within an
industry itself. It's fascinating.
So, so I'm second generation nuclear.
My dad was in nuclear his whole career and he moved up pretty
high. And one time I asked him, I'm
like, how come you keep having to meet with psychologists?
And, and, and so I actually talked to one of the nuclear
psychologists and found out the answer.
One of the tests you have to take for your background check
is the MMPI exam. It's like a 300 question test to
ask you a bunch of questions often over and over again and
different phraseologies over random things like would you
rather hold a gun or a flower? You know, how angry are you with
your mom? You know, like just all kinds of
different questions. And you're scored on a bell
curve. There's no right or wrong
answer, but there are answers that are less normal for your
demographic, your age, your, your sex, your gender, whatever.
And so the whole idea is as long as you're within the certain
range of the bell curve, then your profile doesn't generate
any flags. And a psychologist told me most
of the executives are outside of the bell curve.
So to get to a certain level and a utility, you have to be a
little bit something for. Sure.
And so I can imagine being a surgeon, especially a plastic
surgeon in a worn torn area who would definitely put you outside
of the. And the ingredients to that
cake. Yep.
I think that's the interesting thing to me.
A lot of the thesis of this book is trying to avoid corrupt
systems. But really any system that
you're designing for a large group of people is, you know,
how do you recruit and how, what, what's the environment
that you put them in? Do you value transparency?
How does work ethic happen? How do you correct people?
I think that was a really big one for me when I was a
paramedic instructor. I would make sure that all of my
students and all just, you know, people that we worked with, I'm
like, hey, it's you're going to mess up.
Like there's just, there's too many variables in the calls
we're running. You're not going to know of
everything you're going to mess up.
The fact of the matter is you do have to own up to it.
There has to be a level of accountability.
The problem is when you mess up and then you're like, oh, I
messed up. Let me try to cover that up so
that nobody sees it. I'm like, people are going to
see it as we're creating these environments of accountability
and transparency. And so I think that's definitely
something that takes a lot of humility and a lot of that
culture shift within any industry to be like, hey, this
is how we're going to start changing.
And hopefully through that, you see those attrition rates
change, you see people being retained because they know the
environment is fair. Yeah, you need a different
strategy for each kind of location because nuclear is that
high risk scary, but at the same time, like really not.
And it it's one of the most endearing.
I felt like I had a relationship with the equipment.
Like you really, you really fall in love with the machine and you
want that machine to run, You want that machine to be healthy
and you want to come in every day to take care of that
machine. It really does mean something to
you and it means something to it's, it's very different being
at the plant around the equipment, getting opportunities
to work night shift with people and bond over very specific high
intensity, you know, jobs and, and just having that like
everybody there, you all know what the priority is.
It's get the unit back online, It's get through the schedule
for your shift. It's like you're, you're very
aligned and you have something so tangible that you can just,
you know, step outside and see like there it is.
There's this giant humming thing that I am actively making better
right now. And it's so tangible, you know,
feeding millions of people their energy needs, recharging their
phones and C pap machines, all of the important things that
that need to happen, right? And so you really feel that
tangible connection. And it's, it's I think much
harder if you come out of school, go into a corporate job
and you're in a design engineering, in a cube farm in a
corporate office doing work for a plant, but you're not at the
plant. You don't spend enough time
going to visit it, getting to know the people there.
You don't form that connection. That's going to be a totally
different retention, a totally different experience than than
really taking the time. And I want to make sure we paint
the right picture here because you know, we're talking about
high risk and its nuclear and it's scary, but it really isn't.
Nuclear, like aviation has an incredible defense in depth.
And so when you're talking about that accountability and that
transparency and take ownership of your actions, so much effort
over the decades has gone into nuclear's not that old.
Five years until this century. Like we're almost there.
Yeah, fair enough. But there's so much work and
effort that's gone into making mistakes inconsequential.
And so we putting the barriers, will we have the right barriers,
the right defense in depth, the right engineered solutions, the
right processes, human performance tools, the right
thing. So when they do make a mistake,
it's not consequential, it's not going to hurt anyone, it's not
going to damage anything. It's going to be a shot on goal.
It's not going to be a disaster. There's such a separation
between doing very heady work all day versus being at a plant
and being able to like boots on the ground, seeing things.
And I think a lot of the things that are super funny to me is a
lot of the interviews that I've been having and just kind of
learning from people is a lot of their experiences become really
kind of clearly colored the first time they visit a plant or
an Information Center or their first shift.
Like when you get immersed in the world and you're not kind of
just like in an office cubicle. So I think that's another thing
is like you actually have the evidence and the experience in
front of you to be like, wow, this is something bigger than
myself. Your purpose isn't like 1 of
questionable. Like you're not like, what does
this even matter? I think that's one of those
things, you know, we're kind of joking about a nuclear TV show,
but for people to be able to see that connection and correlation
of purpose like so evidently. One thing I haven't heard you
talk about is the three jobs. Every plant worker has three
jobs. What you don't realize about the
three jobs is it gives you the opportunity to grow your
network. It gives you the opportunity to
do something a little bit different.
It gives you the opportunity to learn so much more about people
around you and all successful people in the work environment,
they know it's not always what you can do, it's who you know.
A lot of times that's used negatively, like, oh, you're
getting special favors, but really it's about how do I work
through other people and how do I navigate to get the results
and leverage the strengths and folks in my relationships?
Those employees are always very successful because they're able
to leverage the whole organization.
One of the great things that nuclear has built in for the
folks that don't know, is you have your normal job, whatever
that is. You can be AD Connor, an RP
tech, the welder, a mechanic, an engineer, but then you have an
outage job and that can be totally different, right?
I know IT folks that their day job is taking care of technology
systems and their outage job is lower containment coordinator.
They're climbing over equipment, organizing and making sure
nobody steps in water that they're not supposed to step.
And they do that for 30 days, right?
And they meet totally different people.
And now all of those people know an IT person.
And it's great for those people, too.
Yeah, right. Your emergency preparedness job.
And so that's the job that you get put on a certain rotation
and you get to be on call for that rotation.
You get to participate in emergency drills.
And we're going to pretend there's some scenario with the
plant, this is a drill, this is a drill, yada, yada, yada is
happening. And you've got a job.
My first EP job was a dose assessor.
I got to meet meteorologists. I got to talk to folks in this
state. My job was every 15 minutes give
out a recommendation on where to evacuate, you know, and then and
so do you get so you get to meet a totally different people.
Like like it's a super. I learned so much about weather.
I learned about weather when I first started getting into
aviation and I was like, wow, I did not know.
I didn't know so much about weather.
And now I know so much about weather.
I think the nice thing is it allows the different parts of
your brain get worked and scratched in different ways.
You're like, oh, wow, this is actually really interesting for
for myself. I'm yeah, I would like to see
like a lifelong learner. I always like meeting those 87
year olds at conferences that are like, I'm just here to learn
something new. And I'm like, of course you are.
