044 Shawn Connors, Author & Owner at Atomic Garage Movement

[00:00:00] Shawn Connors: George Carlin was a famous comedian. I mean, he just ripped people apart. His language was a little bit, rich. So, I wrote a little something down on what George Carlin might say about anti nuclear people. So, and this isn’t Mark Hinaman’s opinion or Shawn Connor’s. This is what George Carlin probably would have thought if he had a choice.

Anti nuclear people are a snotty little sociopathic group of hyper narcissistic, rich, pampered, Malthusian, putty butt, busybodies. Whose luxury, isolated lifestyle burn up Olympic sized swimming pools full of fossil fuels while telling the poor little boys of Sub Saharan Africa and India to keep burning water buffalo dung to heat up your 200 calorie tin cup of dirty soup where your mothers and sisters spend all day cleaning clothes and fetching rancid water.

We should seal these snobs up in Yucca Mountain. Kind of a soft caramel filling instead of the hard English toffee we were gonna put in there. That would give American taxpayers more than their money’s worth for building that 19 billion dollar political hellhole. The only way we’d let them out is they agree to debate Mark Nelson for an hour in the public square. That’ll teach them.

Nelson’s like pro nuclear Zorro. He’ll have their buttons zipped off and their bangs trimmed before he goes in for the kill. I say let’s turn off their valves and switches for a week and see how they like it. I just don’t like people that don’t like people.

So that’s what I think George Carlin would say about anti nuclear. You and I would have never said that. George Carlin would have said that, so we wouldn’t have said something like that. We’re more positive.

I tell everybody, the good guys are about to tell their story. This is the first time there’s ever been a positive story in popular culture about nuclear energy. We got more heroes in nuclear energy, I mean, than we did in our space program, you know.

[00:01:53] Intro: Just because the facts are A, if the narrative is B and everyone believes the narrative, then B is what matters. But it’s our job in our industry to speak up proudly, soberly. And to engage people that are in energy poverty, they need us. America cannot meet this threat alone. If there is a single country.

Of course the world cannot meet it without America. That is willing to. We’re gonna need you. The next generation to finish the need scientists to design new fuels. And focus on net public benefit. We need engineers to invent new technologies. Over absurd levels of radiation. Entrepreneurs to sell those technologies.

And we will march towards this. We need workers to operate a. Assembly lines that hum with high tech, zero carbon components. We have unlimited prosperity for all of you. We need diplomats and businessmen and women and Peace Corps volunteers to help developing nations skip past the dirty phase of development and transition to sustainable sources of energy.

In other words, we need you.

[00:02:57] Mark Hinaman: Welcome back to another episode of the Fire2Fission podcast. My name’s Mark Hinaman, and for this episode, I was joined by guest Shawn Connors. So Shawn is a fiction author, but he really enjoys the topic of nuclear energy and what it could do for society and the planet. And he thinks that it can be a hero for the planet. So he’s written a novel about it. And we talk about the novel. During this episode. Unfortunately, during the episode, we bounced back and forth between the novel and the real world. Uh, and kind of seamlessly and, uh, it, wasn’t always obvious when we went back and listened to it. Uh, What we were talking about the novel or the real world.

So we thought it’d be helpful to have a little bit of an introduction. Um, to just give the summary of the book. You know, something that you might see on the pamphlet on the first page. And then we’ll dive into the episode. So again, Shawn Connors’ book, a Chain Reaction, subtitle, a story about power in the age of climate. Change chain reaction as a novel set in the near future in 2027. Um, the books protagonist is a 19 year old science polymath by the name of Amy Austin, who takes on environmentalist and academy award winning actor, John Manning. The spokesperson for an anti nuclear group called the terrestrial ecology society. The two square off and a public debate over the fate of a nuclear plant in rural Michigan. But all is not as it seems. Amy is building a new nuclear reactor.

The technology is 30 years ahead. Small, light, safe, powerful, and affordable. The world energy market already in disarray is controlled by some of the most powerful people on earth who start making their moves ahead of the disruption they know Amy’s reactable cause. A chain reaction ripples around the globe. As an eco terrorist cell moves against Amy, her loyal group of unlikely characters, risked everything to protect and help her.

There is no going back. Time is running out. It’s now or never, and it was a breathtaking and dangerous race to save the planet -from ourselves. So that’s the little intro for the book. Hopefully it gives some context. Um, Shawn and I really enjoyed this conversation and recording this interview and we hope that you guys enjoy listening to it..

Okay. Welcome to another episode of the Fire2Fission podcast. My name is Mark Hinaman and I’m joined today, my guest is Shawn Connors. He’s the author of Chain Reaction, a story about power in the age of climate change. Shawn, how you doing?

[00:05:22] Shawn Connors: Good afternoon. Doing great. Thank you.

[00:05:25] Mark Hinaman: Awesome. Shawn, you and I met at a conference recently, and I’m excited to dive into kind of your background.

Why you enjoy nuclear but you’re, you’re actually a fiction writer, is that correct?

[00:05:39] Shawn Connors: I’m a fiction writer. And you caught me in a moment of moderation. I was eating chips and beer. You asked if I eat that regularly. So, that was kind of funny. So, that was

[00:05:55] Mark Hinaman: a weak moment. I’m amazed you

[00:05:56] Shawn Connors: invited me on your podcast.

Let me start as a reference point. I was born the year the Nautilus, the nuclear submarine Nautilus was launched. And that’s also the year that the shipping point nuclear plant power plant went online. I’m going to fast forward it, get past all the middle stuff. I’m kind of a cross between say, Walter Mitty and Forrest Gump.

I like to read a lot. I’ve got a voracious appetite for reading. And I’ve got above average skills in critical thinking. And so it’s a… That’s where I’ve got at this point in my life. I guess if I was a dog and and you were gonna try to rescue me out of a kennel, I’d be sitting there and a couple would walk in and I’d know it was my chance to be saved, I would look at them and I, I, I would focus primarily on the woman and I’d try to get her to look my way I’d use all the Dog sense I had my whole life and get her right on the edge of that magnet is and get her eyes looking at me and BAM!

I got eye contact and we have a connection and I know I’m gonna get that with that woman But not with the guy the guy’s gonna say is he housebroken, you know, does he bite? She’s gonna look at me and say he’s so cute. But they’re gonna say he’s a little older and she’s gonna say well He needed us, we could save him.

