Copyright © 2025 by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow

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ISBN 978-1-64375-315-7 (hardcover); 978-1-64375-758-2 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

E3-20250311-JV-NF-ORI

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE The Land

CHAPTER TWO “Don’t shut it down!”

CHAPTER THREE The Club

CHAPTER FOUR The Plant

CHAPTER FIVE “Kiss your children goodbye”

CHAPTER SIX The Bad Boys

CHAPTER SEVEN Conversions

CHAPTER EIGHT “We are as gods and have to get good at it”

CHAPTER NINE The Deal

CHAPTER TEN “The motherly side of nuclear”

CHAPTER ELEVEN The Nuclearists

CHAPTER TWELVE The Tribe

CHAPTER THIRTEEN “But what about the waste?”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Guy in the Headband

CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Inside Game

CHAPTER SIXTEEN “A heretic among heretics”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Nuclear Spring

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The Turning Point

CHAPTER NINETEEN A Social and Political Problem

CHAPTER TWENTY Diablo Canyon Lives

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Discover More

Notes

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INTRODUCTION

Those who could mostly stayed indoors. Throughout much of California, the streets, where heat rose visibly from the asphalt, were largely empty. Those who were outside moved with effort, or not at all. An ice cream vendor trudged down a Los Angeles sidewalk, sweating through his shirt, and children who heard his jingle would emerge from their homes momentarily to buy an icy treat. A few miles away, on Skid Row, a mutual aid group handed out bottles of frozen water to people sheltering from the sun in their tents. About 40 miles northwest, a wildfire crackled through the desiccated brush on a hillside. One by one, seven of the firefighters working to contain it had to be hospitalized, sick from the heat.1

It was late summer 2022, and most of California was suffering under a “heat dome”—hot, high-pressure air trapped by the atmosphere as if by a lid. The heat would intensify through the Labor Day weekend and into the next week, breaking records throughout the state. In the San Fernando Valley, the Central Valley, and the desert, temperatures climbed above 110 degrees. “If you have AC, use it,” the National Weather Service tweeted. “Fans will not be enough.” At the same time, on the freeways, drivers saw digital signs, which normally showed messages about distracted driving or upcoming construction, reading, “EXTREME HEAT. SAVE POWER 4–9 PM. STAY COOL.” On August 31, Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency, exempting power plants from certain environmental restrictions to ensure that they could provide enough energy to meet demand.

That day, in Sacramento, the state’s capital, temperatures reached 97 degrees, but lawmakers inside the air-conditioned capitol building got a respite from the heat. August 31 also happened to be the last day of the year’s legislative session. And for the state senators, the very last bill on the agenda had a direct bearing on the issues raised by the scorching weather: the knotty nexus between a warming climate and energy consumption. The bill’s ramifications also touched on a host of other issues, from radiation hazards to marine life to tribal land rights. At stake were more than a thousand jobs, including, potentially, the jobs of the lawmakers themselves. For all that, the practical repercussions of the vote would be dwarfed by its symbolic significance.

The question before them was the fate of California’s last nuclear power plant.

The 40 lawmakers had gathered in the majestic senate chamber, an airy space with floor-to-ceiling windows, white Roman Corinthian columns, and plush crimson carpeting. Their desks, made of ornately carved walnut wood, faced the dais, where an American flag hung from a pole and Senator Connie Leyva stood to administer votes. Throughout the chamber, a smattering of mask-covered faces, as well as signs about social distancing, offered reminders of the pandemic that had disrupted the world for the past two-plus years and had only recently begun to abate.2

It was the culmination of a productive legislative session in which members had called out their “aye”s and “no”s on hundreds of bills. The issues on the table were pretty much what you’d expect in California circa 2022. There were bills to strengthen abortion protections and support transgender youth. The Freedom to Walk Act was intended to limit enforcement of jaywalking laws; a human composting bill aimed to allow people to turn their bodies into soil after death. There were also multiple measures stepping up the state’s already formidable goals to phase out fossil fuels and curb climate change. One of them codified the state’s plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045; another established a car-free incentive program; a third prohibited oil and gas drilling within 3,200 feet of homes and schools; yet another provided support for efforts to suck carbon dioxide out of the air.