You are so cute because I always find it so fascinating just to
learn how people are doing things that I think nuclear does
allow for just so many different perspectives to learn from.
That might be another cool selling point that we should
hype up a little more. People are multi dimensional.
I learned that you were a skateboarder.
So I was like, that's cool. I like to longboard.
I'm I'm really not good at skateboarding.
That's the holistic nature of nuclear that we also probably
should talk about more to let people kind of understand like,
hey, there's there's a lot of different ways that you can kind
of get your fix, especially if you like climbing on things.
Then that's a whole whole thing you can do, yeah.
I don't want to give myself too much credit on skateboarding
because I did skate competitively across the
Southeast when I was in high school, but I grew up all over
the place, anywhere there was a nuclear plant being built for
the most part. And so I got into skateboarding
while Palo Verde Unit 3 was being built and restarted.
And there was a lot of West Coast skateboard influence in
West Phoenix and central Phoenix during that time.
And then I moved to Browns Ferry construction and and start up
and rural Alabama had a very different scene than the West
Coast, Phoenix being fairly average to being fairly advanced
just by relocating. And so yeah, I was able to hop
out on the scene. So they say.
Nice different size pond big fish.
Now, that's right, I think we're hitting on something here for
your recruiting. You know, you've got retro,
state-of-the-art analog, 3 dimensional tactile experience
and you get 3 jobs in one. I can say no to that.
And I think it's perfect because I'm finding that the younger
kids, I mean, I'm going back to school currently for nuclear and
it's always humbling to work with 19 year olds.
One of the interesting things is that kids have access to
everything nowadays. They really do like have access
to all of the things in every dimension that you can think of.
And they get bored very easily. And I think it's just because
there's just an abundance of everything in every direction.
But I think the nice thing is nuclear provides very clear
boundaries. I think a lot of the times
sometimes corporate work, you kind of, we kind of drift as to
like what you're supposed to be doing purpose and what you know,
the rules are. But nuclear is a very clear
boundary. But within that boundary there
is so much richness. Like I know you feel really cool
with your cell phone and you can do 18,000 things with it, but
welcome to analog world. The history behind nuclear as
well is, is that's the other fun thing about to me, being able to
see how operators are working and just what a plant looks like
and who built it. Because you get that sense of
people have come before for me and they will come after me.
I think that's the fun part as well.
Yeah, and some of the technologies blows their mind
because they're so used to electronics, electricity powered
things, right. And it's like, no, this is a
steam, you know, a steam driven turbine, you know, and they're
like, what do you mean? I'm like, well, it's there to
cool water, but it can't. So the water gets really hot and
it turns into steam and then the steam goes through this pipe and
then it spins A turbine that turns the pump that then pumps
the water and self cools it back down again.
They're like what's? Yeah, like on pressure gauge,
like the idea of a pressure gauge to them, they're like,
you're like, oh, he's a sweet summer child.
It's great because we just finished up an episode.
We're doing a series called Who to Follow a Nuclear, and we had
Nick Taran on it. We'll be releasing that.
We were talking about all of the historical videos that he
digitizes and puts on YouTube. Problem solving the way these
engineers were thinking to me is mind blowing.
I'm also burning podcasts and then watching digitized versions
of nuclear power plants in the 50s.
Like, those are my jam. But the way in which
historically they are able to solve problems without all the
technology in the world is fascinating.
It has created a different engineer then and now and kind
of taking some of these kids and throwing them back into the then
to be like, here is how we've started.
This is the history of it. These are the fundamental
concepts of engineering that work.
I think that's really fun, somewhat humbling for a lot of
them because you can't just like essentially just like Google it
and like understand immediately how some of these very technical
systems work. Yeah, there weren't computers.
My dad told me the story once about Brownsphere or Palo Verde
during restart. And I should know this because
one's AP WR1's a PWR. So it's probably obvious to most
of the folks that listen to this, that know these things.
He was a control room engineer at the time and his job was to,
maybe it was his job was to calculate a lot of the physics
that was happening, understanding rod placement,
manually controlling rods. They're managing the machine
and, and the reaction of what's going on in the core and their
readings are getting back on. The analog systems don't make
any sense. He keeps doing things looking at
all the gauges and he's got his literally slide rule and he's
doing hand calculations, hand physics calculations, like on
giant piece of paper trying to calculate out why are we were
make we're taking this action and we're getting a result that
doesn't make sense. It's unexpected.
And so it should power level should be going to this heat
pressure, whatever should this should be happening that's
happening, what's going on? And he's trying to figure it
out. And he realized when they
labeled the original installation of the rod
placement indicators that were backwards, and so he had to move
like the inverse rods and everything made sense.
And he had to figure all of that out with hand calculations while
you're controlling the reactor. Holy moly, ain't no way.
Like for me, it would not be a good day.
I'd probably start crying. That is amazing.
It's one of those things that like you physically know the
math and the physics to be able to like see that and be like,
wait a minute, let's change that.
Any time I talk to the young folk, I'm always telling them to
look into nuclear history because I think there's a lot of
hype of like, we just learned how to do this.
Or, you know, these are advanced reactors and and there's kind of
seems to be like a little bit of a myopic understanding of the
technologies we're creating right now.
But meanwhile, some guy in a lab in the 1963 was like actually a
bleep, bloop, bloop. And I think that's the fun part
about going through these digitized documents, just to see
the way in which these engineers were thinking.
And that can be so helpful for younger generations and even
folks in the industry right now just to know like, hey, hand
calculations, that was the thing.
What were the most surprising things to you about the industry
as you started to get closer to it?
What stood out for you? Definitely the safety culture
for sure. I think one of the things that
I'm, I'm really interested in workforce because something
that's happened kind of within the aviation industry recently
is the fact that there's no hiring for a while.
And then all of a sudden they're like, we have to hire hundreds
of pilots. My first flight school lessons
were taught by somebody who was younger than me.
This is weird because I came into firefighting and I had a
guy with like Gray hair that's like, who are you?
I'm like, Oh my gosh. And the dynamic was just so
weird. I'm like, this feels like a
young industry with nuclear, the safety element, the safety
aspect. Culturally, I think it was very
different between aviation and fire as well.
But I would say that would be the first one that stood out.
I literally had people being like, you're kind of an
adrenaline junkie is like is do you think nuclear is that
actually for you? And I was like, I could do
adrenaline stuff outside of work.
I think that'd be #1 safety culture.
OK. What do you think of the
community with the nuclear? It's fantastic.
What was really funny is I moved to North Carolina, did flight
school and I was like, all right, got to do this fun
astronaut journey. I'm going to find a major to do
science wise. That's kind of why I fell into
nuclear. The first person I emailed was
Lisa Marshall at NC State and I was like, why?
I'm firefighter. I want be nuclear engineer help.
She comes back with like these resources.
We do a one-on-one. I was like, I feel warm and
fuzzy inside. This is so delightful.
And it's just been so funny. Like over time, like we won't
even coordinate our schedule and we'll just end up in the same
place at the same time. And I'm like, oh, hey.