And she’s going to instinctively know that she had walked into that kennel that day just because she was going to meet me. Now at this point, the man’s thinking, well, he’s not going to fight this. I mean, is he really going to say, forget it, we don’t want this old dog and he’s going to walk out. But he’s going to instinctively know that.

She’s making the right decision because she has probably saved his bacon a number of times in his life in their relationship. Now we fast forward a little bit. I look at the world and I think the world is in a position where it needs to be rescued. I’m fairly convinced it’s instinctual.

I don’t know, they just have the instinctual sense to do it. Most of them, many of them are mothers. They’ll take care of their sons and daughters equally. I think about all the women around the world that have not been able to reach their potential in history. So we think of all the great men in history, the scientists.

It’s always usually a man’s name, and I think, what would happen if we could unleash all that talent in the world? And, you know, you listen to Robert Bryce, and he says, really what the women in the poor countries need is a washing machine. Now, why the men don’t do the laundry, I don’t know, but he says if you can free the women up from the laundry, if you can get them a little bit of refrigeration, if you can get them a light at night, I think that starts the tipping point to making the world a lot better.

And I just, you say, well how, okay, so how do you get to that point? To me at least, I think nuclear energy is probably the best way. Maybe natural gas to nuclear energy. You know, that kind of thing. I got into nuclear energy, I was always a little bit nervous about Palisades nuclear plant, which I’m sitting about four miles from right now.

And I grew up in this area south west Michigan. And my business, and I’m going to go back from where I’m at, I’m going to go backwards on my resume. So my business was a publishing business. We did employee communications. And so we had to get complicated things so people could understand them. One day I’d be at a trucking company, say in Atlanta, long haul truckers.

We had to teach them how to use their APAP machines at altitude so that they had cardiovascular issues. It’s a very unhealthy population. We had to get into cabs with them, figure out how to do this, figure out how to explain it, figure out what their problems are, put communication systems together for that.

Then I’d fly across country and I’d be at Sandia Labs. And we’d be teaching them about their pension plans, those kind of things. There was a great human resource director at Sandia Labs named Peter. I wish I could remember his last name. And I, I told him, I said, the place was fascinating. I think it was in the 90s and he said, well, let’s go have lunch.

Maybe we can talk to some of the people. So we’re having lunch and and I told those I was teasing the guys mostly because they reminded me of a Farsight cartoon. So Gary, Gary Larson, and if you haven’t seen Gary Larson’s Farsight cartoons, look them up cause they’re a riot. So we had a great laugh and we, a good relationship was developing.

And then I told them I was a little bit nervous about Palisades and they gave me some things to read and reassured me. You know, I think right about that time, Power to Save the World was probably being written, and And what’s that? It’s a book, Power to Save the World, a book by Gwen, help me with the last name, but highly recommended.

It’s a woman journalist that went from being somewhat anti nuclear to becoming pro nuclear. And she, she used a physicist at Cyndia Labs who was a friend of hers to take us on this journey. So I read that, that book came out in about 2010, I think. But anyways, I started learning more and more about nuclear at that point.

You know, kind of moved from there.

[00:11:46] Mark Hinaman: Well, let’s, let’s step back just a little bit, Shawn, I want to just summarize or say back to you a little bit. I mean, you, you were an author, you had your own publishing business, and then you discovered nuclear power, it sounds like, in about 2008 when you were at Sandia National Labs, or you had a book that was recommended to you, and you started digging into it.

Is that, did I get that right?

[00:12:07] Shawn Connors: That’s correct. So, So, so I was a publisher. A lot of what I did during that time was write sales and direct marketing copy. Did some public speaking, but wrote a lot of sales copy and, and, and also participated writing some of the copy for the communications, which simplified 401k plans and health plan benefits and things like that.

I see when I went to college, a

[00:12:33] Mark Hinaman: lot of technical writing or simplifying writing for corporate publications, we’ll say, but I mean, that stuff’s not super exciting. Maybe I’m wrong on that. Maybe you made it very exciting and engaging to read.

[00:12:47] Shawn Connors: Well, we use humor a lot. And so we use cards to use humor.

Yeah. Well, for example, so let’s say we’re, they got a health issue and obesity is one of the issues. Smoking is one of the issues. It’s, you can’t just keep pounding people overhead over this stuff. So, we would use a bear in the illustrations anytime we talked about obesity. We had a dragon woman that had given up smoking.

You know, and it was Boy, she’s really hot since she quit smoking. You know, we were doing things like that. And we would use funny quotations to underscore. So I’m a big, I love quotations. So that kind of went that route too. So what happened before, before I got into that publishing career in college I really went to college just to wrestle.

I was on the wrestling team in high school and college. I wrestled a little bit internationally and I ended up at Indiana university and my coach was an Olympic champion and he was most valuable wrestling the world that year. He pinned. an Iranian five time world champion named Habibi. And so his name was Doug Blubla.

And he was a Neanderthal man. I think he was a genetic, you know, he just, he just seemed like he came right out of the genetic profile of a Neanderthal man. And but his technique was outstanding. They’re still studying it today. It’s almost think of an eighth degree master black belt. He just had a technique.

And I even think now if the modern day wrestlers would go back and study Doug Buba’s technique, they would improve their performance quite a bit. So I documented his technique in a series of booklets. And this is before video was really big and everything. This is the late 70s, early 80s, and we went around the country together.

And I was the person he would demonstrate his moves on. And I was assistant coach for a couple of years. And we’ve sold literally thousands of those books, thousands of them. And that turned me pretty much into a capitalist pig right on the spot. I mean, I wanted to know, I got how

[00:15:02] Mark Hinaman: are we doing this? We’re going to make money.

Wow. Look at that.

[00:15:05] Shawn Connors: Yeah. And so I got into, well, tell me, I got interested in publishing and I got interested in direct marketing. You know, first I went, went to the school. I was at Indiana still. And I went to the business school cause I, I, I didn’t major in business and I just couldn’t find what I wanted on direct marketing.

