 An atomic energy power plant has already proved feasible. The future supplying of electric power to entire cities is far from impossible. America once embraced nuclear power. Industrialists, politicians, and intellectuals hailed the technologies the future of energy in the 1950s. In the new world of the atomic age. In 1953, President Eisenhower delivered his famous Atoms for Peace speech, calling for nuclear power to become a global priority. It is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers. It must be put into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace. As of mid-1961, approximately half a million homes were receiving power produced by nuclear reactors. A million more homes will be using such power by 1964. Between 1967 and 1972, 48 U.S. nuclear plants went from breaking ground to producing power at a fraction of what it would cost to do so today. Then in March of 1979, there was a meltdown at Pennsylvania's three-mile island nuclear power plant. It was the first step in a nuclear nightmare. It was four o'clock in the morning. There was a mechanical failure, then a human failure. Throughout the day chaos and confusion reigned as monitors tried to determine exactly how much radiation was released. Questions clouded the atmosphere like atomic particles. There were no casualties and there was no lingering environmental damage, but the incidents spooked the nation. From a publicity standpoint, the timing was disastrous. Three-mile island occurred while the China Syndrome, a fictional account of safety cover-ups at a nuclear plant, was still in theaters featuring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemon and Michael Douglas. It will start with a tremor in a nuclear power plant where it will end. It will depend on three people. The closer they get, the more threatening it becomes. After three-mile island, what was considered to be the best interest of the public was just reducing risk as low as possible. And all of it resulted in a huge volume of regulations that anybody that wanted to build a new reactor had to know. It made the learning curve much steeper to even attempt to innovate. Adam Stein is the director of the Nuclear Energy Innovation Program at the Breakthrough Institute. The number one lesson of the Three-mile Island incident was that we needed to revise emergency preparedness regulations, which did happen and it was appropriate to do so. The biggest problem with what happened at Three-mile Island was they didn't know what to do in the event of an incident. We still are working in that area, but at that time we just weren't prepared. The second result was you had a full meltdown of a reactor and there was no severe impacts to the public. Even though nobody was killed by Three-mile Island's meltdown, the pace of nuclear reactor construction tapered off, including a 20-year spell in which no new nuclear reactors were built. My view is that these supposedly environmentalist groups formed in the 1970s that are not primarily pro-environment, they're really primarily anti-nuclear. The writer Eric Dawson is the co-founder of Nuclear New York, a group fighting to protect the industry on the grounds that nuclear is, quote, the most scalable, reliable, efficient land-conserving, material-sparing, zero-emission source of energy ever created. He says the Three-mile Island empowered the anti-nuclear movement. That same year, about 200,000 anti-nuclear activists crowded into New York City's Battery Park City, capping off a week-long concert featuring Pete Seeger, Jackson Brown, and Bonnie Rait, which raised awareness and funding for the anti-nuclear movement. Stopping atomic energy is practicing patriotism, Ralph Nader told the crowd. Stopping atomic energy is fighting cancer. Stopping atomic energy is fighting inflation. They are a generation that was radicalized from the Vietnam War. They became anti-war. They then became anti-nuclear weapons, and then they conflated nuclear weapons with nuclear energy, and they made it their mission to shut down nuclear energy. An anti-nuclear power protest in New Hampshire a year ago. Similar demonstrations at other nuclear sites are planned this spring, and the emotional battle over nuclear energy goes on. And they succeeded in that mission. Environmentalists, in effect, may have crippled the only truly viable form of clean energy. The federal government makes permitting arduous. Many states severely restrict new plant construction and force operational ones to shut down prematurely. A striking recent example was the shutdown of Indian Point Energy Center, New York State's largest nuclear plant. I think it is insane, and this is a quote, I think it is insane to have a three-unit reactor on the banks of the Hudson, 20 miles from the Bronx and 35 miles from Midtown Manhattan. Anti-nuclear activists had targeted the plant for decades. In 2007, they found a powerful ally in state attorney general and future governor, Andrew Cuomo. I understand the power and the benefit. I also understand the risk, and this plant in this proximity to New York City was never a good risk. Of course it's true that nuclear energy carries risk. So does every form of power generation. If you look at energy sources, there's nothing that's perfect. There is no utopia. Basically, we have a choice. Everything is compared to something else. Decades of political attacks on the nuclear industry have caused the United States to rely more on burning fossil fuels, which bring another set of risks. Nuclear would eliminate the majority of pollution-related fatalities in the US, which is thousands a year, because most of those come from coal-fired power plants currently. So you would be able to eliminate the largest health impact from pollution to the American public. In his campaign