And she's like, oh, hey, I've had that experience with so many
different people within the nuclear industry.
Like I, I from the podcasting perspective, it's always easy to
get guests and like, hi, can you talk to me about your very
technical thing that you're working on and your research?
That seems cool to me. And they're like, I was wishing
somebody would ask and I think it helped me keep going.
There's so many different people that are doing really cool,
interesting research and they just want to share it with
somebody. The whole industry is very
rewarding in that regard. The community aspect is really
top notch. Lisa's great.
We had her on the podcast earlier this year, NC states,
where my dad got his nuclear engineering degree.
I was very young when I lived in Raleigh.
It's. Changed just a bit here.
Yeah, no, it's been great. I've never been able to put the
right phraseology of the word on it.
But the nuclear has its insider community, right?
It has it's it's more important and there's more gravitas than
to call it a club. Halt isn't quite the right
phrase. Yeah, it's a little closer, but
yeah, it's definitely. Maybe a fandom?
There you go. And yeah, the fandom's growing.
It's almost been almost the opposite.
It's like this martyrdom of I work at the utility every, and
even more so I work at the nuclear plant.
Everyone hates me, the press hates me, everyone thinks I'm
going to destroy the universe and I'm silently keeping all of
their electricity running cheaply or climate impact and
I'm working crazy hours under high stress.
You're welcome, right? But we all like we're all under
that same trauma and that same stress, and we do it together.
It definitely forms that bond. And of course it has its secret
language and you, you have these subtle phrases and it's
something that we do in our company.
We have to be sensitive to the ratio of people that we hire
that are from the industry versus those that are really
high tech or really, you know, strong and startup and and, and
tech growth, right? And maintain that balance
because it's I'm a plant engineer versus I'm in a nuclear
engineer. Totally different.
Like right to me, I'm like, oh, nuclear operations, like someone
from the outside would think, oh, it's about operating, it's
about the business of the plant. Like, no, no, no, that's an
operator. No, no, no.
And about a licensed, you know a licensed individual that's put.
Some respect on. That yeah.
And so it's like no, no, no, no, no.
And it's like, Oh no, you're referring to a nuclear
professional, not to a operator, right?
Like so you know, you, you just have this phraseology.
We find it almost reassuring that when we go to plants, talk
to folks, the respect that you get as a software guy that can
exit the portal without causing a scene.
You know how to use the handrail without being told that follows
the signages, that respects the visitor badge.
You know that knows all the things and is very comfortable
in the environment. That, you know, doesn't flinch
when the air puffers blow across your head, the explosive
detectors you. Know, right, Yeah.
And I think it's helpful because there is a little bit of that
alienation when there's a newcomer.
There's so many different terms, technologies and the acronym
soup. It does feel like a cool
insiders like we're in the no, but at the same time getting the
public to like you when you throw PWR P of your SMR versus
MSR EP could have 18 different meanings.
And I think that's one of the reasons why, like, I was like,
oh, let me start naked nuclear. Like let's strip down all of
these different things and make people feel good about learning
about nuclear. Because I think sometimes we'll
just kind of like jump into the deep end with a lot of the
different sources that are out there.
And it's overwhelming. If you're, you know, I'm a mom
and you're thinking, is this coming to my town?
What's the trade off? You know, like, hey, mothers
from nuclear is there. But they're also being able to
translate a lot of this, like a lot of deep technical jargon in
a way that people are like, oh, it's not as bad as what I had
pictured in my hand. Cool.
And I think that's the other important part of being able to,
yeah, for you guys at nuclear, have that balance of deep
technical knowledge, but also being like, hey, software guy
who only does a lot of coding, let's walk you into the nuclear
side. I think it can be a fun
experience for people as well. Yeah, you've got a great style,
five stars on Apple. Good job.
I think I called you the IRA glass of nuclear because you
have this very break it down for you.
Let the guests run, then I'm going to break it down.
And then I think you do an excellent job.
And and you mentioned mothers for nuclear and Heather and
Kristen. Heather's an amazing person.
If you've gotten to spend much time with her in person.
What 0 approach anxiety when it comes to talking to people about
nuclear. Doesn't matter where you are.
Yeah, I was taking notes the first time.
I was like, OK, it's that easy. Yeah, floored.
Absolutely floored. But yeah, I think the nice thing
is, just like for me, I'm not afraid of stealing people's leg.
Is that working for you? Let me try that out a little
bit. I think really just so impressed
by the way in which she was like, I'm just going to start.
I'm like, wow, that's pretty cool.
And I think it's also we're in this kind of phase, at least for
nuclear. I always think of it as like the
ugly dweeby kid in high school that's now in college is like
hot now. And like is all this attention
to like, I don't know what to do.
I'm like, if nuclear is having that kind of moment right now
and it's I don't know what to do phase, but at the same time
bringing people along that I never knew you in high school or
whatever, I never knew all this history.
Being able to kind of share all of that with them.
Well, it's really hard to keep up with with nuclear even if you
are in nuclear because there's just so much happening.
But trying to educate the public along the way is like tricky for
me. They taught 2nd through 8th
grade sciences out of a Science Museum.
They did all their science curriculum stuff.
Exploration. Exploration place yes nice.
I love you do some good research and like my whole life history
it's awesome as I was starting this podcast, I was actually
kind of concerned about the United States in terms of our
science literacy. That one is another thing that
keeps me up at night, people not knowing how we're getting to the
sciences and how we're figuring out these deep technologies.
I really want to bring nuclear into this space where people can
feel exploratory with it, like, hey, you might not know what
boron neutron capture therapy is.
Nobody grows up knowing that. It's OK, let's talk about it
now. It's just more approachable.
And now you've got this image in my head of the The Nuclear Geek
to Goddess 90s movie and I can't get the thought of wind and
solar being the popular hot girl.
We could definitely do a thing with that and I think it's had
its moment. And then realistically we're
just looking at the energy forecast and be like, hey, for
load growth is doing this hockey stick number.
The Mean Girls are not going to get it done.
Let's pitch this book I did to Russell.
Perfect. I think it'll be great.
What questions do you have for me?
Yes, so this is fascinating for me because the one thing I had
brought up before is when you're part of a generation of like,
hey, my dad was a nuclear and now I'm at nuclear.
How is it that you found your own kind of thing that you
wanted to do? Hey, I'm my own person and I'm
also doing the same kind of role that my dad was.
So I guess that would be my first question for you.
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Interesting, because I didn't start thinking I was going to go
into nuclear back in free Internet, free LinkedIn, free
job boards. Honestly, what really was who
you knew, you know, I I got my first job at Burger King and
then I worked at the car wash that got ready by the FBI and it
was literally a Breaking Bad type situation with money
laundering at the car wash the whole deal.
And and so it's like had a string of bad luck of, you know,
high school jobs and so I got to college and then just 100
resumes all hand, you know, printed, you know, there's no
e-mail. It's show up, knock on the door
at, you know, at the a valve company and be like, can I, you
know, you get 100 rejections and as a 16 year old, you know, or
as a 18 year old, it still stings.
