A new generation finds promise in nuclear energy

Nov. 18, 2024 3 AM PT

When Heather Hoff took a job at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, she was skeptical of nuclear energy — so much so that she resolved to report anything questionable to the anti-nuclear group Mothers for Peace.

Instead, after working at the plant for over a decade and asking every question she could think of about operations and safety, she co-founded her own group, Mothers for Nuclear, in 2016 to keep the plant alive.

“I was pretty nervous,” said Hoff, 45. “It felt very lonely — no one else was doing that. We looked around for allies — other pro-nuclear groups. … There just weren’t very many.”

Today, however, public support for nuclear power is the highest its been in more than a decade as government and private industry struggle to reduce reliance on planet-warming fossil fuels.

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Although a string of nuclear disasters decades ago had caused the majority of older Americans to distrust the technology, this hasn’t been the case for younger generations.

Old-school environmentalists “grew up in the generation of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. ... The Gen Zers today did not,” said David Weisman, 63, who has been involved in the movement to get Diablo Canyon shut down since the ’90s and works as the legislative director of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility.

“They don’t remember how paralyzed with fright the nation was the week after Three Mile Island. ... They don’t recall the shock of Chernobyl less than seven years later.”

Two domed nuclear reactors can be seen along a coastline.

Many of these younger nuclear advocates — outwardly vocal on social media sites such as X and Instagram — hope the renewed interest will fuel a second renaissance in nuclear power, one that helps California, the U.S. and the globe meet ambitious climate goals.

“I think we are the generation that’s ready to make this change, and accept facts over feelings, and ready to transition to a cleaner, more reliable and safer energy source,” said Veronica Annala, 23, a college student at Texas A&M and president of the school’s new Nuclear Advocacy Resource Organization.

In the past few months alone, Microsoft announced plans to fund the reopening of Three Mile Island’s shuttered unit to power a data center. Amazon and Google have also invested in new, cutting-edge nuclear technology to meet clean energy goals.

While some advocates wish nuclear revitalization wasn’t being driven by energy-hungry AI technology, the excitement around nuclear power is more palpable than it has been in a generation, they say.

“There’s so many things happening at the same time. ... This is the actual nuclear renaissance,” said Gabriel Ivory, 22, a student at Texas A&M and vice president of NARO. “When you look at Three Mile Island restarting — that was something nobody would have ever even thought of.”

Support for nuclear began rising in the U.S. after the Western U.S. energy crisis led to widescale blackouts. It dived after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, and began rising again in 2016.

This enthusiasm has also been accompanied by a surprising political shift.

During the Cold War nuclear energy frenzy of the 1970s and ’80s, nuclear supporters — often Republicans — touted the jobs the plants would create, and argued that the United States needed to remain a commanding leader of nuclear technology and weaponry on the global stage.

Meanwhile, environmental groups, often aligned with the Democratic Party, opposed nuclear power based on the potential negative impact on surrounding ecosystems, the thorny problem of storing spent fuel and the small but real risk of a nuclear meltdown.

“In America … it has been highly politicized,” said Jenifer Avellaneda Diaz, 29, who works in the industry and runs the advocacy account Nuclear Hazelnut. “That is a little bit shameful, because we have great experts here — a lot of doctors, a lot of scientists, a lot of engineers, mathematicians, physicists.”

Today, younger Republicans are 11% less likely to support new nuclear plants in the U.S. than their older counterparts. Meanwhile the opposite is true for the left: Younger Democrats are 9% more likely to support new nuclear than older Democrats, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.

As a result, while Republicans older than 65 are 27% more likely to support nuclear energy than their Democratic peers, Republicans age 18 to 29 are only 7% more likely to support it than their Democratic counterparts.

“Young Democrats and young Republicans may be looking at numbers — but two separate sets of numbers,” said Weisman. “The young Republicans may be looking at the cost per megawatt hour, and the young Democrats are looking at a different number: parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere.”

Brendan Pittman, 33 — who founded the Berkeley Amend movement, aiming to get his city to drop its “nuclear-free zone” status — said he’s noticed that younger people have become more open to learning about nuclear energy.