against Indian Point, which provided a quarter of downstate New York's electricity, Cuomo dangled the promise of a different sort of clean energy before New Yorkers. A true transformation to a green economy must create a complete green energy system to replace the old carbon-based supply. There is a gulf between intentions and results. The effect has been to increase New York's carbon emissions. Renewable energy like wind and solar couldn't fill the gap, despite decades of promises that they would replace nuclear power plants from Ralph Nader in the 70s. Solar energy is here. It can be here in a big way if we as consumers demand it through a national political force. And part of that demand involves the abolition of nuclear power once and for all. To green New Deal advocates Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who each backed Cuomo's moves against Indian Point. We have nuclear facilities now that I'm frankly very concerned about, like Indian Point that should have been shut down a long time ago. The environmentalist pitch wasn't ever to go back to fossil fuels. And what we don't want is Governor Cuomo to shut down Indian Point and replace it with hydro-fract energy. But that's exactly what happens. When Indian Point shut down, state utilities made up for the loss by burning more natural gas. The closing of Indian Point's two reactors coincided with a 9% increase in energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in New York. The state's energy prices also increased over the same period. This outcome isn't unique to New York. Germany's Greens pressured the government to close its nuclear plants, betting on wind. Electricity from windmills increased, but so did the country's reliance on coal. Germany emitted almost eight times the carbon per kilowatt hour in 2023, as did neighboring France, which still gets the majority of its electricity from nuclear and less than 1% from coal. The problem is wind and solar aren't reliable power sources because they depend on intermittent weather. Batteries can provide stored energy, but it's too expensive to manufacture enough batteries to meet the energy needs of New York's grid when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. Nuclear plants also require a lot less land than renewables, about 1% of what solar farms need and 0.3% of what wind farms require to yield the same amount of energy. Consistent low-cost, low environmental impact electricity with a very large potential fuel source. It's really just as close to a modern miracle as we have. There is still a kind of irrational fear of technology, especially on the far left, where a lot of the same groups that are opposed to fossil fuels are opposed to zero-emission nuclear. For some, more natural gas for New York appears to have been the goal all along. Court documents show that the Cuomo administration knew that natural gas would benefit from Indian Point's closure. And Cuomo's former aide and campaign manager, Joseph Prococo, was convicted of corruption for taking bribes from a natural gas company to hasten the plant's closure, though the Supreme Court later overturned the conviction because he didn't work for Cuomo at the time. It's okay to open up two new gas-fired plants that spew emissions, but it was okay to shut down a nuclear power plant with zero carbon emissions. That's hypocrisy to me. Theresa Nickerbocker is the mayor of the small town of Buchanan, which had been home to the Indian Point Energy Center for nearly half a century. Six units to be built between 1957 and 1975. A lot of pictures of when the plant was being built. She tried to negotiate with the state and spoke at rallies to save Indian Point. So you're going to see here today there's a thousand helmets, yellow helmets, and that represents the loss of 1,000 jobs. After surviving decades of attempts to shut it down, the plant finally switched off on April 30th, 2021. That was really sad. I did an event that day. It's sad. I still think back and I'm sorry. I get emotional. I think there were two major events that happened here in the village of Buchanan. When Con Edison came here and built the nuclear power plant, we ended up getting a lot of our infrastructure. We have our own sewer treatment plant, so it was a good time for the village. It was a historical time. What do you think about that? You did? Yeah. What did you do there? I was up in the administrative department with the big boys. What did you think about it closing? Sad. Very sad. So is the energy. That was the end of an era for us. Indian Point Energy Center's containment domes still loom over the Hudson and could remain untouched for decades. New York has paused the process of decommissioning, dismantling the structures and disposing of the radioactive byproducts they contain. With the mission of cleaning up the Hudson, the non-profit riverkeeper was instrumental in the shutdown of Indian Point, setting concerns ranging from the plant's water cooling system killing more than a billion fish eggs in larvae a year. An estimate a federal study says could be as much as 1,000 times too high to the possibility of an accidental meltdown or terrorist attack. Riverkeeper was formed in New York in the late 60s. It gained steam partially from hiring Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as their chief prosecutor and attorney in the 1980s who was actually later Andrew Cuomo's brother-in-law. Riverkeeper, whose representatives declined to speak with reason, played a major role in stopping the decommissioning of Indian Point. The organization holds a seat on the state's decommissioning board and worked closely with lawmakers who halted the process. When nuclear fuel is spent, it gets placed in pools of water to cool it down. That wastewater is then treated to remove toxic levels of radiation. At Indian Point, it was then released into the Hudson. The process was heavily monitored by federal agencies and it's what Riverkeeper has successfully lobbied the state to halt. EPA even has documentation of what was discharged and what the levels were compared to drinking water and way below the stand, way, way, way, way. People ask, would you drink that water? Well, the water goes into a discharge canal. It's diluted and it's been done for 60 years. Would you drink that water? You know what, in the Hudson River, I wouldn't drink the water in the Hudson River because of the PCBs that came from GE. That's even a bigger concern. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission concluded that the amount of radiation in the water is about one-two-hundredth the federal safety limit and there was no evidence of an occupational or public health threat. It is based on politics and fear-mongering and a lack of understanding. People hear radiation. They get confused with radioactive contamination. They get confused with other items and they have a fear and that's what this was all based on. Indian Point's vice president, Frank Spagnolo, says New York has delayed decommissioning by at least eight years. Everything was based on twelve to fifteen years and there was no thought that we would not be able to release liquid waste as we had for the past fifty years. We're kind of stuck in this position. Spagnolo previously worked for Entergy, the company that operated the nuclear power plant starting in 2000. He says that Indian Point could have safely continued providing clean energy for decades. To be honest with you, up until the day before I didn't believe we were going to go into decommissioning, the maintenance that we did, the inspections that we did, all validated that the plant was able to run another twenty years and we were in the middle of relicensing for years. But it was held up by politics. As we're cutting this place up, the four inch thick carbon steel steam generators are in perfect condition. The four inch thick RCS reactor cooling system piping is in perfect condition. Clean on the inside, clean on the outside with no degradation. So, yes, it was premature. We could have ran another twenty years or maybe another twenty after it. Holtec, the company that took over Indian Point, has no alternative plan for disposing of the wastewater. So, they're waiting, as is the town of Buchanan. You're talking 240 acres, beautiful prime property on the Hudson River. It was not fair what happened to this community and now the lack of support. Even after the wastewater is disposed of, the property won't be usable with dry spent fuel on site. Nicarbaca blames the federal government for failing to remove it. The government claimed responsibility for all nuclear waste disposal in the 1980s and has failed to come up with a viable alternative since the collapse of plans to build the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada. The nuclear power plants every few years will sue the Department of Energy for their expenses of keeping that on the property. So, we need to figure out what to do with this. Otherwise, I really feel that that's going to sit there for many, many more years. Probably I'll be long gone and it'll still be sitting there. It wasn't the nuclear industry's problem. It's the federal government's problem for not dealing with it and just kind of like putting their head in the sand. Does the fact that the presence of the waste makes the land unusable and nobody really wants to take it make a case against nuclear energy? I think if the Department of Energy had complied by their agreements, I think if our country had done what other countries, for example France did, to reuse that, I don't think we would have a stockpile of this around the country. France recycles about 96% of its nuclear waste and has plans to bury the rest. Increasingly stringent regulation forced the only three reprocessing plants in the U.S. capable of recycling nuclear waste to close in the 1970s. How much nuclear waste are we talking about? All that's ever been produced in the U.S. would fit on one football field if stacked about 15 feet high. Finland created a bunker, 1,500 feet underneath an island to bury its spent fuel. The International Atomic Energy Agency called this approach a game changer for nuclear power. And the U.S. could do the same if not for political opposition. The economics of nuclear power remain challenging, but its advocates say that's primarily because of the thorny politics of nuclear power. There's nothing technologically that makes it not profitable. It's because of political will. So if you increase protests and increase class action lawsuits and increase regulation at the NRC and at local level, this increases the cost ultimately to building more power plants and keeping them online. The saga of a new power plant in Georgia underscores how hard it is to build out nuclear capacity in 21st century America. This nuclear reactor is part of Plant Vogel near Wainsboro as it was being loaded with fuel in October 2022. It's the first U.S. reactor built from scratch since 1974. And the process was a nightmare. It took almost 17 years from when the first permit was filed, cost more than $28 billion and bankrupted the developer in the process. Those construction costs could be as much as 12 times higher than a natural gas plant producing the same amount of energy. Way over budget and way over time and their costs are much higher than anticipated. If you look beyond those projects which were challenged in many ways not just being a first-of-kind but other challenges along the way such as financing, bankruptcies and a pandemic and look to the newer designs that are being worked