I couldn’t, you know, and And publishing. I mean, the publishing was like the traditional, you go to New York and all that, but I wanted to self publish these booklets like I did with the coach. So I learned from myself on that and that, that ended up after I left Indiana, that ended up, long story short, I got involved in this business and it morphed into being an employee communications business, you know, and I, I did that for the next 35 years.

So I come to this point in my life now. I sold that business in 2016 after operating it 35 years and I had a great staff. In fact, a couple of them I’ve tapped to help me with this. And the writing, I think the sales copywriting probably is an asset in fiction writing because you’ve got to hold people’s interest and you’ve got to try to hold the story together.

You want to keep turning the pages, you know, we’re terrible. We want to keep people up all night reading books, you know, that kind of thing. So that’s kind of the history, you know, but I know you’re a capitalist too. I heard the idea on one of your podcasts. Now there’s what about 45 billion and, In a trust somewhere to handle our nuclear waste when we find a repository for it.

And if I’m not mistaken, you thought you could do that for 20 million and pocket the rest, see? Didn’t you say that on one It could be so easy.

[00:16:49] Mark Hinaman: I know. It’s not far off, right?

[00:16:53] Shawn Connors: So Ryan Pickering has the same idea, right? He goes, he tells NRC people that Hey, look at it. If you don’t have a place to put it, you can put it in my garage.

And I’m thinking, after listening to you, I know why he made that offer. If Jay Leno made that offer, we could probably fit it all in there. Don’t you think? Yeah.

[00:17:15] Mark Hinaman: Absolutely. Yeah. No, that’s fun. So okay. So you had this publishing business you discovered nuclear when you read a power to save power to save the world, the truth about nuclear energy.

Great book recommendation. So tell me about, I guess, when, after you’ve sold the business, how did you get into nuclear and why did you want to write a novel about? What kind of nuclear is the background and the premise?

[00:17:38] Shawn Connors: If you’re getting on a highway on a ramp, you kind of slowly get on and escalate your speed, you know.

It wasn’t a rocket launch for me from the days in Sandia. It was like I’d notice an article here and there and I’d read it. Or I might be at the bookstore and I’d notice something, I’d pick it up. And then it got, that started, that type of activity started picking up. By the time I sold the business in 2016, I was…

Paying a lot more attention. I think, you know, I lived through I lived through Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. And I lived through Fukushima and I remember all those things when they were happening. So by the time Fukushima happens I realize they’re not being accurate on TV with the news.

They’re scaring the heck out of everybody. And what they’re saying about the radiation coming across the Pacific and things washing up and… The west coast of the United States and I just I remember telling my wife said that just can’t that’s just can’t be possible based on some of the stuff I read, you know, and so that was kind of like, all right, I escalated a little bit more there and what about this waste?

What about radiation? And, you know, a lot of people that are in this community kind of went through these different phases. So by 2016, I’m, you know, I’m selling the business. It’s one of those things. I sold it faster than I I anticipated, so I had nothing to do really quick. And I just started picking up more.

[00:19:09] Mark Hinaman: This is like my biggest fear in the world, I tell you what, man. Being bored, like, oh my god. You’re not going to be in this business, though. I’m going to actually, you know, deal. You’re,

[00:19:17] Shawn Connors: I mean, you’re, you’re like You’re like Fire to Fission, right? Is the name of your podcast? Yeah. So, okay. So the anti nuclear technique now is, let’s just say fusion’s going to come out, we won’t need fission.

And, in fact, this is probably going to happen in the next two weeks. And then I think, you know, what’s Mark going to do? He’s got, he’s kind of stuck, but I thought, no, just change, you can just change your logo to Fission to Fusion and you’re all set. You can keep going forever. Yep. You know, we’re adding that.

I think that domain’s

[00:19:51] Mark Hinaman: already taken, so we gotta, we’ll have to buy it, but, yeah.

[00:19:54] Shawn Connors: You need fire to, to Fission to Fusion. And, and fine or something. .

[00:20:00] Mark Hinaman: Perfect. Yeah, something. Okay. So sorry I cut you off, but you, you were, I like the metaphor of an on-ramp versus a rocket launch, so you were getting more and more engaged in it.

Then you sold your business and

[00:20:12] Shawn Connors: Yeah. And I think started writing. Yeah. Who’s it? Dr. Is it Dr. Keer in Canada? Keefer. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is the kind of guy, you throw him in the crib and he’s saying, can we speed this process up? I gotta go save the world. I just love that guy, listening to him and everything.

He said once that of all the things he, the great things he’s done in his life, he felt like nuclear energy was the area where he could make the greatest contribution. And I, I thought, you know, as I’m sitting here with you today, I think I’m in that space. I feel that way when I think about nuclear energy today.

Some of the greatest people I’ve met in the last few years have been at these nuclear conferences, and it’s a, it’s a mission oriented community. It’s, it’s, they have the, they kind of have fiduciary to the public. They’ve got the public’s best interest in mind over their own. I mean, it’s just incredible.

And so, but what got, to be honest with you, being an athlete, what gets an athlete to get up at five in the morning before anybody knows who they are? And before they’ve accomplished anything, and when they start training their butt off, what makes them do that? Because they’re not famous at the point, right?

So if you ask around, what really, what really is the ignition on some of that thing is they just don’t like somebody and they want to beat them. You know? So in my case, when I was a kid, there was this guy, he beat me in wrestling, I was a sophomore, junior year in high school, and I just did not like him.

I was never going to let that happen again. And so I, Dan Gable had just won the Olympics in 72. I had a big poster of him on my bedroom wall. And I just, it just took over. I just started working out six, seven hours a day, going at it. And every day I would think about how I wanted to beat the hell out of this guy.

The year comes around, you know, and I’m back on the mat with this guy. And well. I beat them pretty easily, but it was like, I was beyond that at that point. I had, now I started thinking it’d be fun to win the state championship. It’d be fun to wrestle in college. You know, and I got that, that kind of, the thing that got me going kind of took me to a new direction.

The same thing happened later in my life in nuclear energy. I just did not like the anti nuclear people. You know, I just, they irked me. I, I like to say those imps irked me. So, I wanted, but they were smart. I watched a speech by Ralph Nader once when I was at a conference, and I just wanted to throw my chair at them, but it, it, it just, it, it just, how do you count them?