“Now — as we’re getting into energy crises and we’re talking more about, ‘How do we solve this?’ — younger people are taking a more rational and nuanced review of all energy. And they’re coming to the same conclusion: Yeah, nuclear checks all the boxes,” Pittman said.

“I remember getting signatures on the streets of Berkeley, and I would say most young people — when I said we’re looking to support nuclear energy — they would just stop me and say, ‘Where do I sign?’” he said. “I didn’t even have to sell it.”

Younger Democrats are more likely to support more nuclear plants, while younger Republicans are less likely to support them.

This newfound enthusiasm has also affected the nuclear industry, where two dominant age groups have emerged: baby boomers who mostly took nuclear jobs for consistent work, and millennials and Gen Zers who made a motivated choice to enter a stigmatized field, advocates in the industry say.

“You get all sorts of different backgrounds, and that really just blooms into all sorts of fresh new ideas, and I think that’s part of what’s making the industry exciting right now,” said Matt Wargon, 33, past chair of the Young Members Group of the American Nuclear Society.

Like the workers themselves, the industry has formed two bubbles: the traditional plants that have been operating for decades and a slew of new technologies — from small reactors that could power or heat single factories to a potentially safer class of large-scale reactors that use molten salt in their cores instead of pressurized water.

At existing plants, younger folks have injected innovation into longstanding operation norms, improving safety and efficiency. At the startups, those who’ve worked in the industry for decades provide “invaluable” knowledge that simply isn’t in textbooks, industry workers say.

Steam rises from two nuclear cooling towers.

The infusion of new talent and ideas is a significant change from when Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 and the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986 devastated the industry. Regulations became stricter, and development on new reactors and new technology slowed to a halt.

False narratives around the technology ricocheted through society. Both Hoff and Avellaneda Diaz recall their parents worrying about radiation affecting their ability to have children. (The average worker at Diablo receives significantly less radiation in a week than a passenger does on a single East Coast to West Coast airplane flight.)

“Radiation is invisible — you can’t see it. You can’t smell it. You can’t hear it,” said Wargon. “And people tend to fear the unknown. … So if you tell them, ‘Oh this power plant has a lot of radiation coming out of it,’ it’s hard to dispel [the misinformation and fear].”

Only as the memories faded and new generations entered the workforce did the reputation of nuclear power slowly recover.

Advocates also say that college campuses have become a leading space for nuclear advocacy, with Nuclear is Clean Energy (NiCE) clubs popping up at multiple California schools in the past few years.

In August, Ivory held up a big “I [heart] nuclear energy,” sign behind an ESPN college football broadcast. It quickly spread on social media and even caught the attention of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Nuclear advocates say the internet and easy access to accurate information has also helped their cause.

“That was certainly a revolution because right now, it’s super easy to Google it,” Avellaneda Diaz said. “Back then you needed to go to the library, get the book — it was not that easy to get the information or be informed.”

A poll conducted by Ann Bisconti, a scientist and nuclear public opinion expert, found that 74% of people who said they felt very well informed strongly favored the use of nuclear energy in the U.S., whereas only 6% who felt not at all informed supported it.

As such, public outreach and education has become a core tenant of the new nuclear advocacy movement.

“Let’s be real,” Annala said, “our generation has the whole internet at our fingertips ... so, just starting the conversations is really the big thing.”

Advocates speculate that the ability to rapidly disseminate information on nuclear energy to combat misconceptions might have helped prevent nuclear energy from becoming politically and culturally toxic after the Fukushima accident, unlike with Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.

While the Texas A&M students were quite young when the disaster unfolded, both Wargon and Pittman were in college in 2011 when an earthquake and tsunami in Japan crippled the power systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, triggering a meltdown. Avellaneda Diaz was in high school.

Hoff was working at Diablo Canyon when Fukushima happened. The public scare, in part pushed by the media, almost led her to quit her job.

Instead, after taking the time to analyze the causes of the meltdown and the errors made, she decided to embrace nuclear.

For her, Fukushima was a reminder that nuclear power comes with risk — however small — but that even in a worst-case scenario, operators are skilled at preventing a disaster. (PG&E says a Fukushima flooding episode would be impossible at Diablo Canyon.)