Katherine Sullivan

Kinney joined a growing movement protesting nuclear power.

Historian Sarah Roby says the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island was a key moment for the anti-nuclear movement in the U.S.

A movement that had been somewhat fragmented before 1979 began to coalesce.

This was the Cold War, and the constant threat of nuclear weapons contributed to the fear of nuclear power.

A series of no-nukes rallies took place across the country.

Like this one in San Francisco, where Ralph Nader addressed the crowd.

In the decade after Three Mile Island, 67 nuclear plant projects were canceled.

Public opinion shifted even further against nuclear power after the 1986 disaster at the Soviet nuclear plant Chernobyl in current-day Ukraine.

By mid-1986, polls showed that over 70 percent of Americans opposed new nuclear power plants in their communities.

The NRC did institute sweeping new safety regulations in the 1980s, many of them overseen by Victor Galinsky.

But still, for 25 years, no new plants were built in the U.S., and over a dozen were retired.

In 2019, the remaining undamaged reactor at Three Mile Island was shut down.

It was expensive to run, and the economics weren't working out.

Activists celebrated.

So how did we get from there to the so-called nuclear renaissance we see today?

That's after the break.

If there's one moment you can pinpoint when interest in nuclear power really started picking back up, it was this one.

Just a few weeks before Grace Vander High won the Miss America pageant in late 2022.

It's called ChatGPT, which stands for... ChatGPT and other AI services use huge amounts of energy.

And all of a sudden, millions of Americans were using them regularly.