They, to me, they were smart, they were intelligent, they were well funded. If I’m going to take them on I better know what I’m doing, and I better be able to think faster on my feet. So, it was a training Type of thing. I, I mean, just start absorbing everything I could about nuclear. I studied the people that were good, good debaters at it.

You know, that kind of thing. And I I’ve got a little acid test, I think. When I don’t like somebody, I wonder what George Carlin would have said about it. Remember him, the comedian, George Carlin? So, if you want, I go… I

[00:23:45] Mark Hinaman: don’t.

[00:23:47] Shawn Connors: George Carlin was a famous comedian. I mean, he just ripped people apart. His language was a little bit, rich. So, I wrote a little something down on what George Carlin might say about anti nuclear people. So, if you, if you want to hear it. But I’ve taken all the, knowing we have a family show. Yeah, let’s hear it. Let’s hear it. So, and this isn’t Mark Hinaman’s opinion or Shawn Connor’s This is what George Carlin probably would have thought if he had a choice.

Anti nuclear people are a snotty little sociopathic group of hyper narcissistic, rich, pampered, Malthusian, putty butt, busybodies. Whose luxury, isolated lifestyle, burn up Olympic sized swimming pools full of fossil fuels while telling the poor little boys of Sub Saharan Africa and India to keep burning water buffalo dung to heat up your 200 calorie tin cup of dirty soup where your mothers and sisters spend all day cleaning clothes and fetching rancid water.

We should seal these snobs up in Yucca Mountain. Kind of a soft caramel filling instead of the hard English toffee we were gonna put in there. That would give American taxpayers more than their money’s worth for building that 19 billion dollar political hellhole. The only way we’d let them out is they agree to debate Mark Nelson for an hour in the public square.

That’ll teach them. Nelson’s like pro nuclear Zorro. He’ll have their buttons zipped off and their bangs trimmed before he goes in for the kill. I say let’s turn off their valves and switches for a week and see how they like it. I just don’t like people that don’t like people. So that’s what I think George Carlin would say about anti nuclear.

[00:25:25] Mark Hinaman: Shawn, we need to put you in charge of all public communications for Fire2Fission. And written in the voice of George Carlin.

[00:25:34] Shawn Connors: And you ought to watch some of his videos. You’ll see how this ties in. So, but it’s kind of negative. You and I would have never said that. George Carlin would have said that, so we wouldn’t have said something like that.

We’re more positive. So I have also something that, there’s a guy named Don Ardell, who was a wellness guru back in the 90s. He was like a triathlete and a hippie and just a colorful character. I just love the guy. So, what he would say about wellness, I’m going to paraphrase it for pro pro nuclear energy advocates.

So you ready for this? Pro nuclear energy advocates. Ready? Here we go. Pro nuclear energy advocates are fun, romantic, hip, sexy, and free. People that advocate for nuclear energy are better looking, have higher morale, superior bowel movements, and more antibodies against disease. They also become wildly popular, tax exempt, and get elected to office.

And they get assigned to nuclear regulatory bodies that approve the construction of big, huge nuclear plants by the dozens. And 10, 000 small modular reactors at a time. And everybody, everywhere, loves them for it. So I think that’s what Don Ardell would have said about pro nuclearity.

[00:26:49] Mark Hinaman: I love it. That’s great.

[00:26:52] Shawn Connors: So that’s, I don’t, you know, I, I, I just love this nuclear energy space. And I, it’s, it’s, can do good for the world. And I think what, you know, in every conference you go to, Or when you, even when you talk to the advocacy community. Seems like the advocacy community and the nuclear industry community are kind of melding.

They seem like two separate things for a while. But they say it’s not the technology, it’s the communication. And I think, you’ve got such a good story, but you haven’t told it. I mean, argue, I mean, this document Documentary Nuclear Now by Oliver Stone just came out. That was pretty good. But it was, we’re kind of pounding, you know, we’re kind of putting the technology in front of people all the time.

I mean, we’re arguing about how it’s safe and it’s, it’s dense. It doesn’t need to be refueled. It powers a lot of stuff. All that stuff is true. But what do you want when you go into a hardware store? If you, if you go, let’s say you need a drill, right? And you’re going to go in a hardware store. You really don’t want the drill, you want the hole, right?

And we just seem like we’re always selling the drill. We gotta sell the hole. And I thought, what could my contribution be in this world in nuclear energy? And it’s almost like my, I wish I would have got at this sooner. I wish I would have discovered nuclear energy sooner, and maybe my career would have been more tied to it.

But I thought, no, I’m coming at it from a different place, and my whole life, my whole career has prepared me for it, for this moment. I go to a nuclear conference now, and I sit around a table with all these wonderful people, scientists, engineers, suppliers graduate students. You know, and I say, well, what do you do?

And I say, I’m a fiction author. And it just changes the chemistry. Right away, they’re interested. You know, and I tell, I tell them, I tell you, I tell everybody, the good guys are about to tell their story. This is the first time there’s ever been a positive story in popular culture about nuclear energy. We got more heroes in nuclear energy, I mean, than we did in our space program, you know.

They’re in fossil fuels too. I know you’re from the fossil fuel world. And, and I like, I like your, your, the Fire2Fission in all seriousness. We should allow everybody in Africa. India, whatever, burn the next most dense fuel you have available. I don’t care what it is, get off the straw. Yep. And go to the oil, put your D use diesel if you got it.

Use natural gas if you’ve got it. You know, get ’em moving right down that density line. And if you study energy for any amount of time, you know that’s a way to go. So, you know, like here in Michigan and I’m not really, I’m kind of anti wind. I’m more supportive of solar. I think solar on top of what it’s powering, without touching the grid, is a good thing.

I mean, if I can put solar panels on my roof and power my water heater and some of my refrigerator, that’s not a bad thing. I don’t want to go, but don’t let it go out in the grid and screw everything up. You know, just keep it right where it’s at. Wind is going to be probably the biggest debacle of our century, I think.

I, I just do not understand it, and I’m a little bit more. You know, when you go to these nuclear conferences, first of all, I’m retired, I’m not from the industry, so I can say anything I want, but when you go to the nuclear conferences, there’s always this huge elephant in the room, you know? We need all of the above.

