About this rebuild

This is a structured learning environment rebuilt from the 30-year Atomic Insights archive (founded by Rod Adams, former submarine engineer officer and host of The Atomic Show). The goal: take someone from zero to genuinely literate on nuclear energy faster and more rigorously than anywhere else — not by dumping 3,000 posts on them, but by sequencing the best of the archive into a curriculum.

What was extracted

3,657 articles via the WordPress REST API → clean Markdown + a full manifest.
371 podcast episodes from the RSS feed, with audio and show notes.
The 1995–2006 classic newsletters (now migrated and redirected) preserved as an archive layer — 634 pre-2007 articles.
~58,000 reader comments captured separately and flagged as community content (a sample harvested this run; full harvest is resumable).
A media manifest of 1,798 images mapped to their posts.

What was built on top

The original 206 categories (1,622 posts were simply "Uncategorized") were replaced with a clean 10-topic taxonomy. Twenty-two core concepts were each given a single canonical explainer, a prerequisite map, and a place in three learning paths.

Where we stand

We're optimistic about nuclear energy and say so openly: we think it's a clean, dense, remarkably safe technology that has been underrated and underbuilt for decades, and we make that case with confidence throughout the site. What we don't do is dress up argument as fact.

Fact vs. argument

A confident case is more persuasive, not less, when it's honest about what kind of claim you're reading. Every concept is labelled:

Settled science / engineering — not seriously disputed.
Contested — a real, mainstream debate exists (e.g. LNT vs. hormesis, long-term Chernobyl mortality, SMR economics).
Opinion / advocacy — an argument or value judgment, including the original site's strongest theses.

Kept current

A 30-year archive goes stale. Time-sensitive claims are flagged and corrected — Vogtle 3 & 4 are now complete, the NuScale/UAMPS project was cancelled in 2023, the ADVANCE Act passed in 2024, and LNT still governs US radiation regulation despite predictions of imminent change.