When the floor session started at 10:12 a.m., the mood was celebratory, as the legislature’s Democratic supermajority ensured that most bills would pass. At times it was even self-congratulatory, or, at the very least, self-conscious about California’s outsized political influence. Not only were the lawmakers setting policy for the nation’s most populous state—its 39 million residents far exceeded Texas’s 30 million and Florida’s 22 million—they also saw themselves as an inspiration for the rest of the world. There were inevitable references to California as the world’s fifth-largest economy, to the delegates from other states and countries who routinely visited the state capitol. In rousing remarks on behalf of one ambitious climate bill, Senator Bob Hertzberg, Democrat of Los Angeles, proclaimed, “California has a pretty good track record of knocking the impossible on its tuchus!” Occasionally dampening this spirit were the handful of beleaguered Republicans, who lamented the state’s high housing and electricity costs and noted that some Californians were leaving the state for more affordable regions.

As the day wore on, the energy and focus began to fade, and the senators increasingly turned to their phones and their laptops or chatted with one another, even when their colleagues were giving impassioned speeches. At around midnight, Senate President pro Tempore Toni Atkins, a Democrat from San Diego, led a round of thank-yous to administrative and security staff rather than waiting until the session’s end, knowing that everyone would be eager to leave at that time. By 1:00 a.m., almost 15 hours into the session, the senators were exhausted. But they still had to vote on one last measure: SB 846.

The thrust of the 31-page bill was this: it would open the door to extending the life of Diablo Canyon Power Plant, the last operational nuclear facility in California. The plant was almost 40 years old, and the operating licenses for the two reactors were scheduled to elapse in the mid-2020s. Originally, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the utility that owned it, had planned to apply for a license extension for another 20 years. But in 2016, PG&E reached a deal with environmental groups, as well as unions representing most of the plant’s workers, to shutter it in 2025. This agreement included plans to ramp up energy efficiency and renewables construction to replace the electricity from Diablo Canyon. It had received approval from various state agencies and commissions, and it was widely seen as a model—certainly its architects saw it this way—of how to transition to a future that was both nuclear-free and fossil-free, a California powered by wind and sun and water.

A key player in the deal had been Newsom, the former restauranteur with a gravelly voice and blinding smile who had risen through the ranks of California politics to national prominence over the previous 20-odd years. At the time of the 2016 agreement, he was lieutenant governor as well as a member of the State Lands Commission. Now, as governor, in a move some found courageous and others outrageous, he was pushing this new plan—to press PG&E to apply to renew Diablo Canyon’s licenses and continue operations. The bill would provide PG&E with a $1.4 billion loan and expedite its regulatory reviews, exempting it from some environmental reviews altogether. Only months earlier, this reversal had seemed inconceivable. The nuclear age in California had been poised to come to an end. But now the senators were being asked to give it new life.

More than half a century earlier, California was at the center of the burgeoning anti-nuclear movement. In 1964, activists had helped defeat plans for a nuclear plant PG&E was planning to build at Bodega Bay, a hauntingly beautiful harbor 50 miles north of San Francisco. Soon afterward, PG&E proposed a new location at Diablo Canyon, in San Luis Obispo County, one of a diminishing number of undeveloped spots on the Central Coast. The plan led to a decades-long battle with local groups that sprang up to protest the plant’s construction, as well as national organizations opposed to nuclear power in general.

Anti-nuclear sentiment surged in the late ’60s and the ’70s as some segments of the public, often taking cues from dissident scientists, grew worried about the hazards of radioactive waste, potential accidents, and weapons proliferation. Protesters marched, holding up signs reading, “Hell no, we won’t glow” and “Better active today than radioactive tomorrow!” The major environmentalist groups Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace were each founded with an anti-nuclear ideology at their core; being an environmentalist became synonymous with being anti-nuclear.

