AI Broke the Grid; Nuclear Is How We Fix It

Everyone keeps saying nuclear is "having a moment." But Kevin McGinnis has heard that before — and this time, the pressure isn't coming from where you'd expect. In this live taping of The Disruption Lab, Kevin sits down with Jason Pottorff of Deep Fission, the company drilling reactors a mile underground outside Parsons, Kansas, and Dr. Amir Bahadori, who rebuilt Kansas State's nuclear engineering program from a handful of students into one of the fastest-growing programs in the country. Together they unpack what's actually different this time: the staggering electricity demand created by AI and data centers, a workforce gap that requires tripling the entire sector by 2050, and a public-trust problem that decades of safety still haven't solved. Jason explains why putting a small reactor under a mile of water makes a meltdown nearly impossible — and why "innovation, not invention" is the real strategy. Amir makes the case that the hardest engineering problem in nuclear isn't technical at all. It's communication. This is a conversation about systems change: how a 70-year-old technology gets a second chance, what an emerging "nuclear corridor" across Kansas and Missouri could mean, and the one thing both guests admit could send the whole industry backward overnight.