Reporter and writer. I cover energy, climate change and geopolitics. Contact me via my website www.alexanderckaufman.com and subscribe to kaufman.substack.com.

what was your first encounter with nuclear energy? (book, mentor, convo) and first nuclear power plant visit and that exp

I wrote a few stories here and there over the years, but did a bit piece in 2021 rounding up all the pro nuke announcements at the climate summit that year. The following spring I visited Finland for work and wrote a big feature on the Onkalo waste storage site. But I was really blown away by Okliluoto 3 and the importance of a new reactor at a moment when Russians were cutting off energy supplies. The next month I was going to the Netherlands for a conference so I visited Borsele and wrote a big feature in the Dutch push for more reactors. It snowballed from there. I had a few mentors who helped me a lot. Two of them were on stage with me today at the American Nuclear Society conference speaking on a panel I moderated. One is the consultant and engineer Mark Nelson. The other is the BloombergNEF analyst Chris Gadomski. They have very different views but they both taught me a lot.