on right now those costs are expected to be although haven't been built and proven to be much lower. What if these big, expensive, complex projects could be made more simple and smaller? That's the promise of the next-generation nuclear technology known as small modular reactors. They're intended to be less complex than large plants which have to have many redundant backup systems several coolant loops so you get system simplicity less moving parts but they have to be smaller in order to achieve that. The federal government issued its first-ever approval for a small modular reactor in January 2023 and the Biden administration spent $200 million on the project but the company that created it Newscale canceled its first-ever planned use less than 10 months later because the projected electricity costs were still too high. Why should we have energy subsidies at all? Why should we have federal loan guarantees to nuclear energy? Why shouldn't nuclear just have to compete in a marketplace? In market terms you still need a little bit of a jolt to get some industries moving. Federal funding has always been the way to improve the lives of society fastest through R&D by funding things that never would have been viable in the market, raw science. Ideally, no energy source should receive any subsidies. Unfortunately, the grim reality is that all energy sources receive subsidies and all energy sources are heavily regulated at every level. Renewables like wind and solar still receive the vast majority of federal subsidies. A government report found that nuclear energy received almost $3 billion in federal dollars between 2016 and 2022. Renewables got almost $84 billion and yet they still barely outpaced nuclear and total electricity generation despite decades of plant closures and failure to increase capacity. I think that correcting that imbalance is the best step that we can do going forward. So if there is a public push to subsidize zero-emission energy well we should subsidize just that zero-emission energy that's technology neutral. Other companies are advancing nuclear projects like molten salt cooled reactors which reduce meltdown and explosion risks. Holtec, the company in charge of decommissioning Indian Point is developing one that it hopes to install in a decommissioned nuclear plant in Michigan. It's already trying to make history as no nuclear plant has ever reopened after having its fuel removed. That's another upside of small reactors they can be plopped right into old nuclear coal and gas plants. So if you can replace what's being retired at the same time makes grid planning much easier. My research looked out farther than 10 years and the farther you look the more uncertain you become. But in about 10 years we expected to see a doubling of nuclear energy in the U.S. The Biden administration is also bullish on nuclear power. A 2023 debarpment of energy report projects as much as a tripling of nuclear energy in America by 2050. Stein thinks that this political atmosphere has created enough pressure in Washington to reform some of the regulations stifling the industry. Many Republicans have supported nuclear energy for a long time. Recently many Democrats have seen nuclear energy as an important or necessary component of new electricity generation in conjunction with renewables and other options. So at the moment is a very bipartisan support for nuclear energy. Some former nuclear opponents have become advocates acknowledging it as a vital source of clean energy including the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. She supported the Indian point closure, but after visiting Fukushima she acknowledged nuclear's emissions free power, noting that when Fukushima went offline use of coal and other fossil fuels spiked. Greta Thunberg opposed EU plans to categorize nuclear power as clean energy in 2021, but by 2022 acknowledged that it was a bad idea for Germany to shut down its nuclear plants. If we have them already running I feel that it's a mistake to close them down in order to focus on coal. Jane Fonda opposed nuclear power in the 1970s. In 2024 even the China Syndrome Star sees nuclear as a stopgap measure to reducing carbon emissions. Other organizations assist still part of their core mission to oppose nuclear energy ideologically at all costs. But if you look at the science it shows nuclear energy has the least overall environmental impact of any energy source from mining all the way through use and decommissioning. It's hard to reconcile an ideological position against it without at least trying to confront the science. I think that things have to get worse before they get better this is how humans learn but in the long term I'm very bullish on nuclear. In the 21st century economic growth is so dependent on having abundant, reliable, affordable and increasingly zero-emission electricity on a grid. And so when you think about what markets are looking at right now everything is being led by AI, artificial intelligence data centers, blockchain technology like cryptocurrency all of this requires a huge growing amount of electricity and this is along with the push for electric vehicles and electric heating and electric machinery and you go home and you have your electric fridge and your electric stove and your electric TV and you have your electric phone and your electric watch and electric goggles. The question is where are we going to get all of this electricity? With a demand that high I think that it is a good bet that there will be a supply in the long run and the best way to scale up rapidly is through nuclear technology. The long nuclear power winter might finally be coming to an end in America. America deeply desires to join countries all over the globe in adapting the atom to the arts of peace.