Well, wait a minute. What do you want, why do you want to put in a monster dam in Africa? It’s going to disrupt all the wildlife migration. It’s going to litter those savannas. I mean, why don’t you use like a combine natural gas plant or start using small modular reactors and leave the animals alone and, and, and maintain the beauty of that country.

And I think the people in Africa you know, and then you say, well, why don’t they use it now? Some people in your audience will probably know this, but the banks that loan money to Africa for development prescribe how that money is spent. So they’re not, they’re unable to leverage, as we have been able to throughout our history access to fossil fuel development.

And there’s more natural gas off the coast of Africa. We could power the world probably for another 100, 150 years. It seems like the more natural gas they find, the more natural gas they find. And so I’d like to see the developing countries be allowed to move down the density path as fast as possible.

And that could be fire, fission, fusion, you know, I think wind and solar are kind of an ancillary thing, kind of a side dish, you know.

[00:32:15] Mark Hinaman: So Shawn, I like your approach, you’ve gone, you’ve immersed yourself in this industry and met a lot of characters and real life characters and then identified a niche where you thought you could, contribute, right? So let’s circle back to your book. I mean, it sounds like that motivated you to write a book and bring to light some of the Realities that exist in the real world through your skill set of storytelling and, and writing. And you’ve, you did that with your novel Chain Reaction,

[00:32:49] Shawn Connors: right?

Yes.

[00:32:51] Mark Hinaman: So talk to us a little bit more about, I mean, I know you covered it a little bit already, but kind of, what was your inspiration for this book? Who’s the protagonist? Why, why was she a hero and what were you trying to accomplish with it? And not without, you know, giving spoiler alerts to people, but.

Okay. Yeah.

[00:33:12] Shawn Connors: So in the book, you know, I talk about the power of women. And we’re going to launch this on Marie Curie’s birthday, November 7th. The book uses a woman protagonist. So, Amy Austin is a 19 year old science polymath in the book. And the book opens at, when she’s 19, about to turn 20.

And in the first early drafts of the book, we had her as a little girl, and we had Frank Austin, her father, as a protagonist. But after going through different reviews, we switched that, and we made Amy the protagonist at age 19. And we decided, let’s surround her with strong women. Now remember, you’re the dog in the let’s say in the best friend’s rescue kennel.

And that’s how the men and the women kind of operate in this story. The women are, there’s powerful men in this story. And they cooperate and they’re engaged in the story the whole way. But if you really read the story closely, it’s the women that are leading the action and making things happen. So it all starts with Amy Austin, who probably at a young age, her parents realized she was special.

She has an aunt, and Jolene Grassley, who ends up becoming the mayor of the small town they’re in. Jolene Grassley is married to Stu Grassley, former Navy guy. I thought you guys would like that. He moves to Algonquin, Michigan, which is a fictional town. And between Jolene Grassley and Stu Grassley, who are kind of a…

Adopted uncle and aunt and Becky Austin and Frank Austin, who are Amy Austin’s parents. They probably, from her beginning, they put a protective shell around her, like, Jolene Grassley’s a heavyweight political fight, street fighter. She probably could have gone somewhere, but she decides to stay in Algonquin, becomes mayor of the town, and they’re trying to save the local nuclear plant, which we call The Rock, in the story.

And that’s kind of like, we, we, so we’ve got the small town set up with a small nuclear plant that’s similar to what’s going on here in South Haven with this Palisade, which is the 800 megawatt nuclear plant, currently shut down. So we modeled after P or Palisades, and so we have ’em in this plant.

So now this was about 2020 or so Eric Meyer from Generation Atomic. It got his team together, and they sent out, this is true now, I gotta, I guess I gotta tell you, I’m moving from fiction to… Yeah,

So I felt you know, I thought the story needed to be told in fiction. Fiction has done a good job of attacking nuclear, or diminishing it.

[00:36:03] Mark Hinaman: Yeah, it’s often, it’s always the bad guy, right? Even, I mean, Top Gun, right? There’s an enrichment facility. That, that, that was the target that they were going after, right?

And Top Gun Maverick, and then it’s always, oh man, the nuclear power plant’s gonna get blown. But there was, there is one in Cloud Atlas. The oil companies blow up the nuclear power plants, and then it ends up in this dystopian sort of view that, you know, that’s, that’s kind of a fun one for me to dive into.

[00:36:29] Shawn Connors: Maybe my critical thinking started back in the… When was it, the 70s when chain or China syndrome came out and the big, the big line in that movie is the reactor will burn through the coral of the earth and come out on the other. I said, well, wait a minute. Isn’t the core of the earth like molten?

And you know, this is before, I mean, that didn’t make any sense, you know, right there. It’s like, something’s wrong with this story. But I felt like it was. It’s time for the good guys to tell their story. That’s kind of what my mantra is. So if you look at science NASA’s got astronauts. I mean, you know, the Manhattan Project has some, maybe you just saw Oppenheimer.

But again, that’s kind of tied to nuclear weapons. That’s, it’s not a completely positive message about peaceful nuclear energy. So I thought, what, what the, what we really need is a story that has a protagonist that the public can relate to. They don’t need to know about nuclear energy. They need to know about what this young woman wants to do at this point in history.

When she looks at her life as a gifted person and realizes she can make a difference, what path is she going to take? And what kind of help is she going to need? And, you know, she’s going to be one of these people that do start a chain reaction and change the world. I mean, those people do exist. So it was about this time I, I went back and got my editor Jen Cronin who we’ve worked together in the past and now she’s been very helpful on this project and she has a lot of experience in the healthcare sector and in the energy sector as a writer and editor.

And she has some kids, a wonderful family and young kids and she wants a better world for them. So we would, we would spend a lot of time on this. Now we wrote a 500 page novel and threw it away and started over. And it was about this time we were agonizing over, because it was a good novel, but it was like we wanted, we wanted this chance for this novel to be a movie.

So we were talking to scriptwriters on, how would you like a book written if you were going to turn it into a movie? And that’s before we even started writing the book. So we were going down that, we were anticipating success, but it was hard to get that product where it needed to be. And then I was going to tell you earlier, Eric Meyer surfaces with this idea, Of writing the Sierra Club and asking them to reconsider going pro nuclear like they were in the beginning of their existence.