And so you think, oh, and so it's you know, it's like, Oh
yeah, I know this guy on this company.
They need some help with plant process computer testing.
And so here's this horrible stack of four feet high of
requirements and point verification, validation.
You're just going to go line by line through this code and
verify that this plant simulator actually outputs what it's
supposed to output one at a time.
And it was like a lot of Mountain Dew and just manually
inputting these values and then checking off on the screen and
signing it off, right. But now you've got plant
process, computer and simulation and control systems experience
on your resume. Thought like, that's great.
I love electronics. I'm going to do computer stuff.
And I ended up in Europe and I worked for Europe online and I
was doing all these things And then 9/11 happened.
You were in New York at the time.
I was on a glacier at the highest point in the Swiss Alps
on vacation and cell phone ring. So they share the top of the
Alps. And because I worked at a
satellite infrastructure for most of Western Europe, it was
we're sitting on non essential personnel home this and this and
this And like, dude, vacation's over.
And then from there, it's like, hey, guest permit visa for, you
know, so many time zones away, it's probably time to go back to
the US. And how do you get a job from
that many time zones away when you don't have job boards?
It's who you know, again. And so I ended up at
Constellation. You want to plant, process,
computer and simulation work and real time systems work.
And I thought this was cool, but it was still very different from
what my dad did. My dad was in engineering and he
worked in plants and I'm working in computers and I need to do
projects at plants, but I still had my kind of IT direction that
I was going. And then it got boring and I
went to the plants and I started doing big projects and I just
really liked it and I got my PMP and just thought this is fun and
great. Thankfully, my father had a
strong reputation and that the people that I worked with used
that in a positive way with me. And so it was embracing it was
apple doesn't fall far from the tree mentality.
So I, I, it was like the opposite of it was like positive
prejudice. I was given grace.
I was given acceptance. I was given like, oh, you're
Ike's son. I'm by default like you until
you proved me otherwise. And so it was.
Yeah, Yeah. So I got all.
It was definitely an advantage. And I tried not to be, you know,
a jerk about any of that and, and appreciate it, but it was
so, so it it kind of marked me into it.
And then I ended up in some exact same positions that he
had. One of the challenges growing up
as a second generation nuke is you don't see your dad very
often when plants are being built and started up.
There was a point and Palo Verde Unit 3 restart where he went to
work clean shaven. The next time I saw him, he had
a beard. It was common to sleep at the
plant. You were on shift getting this
thing going and you weren't going home until the job was
done. They didn't have fatigue rules
then. I think I understood him and I
understood the stress and hours much better when I was in his
shoes, right when I was doing those jobs and experiencing it
first hand for myself. And so it for me, it was never
like a shadow thing. Oh, I can appreciate this man
and I can give him some grace for my angsty childhood.
You know what I mean? You know, it's like, OK, now I
kind of feel bad about how I acted out as a teenager.
You know, it's like, I think that's a sign of gross.
If you don't regret who you were a few years ago, you haven't
progressed far enough. You got to look back and be
like, oh, OK, that was a choice. Yeah, and so that was helpful.
But from there I still kind of diverged.
You know, I ended up going a different direction, going back
into the technology side. It was a very positive
experience for me. It wasn't a how do I get out
from the shadows? Like I'm really proud of him and
what he was able to accomplish. I've had both the Super
positive, great responses and then I've heard a few stories
that you just don't want to hear about nothing.
You don't want to put it that way, but there's this things up
you don't picture. You don't want to have that
image of one of your parents in, you know, story being told.
For sure. It's like Dad is Dad, and if
Dad's not Dad, you're like, who's that guy?
Yeah. It's like, oh, boundaries,
please. But yeah.
So for me, it was a really positive experience in that way.
I would definitely want my kids to go into nuclear, but at the
same time they've gone very different directions with what
they want to do, and that's great too.
That's helpful to kind of understand because, yeah, I
think there's that angst for some kids to be like, I don't
want to be exactly like my parents.
And, you know, you kind of get the civil line of like, hey,
it's actually not like that. One of the things I think was
really interesting is almost like this triple threat of like
the operation side and project management as well as like the
finance and computational stuff. And then like, like, how have
you created this really crazy Venn diagram of skills?
And then like there's like you're in the middle of it.
My superpower, I would say, is connecting dots.
I'm really, really good at seeing how a very wide breadth
of things kind of all fits together.
One of the things I'm good at in my current job is going like,
OK, I understand how you do your job.
I understand how the technology works.
I'm going to put those pieces together and bridge that gap
between those two things. And so when I became ACFO in
addiction recovery, totally different job than running
technology at Palo Verde, it was, it was for problem solving.
They didn't need a traditional CFO to optimize anyone specific
part of finance. It was we have cash flow
trouble, we're fiction recovery, but we're also real estate.
We were like the operating on 0 margin.
We're trying to have explosive growth and we need systems
thinking and we need efficiency and we need ideas and we need to
get outside the box a little bit, right.
And so you don't hire, you know, one of the old green shade
visor, you know, accountants to to get outside the box.
Yeah. And so they, they tried that a
few times and and that didn't really work.
And so but it was purposeful for me.
I think when I left my last role in the utility, I had been about
10 years as a director over technology at a utility.
And it had gotten for me to the point where I know all the
things and for and I just was ready to do like something.
You know, I, as much as I've talked about how much I really
enjoy nuclear and I enjoy the machine, there's an aspect of
nuclear power that I never felt I totally fit in with.
And that's that very over the top.
You know, I am a nuclear professional and you have
violated my expectations and kind of this over the top safety
culture, the anything over the top really where it's like, I am
going to tell this story because this is the story IMPA wants to
hear or the NRC wants to hear or the Nuclear Safety Review Board
wants to hear. And I'm going to put on a little
bit of the nuclear airs, so to speak.
It's a little bit too much of that nuclear professional
flavor. And, you know, and I just never
like, for me, it was always about like, how can you solve
the problem? And, and I think you ask people
if you could, you know, what are you all about in five words?
And for me, it's always make things better.
Like I'm just, I took everything apart as a kid.
And it's just like, I want to know how things work and I want
to know how to make it better. And I want to know how to make
myself better. I know how to make the people
around me better. I want to know how to make the
paperwork better. I want to know how to make the
plant better. Like I want to make everything
like I just, that's how my brain works.
I look at something and I'm not happy with it.
Like how do I make this better? Here's this brand new cool shiny
awesome thing cool. How do I make it better?
Like it's obsessive for me and, and so that's applied to myself
as well. And I'm also have always been
too much of A coward to do completely step out and start my
own company. It just randomly think I can
build a language software and do all these things that you've
done right. And so it's been little baby
steps that kind of risk adverse engineering minded baby steps
where it's like, OK, I'm going to learn this and then I'm going
to learn that and then I'm going to learn that.
And then I'm just going to keep stacking skills and stacking
skills and building my confidence in each one of these
skills. And, you know, now I know how to
start businesses. I know how to do LLCS.