But the objections went beyond environmentalism. “Question Authority,” instructed buttons and bumper sticker of the era. Americans were disillusioned by the “best and the brightest” who had led the country into Vietnam; by the crimes of President Nixon; and by the scientific establishment, deeply enmeshed with government and the military. Leaders and experts seemed arrogant, condescending, and, quite often, wrong. No one epitomized this dubious authority more than the atomic establishment, who had reassured the public that nuclear power was safe, that it would be “too cheap to meter,”3 that accidents were vanishingly unlikely to occur. Similarly, the hulking, heavily guarded plants embodied the concentration of corporate power and the militarization of modern life that troubled so many Americans.

In September of 1981, activists blockaded Diablo Canyon, which was still under construction, sitting down and locking arms in front of the gate outside the facility. Over the course of 14 days, more than 1,900 arrests were made, said to be the highest count ever at an anti-nuclear demonstration. They knew their chances of victory were slim, but, as a spokeswoman for one group told the press, “Most of these people couldn’t live with themselves if they didn’t try.”4

The activists ultimately failed to derail the plant’s operations—its second reactor came online on March 13, 1986. But in the larger struggle over nuclear power’s future, they were more successful. A 1976 state law placed a moratorium on building new reactors in California. Throughout the country, new plant construction began to slow for economic reasons. In the aftermath of the accident at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in March of 1979, dozens of planned nuclear plants around the country were canceled.5 Community opposition, new safety requirements, cost and schedule overruns, and flat electricity demand were among the factors that dimmed the allure of nuclear for utilities. In the final years of the millennium, the nuclear industry seemed to be sputtering along, its future unclear.

But in the 21st century, a handful of voices began calling for a reconsideration of nuclear energy.6 It wasn’t dirty, they said; nuclear plants do not emit the fine particulate matter or other toxic pollutants associated with fossil fuels. It wasn’t dangerous, they said; the risks had been blown far out of proportion. Above all, they stressed, it did not emit greenhouse gases, so it could help address what had emerged as a new existential threat: climate change. They pointed out that as protesters had focused their attention on nuclear reactors, few had objected to the spread of coal-fired plants. To nuclear supporters, this seemed analogous to, say, confiscating all the knives from an enemy, but shrugging as they amassed an arsenal of AR-15s.

These claims were advanced by a growing if somewhat ragtag contingent of gadflies, policy wonks, techno-optimists, engineers, industry employees, wealthy entrepreneurs, Twitter reply guys, and self-identified “ecomodernists” and “climate hawks.” They might have been easy to dismiss if they hadn’t also included several of the world’s most respected scientists.

Together, over time, they amounted to something improbable: a pro-nuclear movement. Not only that—a pro-nuclear movement that was making its case on environmentalist grounds. While far smaller than the anti-nuclear movement had been in its heyday, this new faction began to gain influence in the 2010s. And once again, Diablo Canyon emerged as a focal point. Pro-nuclear advocates rallied to save the plant, in what seemed like a doomed campaign. In both cases, the fight to keep it from opening and the fight to keep it from closing, the plant was more than a single facility; it was a symbol. Activists believed that if they could save Diablo Canyon—the most controversial nuclear plant in anti-nuclear California—it would signal a sea change in the state and in the country, and perhaps even herald a new nuclear age.

I came of age in the ’90s, when nuclear was scarcely on the radar. The anti-nuclear movement had receded, presumably because no new plants were getting built—in that sense, it had already triumphed—and the pro-nuclear movement had yet to emerge. My parents were anti-nuclear environmentalists, but nuclear power seldom came up. Rather, what I remember most about my family’s environmentalism is an acute awareness of resource use. The convergence of my mother’s frugality and her anti-consumerist ethos meant that she bought things almost exclusively secondhand, at garage sales or Goodwill—that is, when she bought things at all. One day I noticed an unfamiliar turquoise towel in the linen closet. “Where did you get this towel?” I asked her. “Oh, I found it in the street,” she said.i Our household also had a pervasive reverence for the natural; whether in the case of rice, bread, or paper towels, brown was always better than white.