And a lot of people signed that letter, including a lot of people that are members of the Sierra Club. And basically they responded, you know, pound sand. It was like, no way they were going to do this, and they doubled down on it. And then, that was kind of the end of that. And I always admired those guys for doing that.

I thought, you know, that’s a ballsy thing. That’s kind of cool. I mean, go right at them. I mean, the Sierra Club

[00:39:32] Mark Hinaman: for doubling down on their misguided morals, but…

[00:39:37] Shawn Connors: Yeah. So, you know, incidentally, this is a whole different topic, but if you’re a pro nuclear advocate, go after anti nuclear people. Find them. Don’t sit back and wait to hear about it.

Search the internet and find out who’s writing editorials, who’s in front of the NRC, and go challenge them. Don’t let them say the things that they’re saying because they’re not true. A lot of the things they say aren’t true. So anyway, I thought, okay, what if Generation Atomic sent that letter to Sierra Club and something different happened?

You know, what if they were in Little South Haven here and Palisades was going to change their reactor to a MOX reactor, the first one in the United States since the Carter administration? The very technology that was invented here that France adopted, and now they recycle their nuclear fuel. What if we went back and started doing it here in the United States, and we were going to start it right here, but we needed a license extension on this plant?

I would think the anti nuclear community would be very aggressive about making sure they didn’t get that license extension, because they don’t want the other 92 reactors in the United States switching over to MOX fuel either. So, they, they have a movie star that’s on their board, and because his grandmother actually founded the the, it’s called TESS, Terrestrial Ecology Society, and founded it.

So, they, they offered to send their Academy Award winning movie star to Little Algonquin, Michigan, to debate anybody that the Atomic Rodge Movement wants to put up against them. And they put Amy up against this guy, and that kind of starts the dynamic tension in the story. And all my antagonists, I try to give the reader more dimension to, more of a, more than a single dimension to them.

You’re going to understand why they are against nuclear energy. I’m going to try and put you inside their head. I’ve been inside it a little bit, and I want you to know why somebody advocates that way. So, I, I build in their backgrounds, and I build in their passions, and, and Josh Manning’s case, he’s the actor.

His mother’s kind of a Rachel, or his grandmother was kind of a Rachel Carson character. And I’m a big fan of Rachel Carson in the 60s. If you ever go back and read her work, it’s, it’s some of the most fabulous writing on nature that’s ever been written. She’s been a little bit… You know, picked on because she was against DDT in the 60s.

But if you really read what she was saying, she just thought there was more testing needed to be done and that they were overdosing the environment with it. Which all turned out to be true, but she died of cancer as her book was called Silent Spring was the name of the book. And she died of cancer so she wasn’t really able to defend herself or defend her book.

She did talk about some of the waste coming out of our test facilities from nuclear plants, which were dedicated at the time to weaponry. And she had a legitimate point about that waste being discharged into the rivers. And as a result, I think the anti nuclear movement kind of was born with Rachel Carson.

And had we listened to her then, or had, had she lived possibly, maybe that whole discussion would have gone down a different path. You know, it’s one of those things, we look at history, things turn on a dime. I always wonder what would, what would our world be like today if Rachel Carson had lived and been able to defend her, her book, because it had a dramatic impact on nuclear energy.

And, and then in the 60s, it just exploded. It, they you know, there’s talk, even, even in the, even in the oil world they say that the big oil companies really were anti nuclear because they, they didn’t want the nuclear fuel to displace the, Fossil fuel. And, you know, my research says that, yeah, some of that’s true, but like everything in reality, it’s more nuanced than that.

I mean, it has a little bit to do with property and mineral rights. The mineral rights for natural gas and everything are below private property owners, and they can benefit from that. But if, back in the day, if the government would have taken control of nuclear fuel, and fossil fuel started phasing out in the 60s, the government would have been in control of all energy today.

Because of that there wouldn’t have been property right there. They’re not going to let you there’s not as much uranium as there is natural gas under the earth, and they’re not going to let property rights extend to nuclear fuel. So there were a whole bunch of things. So even even if the there’s a fossil fuel community, a natural gas consortium that is in this story, and you would think they’re going to be the bad guys, but it’s nuanced.

So I’m going to let you inside their world a little bit and You’re going to see what the world looks like from the perspective of natural gas producers in the story as well. And so, we have this, this everybody’s kind of, you’ve got natural gas, you’ve got, you’ve got the anti nuclear NGO community, you’ve got the pro nuclear community, and Amy’s going to come up with this nuclear reactor.

Because her father’s able to invent a fictional alloy called sartorium. And they’re able to jump the technology 20 years. And really, the story’s about what would happen if that actually happened. It’s been done before. I mean, you could argue Edison did that with electrical distribution. You know, I, I, I had been part of a team that we the 1870s.

They had to distribute that energy to those mechanical devices, and if one of those mechanical devices failed, the next one had to be able to continue to work. So you had to have, you had to build your grid so that all the stock tickers on the network would work, even if one failed. And it is from that work that Edison developed his dynamo, and then figured out how to distribute DC electricity.

So, I think the light bulb was almost simultaneously invented by another inventor in France, but it was Edison’s power generation and power distribution that made that unique. And he probably jumped the technology 10 or 20 years when he did that. The same thing with the Wright Brothers. Wind tunnels were in use, but the Wright Brothers really saw the potential of using wind tunnels in testing.

And they quickly figured out thousands away their Wing would not work and by the time they had achieved flight They probably jumped that technology 20 years So this has happened in history several times where you have incremental improvements and then all of a sudden you’ve got this Giant leap so that that goes on.

Yeah And as far as the reactor goes I was referred to a guy named Jeremy Smith He’s a he’s working on his Or his Ph. D. degree at the University of Florida. And he volunteered to help be our technical advisor on the book. And his, his charge was, Can you make, we want our readers to make a short leap.

We want it to go from fiction to reality. And we gotta, we gotta ask him to suspend reality. But we don’t want to ask him to put too much energy into that. So, he just, he just grabbed onto this project. And he, he’s been a blast to work with. So at the end Amy’s gonna explain how the reactor works in about a 500 word or 600 word excerpt of a speech that she gives.