I can do finances, I can do now I can do sales and marketing.
Now I can, you know, build technology stacks.
Now I can like, you know, so I've, I've tried to curate my
skill set to the point where there's, if there's anything I
really want to do, I can go do it.
And, and I'm not, you know, beholden to some process or
something that is going to hold me back.
That is awesome. It's so helpful to know.
Like it's really hard sometimes I think, for kids in school to
like know what they want to do when I grow up.
But like, they'll, they'll have the traits and even like adults,
like they'll have the traits of what they like.
They're like, I like to, you know, connect the dots, make
things better, solve problems. But with that package, you're
like, I could literally do anything.
And so that, that, that baby stepping of like, OK, like I'm
going to start here. I'm going to fix this.
And that's going to, you know, get better.
And so I guess my, my one of my questions is like, so like how
was it that like you found yourself kind of surrounded
within this environment of like, yeah, we are going to optimize
the regulatory side. We are going to make this
better. We are going to really leverage
technology in order to kind of, you know, bring nuclear, you
know, into the 21st century because, yeah, that to me is,
you know, pretty, pretty interesting and pretty
fascinating as. Well, yeah, so this, the origin
story is it's kind of two divergent paths coming together
to create something really awesome.
And so this started the journey started for me probably 10 years
prior with leaving the plants, Sequoia plant from, from an
engineering role and going into the IT department.
And and that kind of happened for me because TVA, you know,
restructured that, brought in ACEO and had them report to the
CEO. And before then they had AVP of
Information Services and they really wanted to use
technologies to take advantage. At that point, I've been working
in maintenance and engineering and working plenty of outages
and thinking, man, chick-fil-A's got better technology and
situational awareness of critical path.
And I do, right? This is insane.
Like I just want the board chick-fil-A's got.
I want to know, you know, what job is Bob on right now and what
step in the package is he on? Like that's it's all I want to
know. And I got to get a pager, like a
literal pager. And you know, it's like, I'm
like, oh, this is terrible. And so I was that guy writing
Excel macros and Access databases inside my shop at
night so I could get better, you know, reports so I could show up
to the turnover meetings and not get beat up, you know, by, by
whoever you know, was expecting punching.
That day. Yeah, you got to know all this
stuff and your ability to, to take that data down and really
understand. I've got, you know, 100 people
in my organization who's doing what.
What did we accomplish? It's 3 shifts.
It's 24/7 like, how do I, how do I not work 100 hours and burn
myself out? How can I leverage technology to
help me with this? Right.
And that's where my brain went. Other people did that job more
successfully than I did. They use totally different
systems, but my systems, hey, I'm comfortable with tag.
I'm going to see if I can leverage tech to help me with
this. And so when I went to the CIO
and I said, like, Hey, here's all the things that nuclear
doesn't have that they should have from a tech stack
perspective, we've been in neglected.
This is what I want you to build for me for, for the fleet.
And he called me up three months later and said, Hey, why don't
you join, join my team. I was like, yes, please.
And you know, it was, it was time.
It was time to to get off the shift work, you know, leave the
fire rated clothing behind and and go get the the waste badge
instead of the lanyard and live the and and get lunches and so.
I was excited about that. So I went into the corporate
world and or the IT side and I started building out IT strategy
and I ended up building a total system for, for how do you build
a tech stack at a utility? Put that to APS, refined it, put
that to Palo Verde, refined it even further.
But at Palo Verde, I got to work with Brad and Gerald.
They were on my team on the data side.
They'd already started the journey of using machine
learning and building these micro applications to do
automation. And I took what they were doing
and combined it with what I had done on a bigger systems map of
you leveraging tech and strategy.
And because I had worked in so many departments, I had my
outage jobs, I had my EP jobs, I worked in maintenance, I worked
in projects, I worked in engineering.
I just took my map of the plant and said, all right, I'm going
to apply technology of this part to this part, to this part, to
this part, this part. We built the system for that one
utility, that one plant and said, this is how we're going
to, you know, literally take a third of the cost out of this
plant over time, building these tools, This is the plan.
And, and then COVID happened and I went to healthcare and Brad
and Gerald had more cars than I did.
And they started the company and I, I joined them as an advisor
initially and said, OK, let's keep this ball rolling.
And then, you know, things went well, They brought in some
funding and I made it full time. Right on.
And I think that's, it's so fun because I'm, I'm literally was
picturing it was like listening to this docu series on Bill
Gates. And like Bill Gates in like high
school was like trying to optimize his class schedule with
the entire rest of the school. He's like, this doesn't make any
sense. And so like, he literally like
started writing code and like literally creates A scheduler
for and like just gives it to the school.
And he's like here, the classes here, how the like the distance
calculated between the classes and like, here's like how you
can make it like, you know, the most effective classes.
And I, I'm literally was just picturing that of like when you
were, you're essentially talking about like how the information
side and how the technology side are kind of like coming together
and kind of creating the solution around like, hey, I'm
living in a problem. In addition to I've, I've seen
this problem from multiple different angles.
What you guys are solving at nuclear is almost something that
almost every conference brings up in some level or capacity of
like it's slow, there's too much paperwork, the regulatory sides
like searching in these things. It just takes too much time.
And so I guess now that my, my, my question is, was like, OK, so
as a company now what are you guys excited about?
Like, like the I've for me, I'm like the horizon looks, you
know, enormous. So what is exciting for you guys
as you're moving forward? Or I mean, so the mission for
us, even at Palo Verde, I gave this all hands meeting to my
team there at one point, we had a whole big room full of people
and maybe 70 people there. And it was literally that we're
going to save the world speech. And and you know, it's like I
just connected the dots down from like you're in IT, you're
doing this work, but this is leading to this.
This is leading to that. Here is the vision for how we're
going to to cut, you know, $100 million of operational cost out
of this, you know, and this was pre, you know, pre mothers for
nuclear pre, you know, Isodope pre gave gave Ivory, you know,
pre like all of the the nuclear, it's like everybody still hates
nuclear. And so we're like, you know,
when it's solar, is it everybody?
They're the Mean Girls, everybody hates nuclear, they're
the ugly duckling. But we're going to save it
anyway because it's the it's already the responsible choice
from a land usage and from a waste and from climate
perspective. But plants were shutting down
because of economic reasons and they're being shut down for, you
know, being turned off. And like, that can't happen.
Like we can't let that happen. And so we're going to prove it
in our span of control. We're going to show how we can
operate this plant. We're going to put I, I did
this, I replicated this talk and I showed these concrete examples
to maybe 10 other plants. And so I kind of went on the
road and said, like, this is how you can go cut huge amounts of
non fuel O&M out of your operating plant and not have to
get shut down. This is the playbook that we're
implementing. You go implement this.
We literally gave away source code that we that that we had
developed other plants to say, like, do what we're doing.
We're going to lead the charge, follow us, and we're going to
make nuclear the economically responsible choice, not just the
environmentally responsible choice.
