Steve Forbes: What's Ahead

Liz Muller convinced her dad Richard to forego retirement and become an entrepreneur. The result is a revolutionary approach to making atomic energy cheaper and safer. For more than a decade, Elizabeth Muller and her father have taken a three-mile hike, usually twice a week, through the hills of Berkeley, California, stopping for coffee and brainstorming on the way. “I would have an idea and she would have an idea,” says Richard A. Muller, who devised the modern carbon dating method used to determine the age of ancient plant and animal remains before he was 33 and won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award at 38. Now, after 40 years of teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, the 82-year-old physicist is on the verge of having his greatest commercial impact, thanks to his business-minded daughter and those long walks. “Nuclear brings out big emotions on all sides,” says Liz, 47. “As a kid growing up in Berkeley, all my teachers and friends were anti-nuclear, and the city became a nuclear-free z