So everybody in, in the, your community, in the nuclear community, will be able to read how the actual nuclear reactor works with this fictional alloy in it. And so it’s kind of cool. I think, you know, you’re gonna say, hey man, this is like impossible. Yeah. And the other thing, Jeremy, we just need the alloy.

Yep, the alloy made it possible. So, and we needed the alloy to make it possible. And then the other thing that happened is M Rod is a real company in Australia. We use Copenhagen Atomics in our story. Whenever we use real organizations like that, we ask for their permission to be included in the book.

So we sent our we sent our Manuscript to M Rod, we were ready and they were thrilled. Oh yeah, you can use our name in the book. So M Rod transmits power through the atmosphere. And we, before we talked to them, and we were just on their website, we were studying some of the work they do in that field, Stanford, and just brainstorming and, and I ended up really just kind of imagining how it would work.

And Jeremy wasn’t with us at the time. I don’t know if you hear the, there’s a It’s a cigarette bolt behind us firing up, burning all kinds of fossil fuel across the river from where I’m sitting. But so Jeremy wasn’t with us at the time. MRAC got back to us and said, We’re thrilled you’re going to use our name in the story.

We like the fictional characters you’ve built around our company, but you’ve really underestimated our technology. So this is, I was making it all up. I mean, I was, I was hoping they could do someday what we had in the story, and it turns out we actually undershot what they were doing now. So, we geared that back up.

That’s crazy. And I said, we gotta, we gotta up our game in this atmospheric transmission thing. This is like the real deal. They’re doing this stuff. So he said, let me look into it, and he studied how it worked, and we rewrote that whole section of the story. And I’m actually thinking one of the greatest things that come out of this story is more of awareness of that technology because our grid is a mouse and if there is a technology out there where we can do atmospheric transition in the near future you know, I think, I think it’s going to be pretty cool.

[00:49:51] Mark Hinaman: I guess I’m totally unfamiliar with it. What is this, Amarok? I’m googling it now. Unleashing power beaming technology today. Yeah,

[00:49:57] Shawn Connors: EMROD, they’re in New Zealand. They’ve been doing this for a while, they’ve got an interesting story, they’ve got a dynamic leader, you know, and so that’s, we needed that technology in our book.

The only thing we really made up in the book that, I mean from a technological standpoint when you read it is we made up Sartorium. And the sad, little bit of a sad happy story, but my friend Tony Sartor, Anthony Sartor, University of Michigan grad PhD, and He was my neighbor in Florida, we actually live in Florida and we come back to our original home in Michigan for a couple years of the summer.

And Tony was an engineer by training and it was the very first time I had this idea, it was just like, I’m thinking maybe I’ll write a fiction book about nuclear energy. And he was all in and he couldn’t stop talking about it. He, you need to read this, you need to read that, come on, get writing, do it. I don’t think if it was for him, I would have really…

Started digging into it as much as I did, but at every step he gave me enthusiasm and support and notes and all kinds of, we just, then we’d go to lunch and talk endlessly about it. It was, it was kind of fun, but we hadn’t even really, it was very in the beginning. Well, during the project, Tony died unexpectedly.

So he’s a little bit older than I am, but it was a surprise. We didn’t think we were going to lose him. So I dedicated the book to Tony Sartor. And then I named the fictional alloy after Tony, and we call it Sartorium, and that’s where that comes from. And Tony’s responsible for some of the properties that we built into that concept, and you know, it just it’s just kind of, it’s kind of a sad, happy story, I think.

You know, I, I wish he was here to see us launch the book. I think you will be, though. Me too.

[00:51:57] Mark Hinaman: Well, Shawn, that’s fantastic. I’m excited for people to read this novel. I think it’s an excellent piece of work and project that you’ve put into trying to humanize this industry and this technology and tell the story.

Even through fiction, but actually make, make it a hero, right? Like leverage it from a, from a side that hasn’t been popular before. So, before we run out of time, I want to touch on the atomic garage movement also. So, and your, your guys’s book, the quick road to nuclear. What, what is this? Why’d you get it started?

And yeah, give us a little bit of background and how can people find it?

[00:52:35] Shawn Connors: Okay the, the world has a lot of good nuclear advocacy groups in it. So, when we started, this is a publishing platform, basically. So I’m a publishing, I’m, I’m from the publishing world. The, the Atomic Garage Movement is actually the name of this movement in the fictional story.

So it’s a way because nuclear reactors will, in the story, will fall so much in price that they’ll be within the range of small business and groups all over the world. They’ll be able to manufacture them from scratch for about 10 million per copy. The only thing they won’t be able to get a hold of is the fuel.

And the story shows you how we… Overcome that problem. That was a huge thing to overcome in conceptualizing, but I think at the end of the day, you’re going to finish the story and say, gosh, you know, this is really possible that there could be sanctioned nuclear reactors being of this quality and expense being put in all over the world, but there might be some unsanctioned ones to scientists may form small groups and power different parts of the world without anybody’s permission.

How could that be done? And so that was part of how So the Atomic Garage Movement is really people that have decided they want to adopt this technology all over the world. And then we named our company the Atomic Garage Movement as well in real life. And the Atomic Garage Movement is going to be a fictional extension of these stories.

So, when you go to the we’re going to evolve into that. So when you go, you’re going to, you’re going to see the characters working in the Atomic Garage. You’re going to see they might have podcasts. They might have classes there’ll be simulations and videos. For instance, in the book, there’s a song that a lady who’s a lyricist writes.

And, you know, we might go to Nashville and try to find somebody to help us actually we’ve got the… The words to the song, we might go and try to find somebody to help us write the music to the song. Maybe that’ll become the theme song for the book. So, it’s gonna be this artistic… I’ll help you, Shawn.

Okay, I just heard you on the piano. music to it. Yeah, I mean, let’s look at Grace Stanky on the violin and you on the piano. And I think that’s appropriate. Perfect. That’d be great.

[00:54:58] Mark Hinaman: Yeah. Mark Nelson plays too. We’ll get him to contribute a little bit.

[00:55:03] Shawn Connors: Oh, okay. That’s great. I, you know, I just met him well, I’ve known of him and I just met him for the first time when I was in London.

So, Yep. He’s a good guy. Felt like I was, he was a celebrity to me.