And, and that was the mission we were on.
And so that mission continues, but now we get to do it
globally. You know, we're doing this, you
know, in multiple countries and we're getting to have that
impact. We're not constrained.
And now by the tiny org chart that you're allocated at your
nuclear plant of you can have one data scientist and you can
have a one Linux developer and you can, you know, it's like,
no, we can have as many people as we can afford And, and the
and the better value we provide, the more people, you know, we we
can have solve bigger problems. And this is positive spiral just
continues to grow. And at the time for us, it was
really that mission of make make nuclear economical enough that
no more plants shut down. We did not expect the AI that we
were building to be the source of nuclear no longer shutting
plants down. And so, so now we get this
virtual circle of we're building AI to improve nuclear, to build
more nuclear, to power more AI to build, to build better
nuclear and, and trying to keep this virtual cycle going.
And just the pace at which the technology is improving and the
pace at which we are able to translate the latest and
greatest technology into a value add for this niche that we care
so much about. And there's just great joy and
saying like, oh, this computer vision technology has finally
hit maturity level. I can now scan handwritten
documents from the 80s and make it digital searchable.
And I can have a conversation with this document somebody
wrote 45 years ago that it's almost illegible on the
microfiche, right? And, and being able to start to
do things like that to, to put a workflow together where push a
button and this thing that would have taken you a week now is 90%
done by a digital intern in 20 minutes.
And now you can, you know, take it and run with it.
And just these these magic moments of seeing, you know, the
application of the latest and greatest science to how do I
apply that in a very practical, tactical way, You know, at the
plant. That's where that's what gets us
excited. That's what as I show up to work
every day, because, you know, we I'm on the road a lot.
I talked to a lot of people. And when I start to describe
like, you don't know how far the world's come in the last six
months, not not let alone the last 24 months in terms of, you
know, you asked me in April, I would have told you that doesn't
exist and is impossible. You asked me a day.
I'm like, Oh yeah, we're doing it.
Oh, wow. Yeah, that's that's like
exciting. Like in in my head, I'm like,
OK, it's like we traveled back to the 1800s, but you guys just
like dropped off owing a washing machine and a dishwasher and a
microwave and you're like boom, boom, boom.
There you go. Now you got way more time on
your hands and like, it's, it's like literally like we're
watching the evolution of work happen.
And I think that's something that like like being in the
moment, like you're like, all right, we're doing it like this
is cool. But like, literally in my head,
I'm like, man, you know, how crazy would it have been if
like, you know, you're in the medieval time frame and it's
like somebody just like here is a dishwasher and a microwave,
like, like probably would have called you a witch and or
something. But I think that is like the,
the, the almost like the quantum leap that we're kind of seeing
within the technology application, within the AI use
that you guys are building. And it's super exciting from
that perspective of I, I feel like within society, anytime we
see the ability to do work, like the ability to optimize and do
work and, and, and become faster at doing, you know, you know,
standard work exponentially like shape, like shape time, You
know, it feels like, you know, horse and buggy to a Corvette.
Now all of a sudden we're like, oh Dang, we can, we can get some
places a lot faster. And I think it's, it's to me, I
guess to you, does it feel like we haven't even like seen like
the full use case of, you know, how good it can get?
Because like for me, I'm like, man, this is, this is monumental
in, in a, in a sort of way. Oh, it's the worst it's ever
going to be. That's what's so interesting
about it. And, and it's a really
difficult, like part of why I, I, I wanted to, to move into
this space, especially full time was just so I could keep up with
it, right? Because I don't know how I could
have a full time job and learn as much as I'm learning at the
same time if this wasn't my job. And it's especially challenging
for utilities across all dimensions of the utility, but
especially nuclear plants that don't change that much, right?
And so, you know, when, when I was at Palo Verde, one of the
big projects they were doing is polar crane, polar crane
replacements. And when I was always trying to,
and I ran technology. So I had all the technology
projects. And there's always this bit of a
clash in philosophy between plant projects and technology
projects. And I, I was blessed to have
done both, right? I, I did, you know, hold up tank
replacements and some generator replacements and turbine
reblading and, and plant prop project proper, right.
And I, I can compare and contrast them very well.
And, and so when people have asked me like, well, why does IT
need so many project managers? And how come you can't do this
and can't do that? And I'm like, OK, imagine if the
polar crane was an IT project, a tech project, you would come in
and say like, OK, to replace the polar crane.
And I'd say, OK, great. What do you want to do?
Like we want to replace it Like, well, you know, motor operated
cranes are obsolete. We haven't had that technology
in 10 years. What do you actually trying to
accomplish? Oh, we want to move things
around containment and move things in and out of
containment. OK, great.
You want to move things in? Do you need to move them in
two-dimensional space or three-dimensional space?
Oh, we need to move in three-dimensional space.
OK, cool. Do you have a lot of metal?
Because I can do gravitation, I can do magnetic mag lifts.
We could do transport technology.
We do antigravity technology, like there's like 20 ways I can
move things around magically within your plant.
Like how do you want me to do that?
Right? And it's just, and so, and then
in five years that technology will be obsolete, right?
And so now I'm trying to figure out what's on the horizon.
You know, it's, it's particle, you know, I'm going to, I'm
going to just generate wormholes and move things in through
miniature wormholes. You know, it's like, that's like
that's what it's like to be in technology, especially now.
It's like I can't even predict, I can't predict what's going to
be happening in five years. I know what I think is going to
be the plants are going to look like what the plants could look
like in five years. And it's crazy.
It is crazy. I mean, I've, I've written, we,
we wrote some, some of how we did this and, and in the early
days at Palo Verde is we wrote these day in the life stories,
you know, and, and the the idea was get someone that has a job
and a specific job and have them write the day in the life as if
they were in minority report or admission.
Impossible. Like imagine the furthest out
future you could possibly think of.
Every technology can possibly imagine exists.
Write what your day is like. It's like, oh, I'm driving into
work and my I automatically on my heads up display have a
readout of what the last shift did and I get instant turnover
and my personal device, you know, knows that I'm now in the
OCA. And so it goes ahead and
prepares my this and that, right?
I have Geo fencing and I have like all the hands free and I've
got augmented reality and I've got right.
So it auto signs me on to the clearance and it gives me my pre
job brief and then my RWP, my my spot robot, you know, goes and
surveys my walk down area and gives me tips on how to lower my
dose. And it gives, you know, the AI
chatbot gives me my RWP briefing and quizzes me and doesn't
unlock my RCA access until I satisfy that I do in fact, fully
understand and three-way communicate with my briefing.
And, you know, it's like all of these things that, you know,
we're trying to like, tell the story in, in a narrative way of
what the future is like. And then we take that story, we
say, OK, what is true now? What has to be true from an
infrastructure and tech perspective for this to be real?
OK, I, I here's all the gaps of things I don't have today.
What are all the systems that I do have today?
When are they going obsolete? What am I going to replace them
with that I can make this story real.
And how can I do that with the money I already have because I
got to replace these systems anyway.