Elementary school lunchtime was painful. Embarrassed by my crinkled, reused brown paper lunch bags and the whole wheat or pumpernickel bread inside, I coveted the crisp new bags and Wonder Bread all around me. By high school, however, I suppose the years of indoctrination had sunk in. I acquired a reputation for vigilance about wasted paper. To get a rise out of me, a boy in my history class once deliberately ripped a fresh sheet of paper in half; 30 years later, I haven’t forgiven that tree murderer.

When, sometime in high school, I first learned about what was then called global warming, I felt a prickling anguish. What bothered me was not only the prospect of catastrophe and chaos, but the more subtle changes, even the seemingly benign ones. The notion that humans could influence the weather, could disrupt the New England seasons that had formed a steady backdrop to my life, meant that the rules I had grown up with no longer applied. (I would later learn that, half a century earlier, some people had a very similar response when they first learned about atomic science.) As the changes started to become noticeable, I became the killjoy who glowered on balmy January days as other people happily broke out their shorts.

By the 2010s, I was under no illusion that we could entirely halt climate change, but I thought: If we can only stave off the truly civilization-ending calamities, I’ll take it. Now I lived in California, and in 2017, I helped organize an initiative in my neighborhood—a kind of Groupon for solar panels—to make buying rooftop solar easier and more affordable. I assumed that wind and solar were the answer: surveying solar panels on roofs, seeing wind turbines dotting landscapes, gave me a little dopamine hit of hope. But I also started hearing more about a solution to which I had never given much thought, though my impressions of it were vaguely negative. This, of course, was nuclear energy. The reason I started paying attention had to do with the respected scientists mentioned above—or at least one in particular: James Hansen.

In June of 1988, Hansen, a 47-year-old NASA scientist, had testified before Congress during a sweltering heat wave. He warned, “The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now.”7 His testimony received front-page coverage in newspapers across the country, and he is credited with bringing the issue to widespread public attention for the first time. In subsequent years, he had courageously spoken out against government inaction, attending protests and even getting arrested, attracting some criticism from peers who thought scientists ought to remain above the fray. As a 10-year-old, I had been oblivious to his 1988 testimony, but I learned about him later from my parents. In my household, Hansen was a hero.

So I had to pause when I learned that he’d decided to endorse nuclear energy as a means of addressing the climate crisis. In fact, he was a full-throated supporter. In December 2015, he coauthored an opinion piece in the Guardian with three other climate scientists: “Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change,” the headline read. They proposed that the construction of 115 reactors per year through 2050 could fully replace fossil fuels and meet global energy needs. “The future of our planet and our descendants depends on basing decisions on facts, and letting go of long-held biases when it comes to nuclear power,” they argued.8

In the ’60s and ’70s, the experts had seemed to be leading the world toward nuclear apocalypse and endless war in Vietnam. Scientists in particular, in cahoots with the military-industrial complex, had been responsible for developing the weapons that could annihilate humanity. (Some of them, such as, famously, J. Robert Oppenheimer, had come to nurse doubt about their accomplishments.) But by the 2000s, scientists were the ones who were raising the alarm about climate change; oil companies and Republicans were—it became a rallying cry—“denying the science.” Experts, at least in this context, had become the good guys again. If Hansen, as well as several other scientists I had reason to trust, championed nuclear energy, I came to think that I ought to learn more about it. I was also simply curious: Wasn’t a pro-nuclear environmentalist an oxymoron? Could it really be true that something that had once threatened to doom us was now needed to save us?