[00:55:18] Mark Hinaman: Well, so, I mean, this pamphlet that you guys put together is excellent, right? It’s your, it’s your quick re, quick road to nuclear energy. I mean, I went through it, it’s not a quick read necessarily, it’s it’s still like 50 pages, but I mean, big text, lots of pictures, you can get through it in half an hour to an hour if you just…

[00:55:38] Shawn Connors: So yeah, it’s a non fiction accompaniment to the fiction book. And it’s posted on our website now. It’s a free PDF download. And we’ll work with anybody in the country who wants to adapt it for nuclear advocacy work. It’s organizing the 21 questions that Jen and I decided we had to answer for ourselves.

Because as we started writing this book, the first thing you run into is it’s… For somebody that hasn’t grown up in this industry, like, and gone to the school and all the training, at first, not later, but at first, it’s a, it’s a hard nut to crack. I mean, it’s, it’s hard to understand everything going on.

It’s hard to really grasp what the issues are. So, we sat down and we wrote down 21 questions we wanted the answer to. And we wanted detailed answers. And we thought, if we do that exercise, we’re going to be able to write this book a lot better, because we’ll have the foundation. to write the book if we know the answers to these questions.

And so we started writing down the questions, and writing down the answers, and we ended up actually putting down the fiction project for a while because we thought this is important enough that we’ve got to focus on this until we get it done. And so that’s what we did. And, and so now that, that booklet kind of is really what trained Jen and I.

To be able to put together a fiction novel, but it’s got almost any, if you don’t know much about nuclear energy or you want to learn more about it, it’s got probably every question you would, you know, somebody not in the industry would probably want to ask.

[00:57:23] Mark Hinaman: Yeah, I thought it was an excellent resource that could be distributed to.

Advocates and organizations that are trying to educate people or trying to educate public officials. Like, yeah, I was very consumable. I’ll say thorough you know, and we’ll be really, really helpful. So, and you guys make it available, right? I mean, it’s a, it’s a link on your website. Anyone can access it and distribute it.

[00:57:45] Shawn Connors: Yeah, yeah, the more the merrier spread it all over the world. Yeah, that

[00:57:50] Mark Hinaman: was really good. So we’ll, we’ll put, we’ll post a link to it. Well, Shawn, I’m excited. I, I have to admit I didn’t get a chance to finish the manuscript that you had sent me. Okay. But I’m excited to do that and excited for kind of your book to go live.

Hopefully we’ll be releasing this close to you guys’ Kindle live date. And you said it’s available on Amazon now, or available for pre-order?

[00:58:11] Shawn Connors: Yeah, the, the Kindle version is available for pre-order. We’re working out the the print and audio are, are gonna be on a, we have multiple narrators in the audio.

We’re probably going to translate it to Spanish, hopefully on day one, because there’s a lot of people, at least in North America, that are speaking Spanish, and probably other languages, but we’re going to wait and see where it becomes popular. And we’re starting to turn the corner and thinking about book two already.

I think a lot of that story is going to take place in Africa and we’re starting to reach out to the nuclear energy community in Africa and any energy community in Africa to understand what their issues are a little better and try to figure out what the future world is going to look like or could possibly look like with Amy Austin in it.

So, we’ll see how that goes. I like

[00:59:06] Mark Hinaman: it. I guess pivoting back to the real world leave us on a vision of hope, how and, and positive optimistic version of the future. What, what’s it look like to you? What’s the next 10, 20 years look like and how do we get

[00:59:19] Shawn Connors: there? Well, let me start by saying that, you know, I’ve been around a little while now and my life experience and all the reading I’ve done, usually the optimists are correct.

We live in a pessimistic day to day world, but over the long term. The optimists have usually proved to be correct, and their achievements almost go unrecognized. You have to study to understand what humanity has been able to accomplish since the industrial age. I don’t think we should be anti fossil fuels.

I think we should put those dense energies where they’re needed. I think the best hope for the future are the women in the world, where we can… Bring them into the, the community as contributors to technology and policy and innovation. And I don’t say that at the neglect of say little boys or young men.

I just think bringing more women in at higher levels is going to help all of humanity. And, and that may, that may not happen if we can, if we can get. electrical power to them, but it will never happen if we don’t. So the first job of, of, of being a humanist, where you believe that people are good, and the more you empower them, and the more they reach their potential, the better the world’s going to be, including the earth, and including the wildlife, and everything we all say we have in common.

You’ve got to get energy to the women. And I mean, if there’s a galactic guardian out there that’s looking at the gate, he’s saying they’re still too hostile, they’re still too oppressive you know, they, they, they’re corrupt, they’ve just got too far to go to let them in our community. I think the first step to getting past that gatekeeper is we have to free up the woman and we’ll unleash 100 percent more talent than is out there right now.

And I personally believe more energy in the world. More women in, in higher positions, the less chance there is of violent conflict at both, at every level. So, I think if you’re, if you’re dedicating your life to making sure that we can produce clean, reliable, 24 7, portable energy to everybody. In other words, if you’re sitting in the United States like I am right now why can’t the rest of the world have the same energy I have available to me?

You know, I don’t want to reduce myself to not have, to having less energy. I want the person that doesn’t have any to have what I have. And technologically, there really is no reason that that can’t happen right now. I think just keep, let’s keep pushing the benefits of nuclear energy and dense fuels. And And, and get those in places where they’re needed.

And I, I think our children and our grandchildren are going to have a, a better, less violent and more productive world than, than we have. We can, they can up the game after us, I think, if we do that now. I

[01:02:41] Mark Hinaman: love that, Shawn. That’s such an optimistic view of the future. And I particularly love your empowerment of women and admiration.

I 100 percent 1000 percent agree. I know so many women that are so much smarter and better at life than me. Yeah, definitely. Definitely more than I know of men.

[01:03:00] Shawn Connors: I can tell you for sure. That’s excellent. I’ve been married 41 years. And I can, I can almost say that she saved me because I think without her, I might have been president of the United States now, and that would have been terrible.

So, anyway, she kept me, she gave me a good life and helped me make right decisions. I like the space I’m in.

[01:03:24] Mark Hinaman: I love it. Shawn Connors, thanks so much. This has been absolutely wonderful to chat with you.

[01:03:29] Shawn Connors: Thank you, Mark. We’ll talk to you soon.

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