But what we, what do we do as good project managers?
Oh, I'm the like for like, I'm not going to gold plate.
Well, most of the time it's not any more expensive to get the
technology that has the features you want to build towards, but
it's you can't use it yet because a lot of times you need
A + B + C in order to get D And utilities don't think that way,
right? They think A has an ROIB
doesn't. So I'm not going to do B.
Well, it's ABC and D and I need ABC and D over a six year
period. So I have to be thinking out,
you know, Scott Lathrop talks about seven generation thinking
and I applied, I applied that to technology stack.
I've got 7 years of this equipment obsolescence and I've
got all of these different pieces scattered.
And I'm going to lay out a strategy is as each one is
obsolete and gets retired, I'm going to replace it with a thing
I'm going to need 7 years from now.
And that way I I'm marching. I yeah, I really, I like that
perspective because the other thing that I was thinking about
just from a technology user on, you know, my end is how do I
keep up it? It feels like, you know, you
blink and there's another iPhone released and you're like, Oh my
gosh, like, hey, can we, can we look at like this kind of
seven-year timeline of like, what are we potentially gonna
have then? And can we plan for that?
Because otherwise, like I have a truck and it updates itself and
I'm like, like, stop. What kind?
Of truck do you have? I'm a truck guy.
Oh yeah, so I have a little baby truck.
I have a Ford Maverick, but it's it's the hybrid.
So it's it's very cutesy for around town in another life.
I I think I want like AI want to like drive a monster truck.
Ford girl, five stars. So I've got a a Ford F-250 and
I've got a 72-F100. Wow.
So you are a truck guy? Nice, nice, nice.
Yeah. And I think about that a lot
because I'm like, man, sometimes just like the older models of
things are just nicer for me. Like mentally, I think that's
that's something that's really fascinating within the realm of
like, can humans keep up with the the pace of technology that
we're going? And I think instead of kind of
just doing like the next best thing, we're going to have to
start taking larger strides. And that's, that's kind of what
I'm hearing you say like we're going to have to start taking
some larger strides and, and kind of stretching our
imagination to see what's coming down the road and plan for that
because otherwise it, it feels like a little overwhelming a
bit. Yeah, I, I think at some point
you'll spend more money on technology, robots and AI than
you will on labor. And I think that's, and I think
that's OK because I think the labor will be way more
meaningful. You know, you will have
everybody will be a manager effectively hands on.
I don't mean like, you know, patent leather shoes, you know,
in the corner office. I mean, you know, like at the
field. But imagine every tradesman,
every single electrician has a robotic apprentice to carry
their tools And like, go ahead and take the cover off that
breaker panel for me and do not drop it.
Like, OK, good job, little robot, good job, little buddy.
Like now I'm going to now I'm going to go do the, the the real
work, right. You know, it's like, you know,
you go ahead and rack that breaker in because I'm not about
arc flash today. Oh my God.
Yeah. Yeah.
And so, you know, I think you'll see a lot more of that.
And if we do it correctly, it's not going to be job loss.
You're going to continue to grow the community because you're
going to be having, you're going to be building so many more
plants. I, I don't think we're in a
bubble. I don't think the demand for
energy will ever go down. I think it will continue to go
up at the pace of which we can provide it as long as we could
do it in a sustainable way and and I think we can with
technology. Right on.
I guess one of the other questions that way is pretty
classic to the show is 1. If you could, you know, build a
futuristic city, what would it look like?
What what are you putting in it and and how are you living in
it? It was, oh man, I'm I'm weird.
I guess I'm weird. It would look like the Lord of
the Rings Hobbit huts on the outside and the Star Trek
holodeck on the inside. Oh my God, that is the nerdiest
answer I've ever heard. But I absolutely appreciate it
100%. I literally was talking about
this morning. I was like, am IA Hobbit.
I think I might be a might be a little Hobbit, but yeah.
OK, a mix of the TARDIS inside in like time Space doesn't exist
inside my Hobbit Hut and I have got holodeck.
I can make it anything I want whenever I want it to be that
way. Nice.
And if and if you need to go outside and you know, touch some
grass, boom, it's there. But yeah, bigger on the inside
as well because that you don't want to be banging your I'm
short, so I'm probably I'm Hobbit size anyway, so that's
not a problem for me. But you know what a Big Bang in
your head on on little Hobbit holes.
OK, perfect, perfect. I love that answer.
Another question is if you had to give a Ted talk on a non
nuclear topic, what would it be about?
Sugar free mixology. Oh wow, you said that like that
was like straight up off the head.
Yeah, so I am, I'm a diabetic, so and I have very particular
taste buds. Like I'm a flavor person.
I've got probably 100 flavor agents.
I make things all the time. My daughter's got that same like
like she's always mixing things right And like, I've got
recipes. I got all the stuff right.
Like if you want, if you want sugar free diet cherry and not
taste like cough syrup, you want like straight up maricino
cherry. It's watermelon and almond.
You mix almond extract and watermelon squirt, you've got
maricino cherry. Oh.
Let's see, you're a professional is what I'm here, right?
You throw a little like the spicy being Luan's in there.
You can start to get Luxardo cherry.
So like I can tune this. You know you want a smoked
pineapple jalapeno Margarita that's 0 calories like other
than the other, give them the tequila like 0 sugar.
Like yes, I'm like here's how you can be diabetic friendly and
not just drink Diet Coke water and unsweet tea like I got you.
I make any flavor you want. Wow, I am not diabetic, but I am
fascinated. Fascinated.
I, I've had a lot of diabetic patients where I'm like, man,
it, it's can't be the Doctor Pepper anymore.
Can't do that. Huh, OK, that is a really cool
answer. And now I need to know like the,
I need like a flow chart with all of the different flavor
profiles because I think that's absolutely fantastic as well.
You gave us your 5 words to make the world better.
If you could, you know, because I feel like you've got the
technology mind if you could bring in one type of technology
that you think could just like advance humanity, what do you
think it would be? Which one do I want to say out
loud? Oh my gosh, I am.
I don't know. There's the near term stuff and
then there's like the really out there stuff.
And so I try to keep, you know, I think I think quantum
computing is super interesting and I think there's a lot of
opportunity there, but I also think it's going to break the
simulation that we're in. Everybody wants a.
Disruptor until we're really disrupting and stuff.
Yeah, the world is changing in a pace that I don't think we're
ready for. And so that's the thing that
concerns me the most is fulfillment, meaning like, and,
and so I got different ideas on what that technology looks like.
But I think, you know, you know, we're all fighting a battle in
neurochemistry. Everybody that is rich tells you
it's not the money, but you can't learn that lesson without
learning that lesson by getting rich.
I think, you know, And so it's like, OK.
And I think it's that way for everything, right?
It's the hedonic treadmill. It's no, we're chasing something
that isn't the thing the neurochemistry is going to
reward us for. It's the thing that we think
it's what. Yeah.