The long fight over Diablo Canyon is at the heart of this story because it has so often been at the center of the larger debate about nuclear power in America. The arguments about this single facility distill, in many respects, the broader conflict. Yet Diablo Canyon is, of course, only one plant, and one that’s four decades old. This book is also about some of the people who are designing new types of reactors and working to make the industry more democratic, representative, and responsive to communities, even to redress the harms of the past. Advocates for “nuclear justice” are betting that the fundamental activity of splitting atoms can be disentangled from its historical baggage and reinvented for the 21st century.

More than any other energy source, nuclear fission seems to inspire nearly religious attitudes on both sides of the debate. (As far as I know, there is no other movement that focuses on a single type of electricity generation, not even a “pro-solar” or “anti-coal” movement.) Some pro-nuclear advocates are evangelists who believe that it is all but a panacea. “It’s gonna be our solution—to everything,” one activist, Heather Hoff, told me. “Like, the only way we can have a utopia is if we do nuclear!” She laughed as she said this, perhaps self-conscious about how it would come across. But she meant it. As I spent time talking with these advocates, I began to see this worldview as an ideology, and I began to think of this ideology as “nuclearism.” When I looked it up, I found that this term had already been coined, during the Cold War, to mean “dependence on or faith in nuclear weapons as the means for maintaining national security,” according to Merriam-Webster. But I think it can be applied now to vigorous support for civilian nuclear power—not weapons—which is more prominent in today’s discourse: faith in nuclear energy as the means for addressing climate change, air pollution, energy security, and energy independence.

Since its inception in the 2010s, the pro-nuclear movement has developed into an idiosyncratic subculture. Its most prominent members, loosely defined, now range from a ’60s-era guru to a Brazilian fashion model to a Nobel Prize–winning physicist. To some extent, it has its own beliefs and shibboleths: if you spend enough time with the pro-nuclear crowd, you start to hear the same talking points, the same lingo, references to the same studies. Yet it is not monolithic; on the contrary, it is fractious. Not all nuclear advocates are evangelists, or nuclearists. But they all believe that nuclear has a meaningful role to play in our energy system.

To some, it’s impossible to conceive of pro-nuclear advocates who are not industry shills. In my reporting, I found that some advocates do have various kinds of connections to industry; others do not. Those who do would argue that since, as they see it, nuclear energy is a force for good, there’s nothing sinister about the industry. I have tried to be transparent, pointing out industry connections where I have found them, to let the reader decide how to interpret them.

This book focuses on the pro-nuclear movement, which has been ascendant in recent years and, unlike its anti-nuclear counterpart, has hardly been covered.9 But it’s impossible to understand the newer movement—or the history of nuclear power itself—without knowing something about the anti-nuclear movement and the context that gave rise to it. So that, too, is part of the story.

If Diablo Canyon is a symbol of nuclear power, nuclear power itself has long been a symbol. Depending on whom you ask, it represents humanity’s genius or our hubris—or both. Nuclear attitudes are intimately linked to our stances on scientific expertise, on modernity, on the proper relationship between humanity and nature. They are bound up with questions of whether humans should be more humble or more audacious; whether we should defer to nature’s limits or transcend them in pursuit of what is sometimes called an “abundance agenda.”10 Those who support nuclear tend to believe that energy use is good, and that humanity can harness powerful forces in sophisticated ways to meet its own needs and desires. Those who oppose it tend to believe that no matter how benevolent our intentions, something is bound to go wrong, and with nuclear, the stakes are higher than with anything else. “I think the technology is rad,” one nuclear opponent told me. “But the humans dealing with it—we all make mistakes.”11

The questions raised by nuclear energy are not only technical and scientific; they are political and cultural; they are even psychological and epistemic. I do not pretend to have all—or necessarily any—of the answers. But I have tried to tell the stories of some of the people who hold passionate opinions about this peculiar energy source, and a few of the places where fights over its future are being waged. These fights are ultimately about one of humanity’s defining challenges: how to reconcile the use of the energy that powers our lives with the health of the planet that is our home.

¹

Footnote

i My mom wants me to clarify that she washed it before putting it in the closet.