So it's the fulfillment piece. It is the I'm doing something
meaningful. I'm it, it means something to
someone outside of me, to a community, to an environment, to
a machine, to outside of me. It's meaningful.
It's challenging. So it's not boring.
I'm growing in the pursuit of doing it.
I have a somewhat unique skill set that I can be proud of to
apply to it. And so it's, I would say it
would be a technology that allows people to discover what
those things are within themselves and help guide them
towards that in a, in a much simpler way than like a
lifetime's worth of therapy and self help looks.
Right, that is pretty dope. I I really appreciate that
answer as well. I literally just, I think I
just, I came across this post that was literally like the, the
deficit of fulfillment creates all of this chaos.
And I think, you know, more technology doesn't necessarily
solve it because it's all of that lack of fulfillment, but a
technology that allows you to discover fulfillment.
I'm like, oh, it's kind of met up and I appreciate it because,
yeah, it is, it is so helpful because, yeah, you've got so
many people that are like, what do I do?
How do I, how do I do these things?
And I think that I think that, you know, kind of ties back into
why nuclear is so sticky for so many individuals.
Is that like very niche sense of, of fulfilment that you're
like, I'm doing this one thing, but I can also see like the big
picture of who it helps and, and how it helps those people as
well, which I'm like, that's pretty amazing.
Yeah. And there's so many things out
there that are so hard to grasp on.
You got Simon Sinek giving you some great framework.
You've got Tony Robbins like circle chart of life thing that
you have to go balance. And you've got like Tom Bill,
you and his mindset stuff. And they're all super amazing,
but they're all also like heart. You know what, Like I almost
want like my own control room in my head.
It's like, oh, Ding, Ding, Ding, you're low on the community.
Like you need to prioritize this.
I've updated your schedule for you.
I've signed you up for these glasses or whatever.
So now you can raise this. It's like, oh, Ding, Ding, Ding,
you're low on like the family. Oh, Ding, Ding, Ding, you're low
on the spiritual or oh, Ding, Ding, Ding, you're low on skill
acquisition. Like I've weaked your habits,
opted you. I want the machine to prompt me
to do the things that aren't bad habits, right?
They're not just the thing I've fallen into doing that's not
optimal for me. And I wanted to say, hey,
remember, you want to be happy. Stop doing that.
Start doing this. That's interesting.
Instagram just came out with a new algorithm update.
So you're allowed to control what you see on your algorithm.
And to me, in my brain, I'm like, I'm seeing that evolve as
its own sort of like new commerce of like how do you
control essentially your heuristic of everything that
you're taking in in a day? I can also kind of see on the
horizon of being a lot more mindful of the technologies that
we're using and having it inform us in a way that's actually like
helpful to not just ourself, but our community as well.
All of which are pretty. I like how we got to this part
of the conversation where it's like these deep philosophical
truths of like fulfillment and satisfaction in life because
like that's really what we're all trying to kind of do anyway,
which I, I'm, I'm excited that, you know, for us it's kind of
like within that nuclear scope, but like, yeah, for other
people, you know, figuring out what that is and, and, and being
able to kind of facilitate that is also pretty exciting.
Yeah, I mean, and I I'm not surprised because I, I feel like
both of us back to the common I made near the top of hindered
spirits. We are both doing things because
it's the thing that we want to do now.
It's the best use of what we are and who we are right now.
It's, we're not stuck in a, in, in a, in a particular job or a
particular company or feel trapped or golden handcuffed or,
you know, or, or societally, you know, or parentally, you know,
judged into it. It's, you know, there's so many
or, you know, or, or just locked in for financial reasons or for
family reasons, or, you know, you've moved around a lot.
I've moved around a lot and we've gotten to the point where
we've acquired skills and said, look, I'm just going to do this
'cause this is what I want to do right now.
Yeah, I think, yeah, that, that it's very empowering.
And I, I like, I don't necessarily see myself as
inspirational. I'm pretty much having like a
goldfish memory and I'm like, I'd like to do what I like to
do, but it is fun to kind of interact with people and they're
like, wow, like you just do things.
And I'm like, well, yes, you're not doing things because I like
to do things. Philly, you like to do things.
So like we just like to do things and we're like, all
right, like we're just going to, we're going to go out and try
it. And I think it's, it's the
ability to learn along the way. Like I know I'm going to look
silly most of the time, Like I'm like, I I'll have to get over
that. I'll look back and be like, Wow,
that is cringe. But you know that that'll,
that'll be gross. But yeah, I think that's the,
the, the fun thing for me is kind of interacting with folks
that are not that are kind of, you know, kind of locked into
place in those different ways to just be like, yeah, you could
just do whatever you want. There's actually no rules.
Probably don't motor somebody. But like other than that, like
there's no rules. Like you can go.
Yeah, there are. Laws.
But yeah, I think that's, that's the thing that in order to like
really, you know, be fulfilled in in a, in a purposeful way is
you actually have to start doing stuff that you don't know
necessarily if it's going to work, work out.
And so because that's kind of where the excitement comes in.
And it's like, yeah, it isn't 100% certain that this is going
to make sense, but like we're going to do it anyway and see
how it turns out. But awesome.
This was a fantastic conversation.
I know we've gone a little bit over our normal podcast lengths,
but I think when you put it. Was two and one.
So like in my head it's 1 + 1. That's 2. 1 + 1 is 3.
Even better. And it can be 4 for extremely
large values of 1. Exactly.
It's a very nerd math joke. I'm thrilled that we got to have
this conversation that we kind of, you know, serpentined our
way through a bunch of different topics.
My key takeaways is I think a lot of times people look at
nuclear from the outside and be like, I can't do that.
I'm like, why not? The nice thing about the
industry especially because like you know, there is so much of A
community aspect that people are willing to take you know, 5
minutes to chat and, and help direct people and things like
that. Yeah, almost every role exists.
Go, go, apply. Go do it.
Right. Yeah, exactly.
Go play, go do it. Well, thank you so much for, you
know, being on my podcast and vice versa.
Thank you for the invite for your podcast.
Double kind of like crossover episode.
I always love the crossover episodes of the 90s, like very
classic, like those were always so fun to me.
But yeah, I'm, I'm super excited to kind of like get this out to
the people, but also just like to show the, you know, the
diversity within the industries of like, you know, you've
literally done all of the roles. My background is way over there
to the left. And so I think it's, it's
helpful to, for people to kind of see, you know, being able to
have those different, you know, not to say that we're role
models, but having like a, a picture of like, hey, this
person did it this way and this person did it that way.
There there aren't really no rules of how you can get into
this industry as long as you, you know, apply and start going
for it. Yeah, you just do it.
Just show up. Thank you so much.
This is a pleasure, your conversation, and I can't wait
to see you at the next event, wherever we might be.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Naked Nuclear and the
Future of Nuclear from Nuclear. We hope you enjoyed it.
To learn more about what Phil and the team are building at
Nuclear, you can go to Nuclear dot AI.
If you click on Nuclear in the news, you'll find their other
podcast episodes. Until next time, stay curious.