Chapter 1: What historical events shaped the perception of nuclear power in the U.S.?
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The Miss America competition in 2023 included a lot of what you'd expect from the pageant stage. Sequins, smiles, stilettos.
Thousands of candidates competed across the country this year at the local and state level, and it has come down to these 51 candidates competing to be Miss America 2023.
And of course, coordinated dance moves. But amongst all the fanfare, there was a hint about where our country's energy future is headed. Miss Wisconsin had something to say about it.
As a nuclear engineer, I'm here to tell you the time to change is now. Nuclear energy is a safe, effective, and zero-carbon method of producing power.
Let's embrace clean energy for a cleaner future.
I did not, first of all, think I was going to win Miss America.
Second of all, think a nuclear engineer would become Miss America.
Grace Vanderhy, a.k.a. Miss Wisconsin, ran on a platform of expanding nuclear power and was crowned Miss America at a pivotal time for energy politics.
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Chapter 2: How did the Three Mile Island accident impact nuclear energy policies?
It unleashed a level of annihilation never before seen. The secretive Manhattan Project had developed the bomb. It also fast-tracked our understanding of a new technology, nuclear fission, or the splitting apart of an atom's nucleus.
In the United States, it's that Manhattan Project that really is the genesis of all of the rest of what has come since.
Sarah Roby is an associate professor at Idaho State University, where she studies the history of nuclear science and technology. If nuclear technology was so powerful that it could destroy entire cities, could it also be harnessed to help power cities? And if so, could it change the way the world got its energy? In a facility in Idaho, scientists began testing different types of nuclear reactors.
One of those reactors generated the first nuclear electricity.
There's some very famous images of a little string of light bulbs lit by atomic power in 1951.
This small production proved conclusively that nuclear reactions could generate electricity. The government needed to show people that this technology wasn't only useful in war. It could be used for peace and prosperity, too. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a speech at the United Nations titled Atoms for Peace.
The United States would be more than willing It would be proud to take up with others principally involved the development of plans whereby such peaceful use of atomic energy would be expedited.
The U.S. not only encouraged friendly countries to build nuclear power plants, but also helped share knowledge, and in some cases, nuclear fuel with them. And the Eisenhower administration was also undertaking a rebranding campaign at home.
You start seeing a lot of film reels and pamphlets and public education materials that... sort of say, yes, atomic weapons have been used for this, you know, very powerful war purpose. But let me tell you about the glorious nuclear future that awaits us.
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Chapter 3: What role does AI play in the current energy demands?
It added to the excitement for nuclear science, even though we still haven't made it work. Meanwhile, back in the 1960s, the government was making big predictions for fission.
Officials were predicting that there would be 1,000 commercial power reactors in the United States by the year 2000. That never happened. But that's how optimistic they were, that starting new projects and getting more and more reactors on board, that's how optimistic they were feeling about the nuclear future in the 60s.
At peak, there were about 112 reactors operating in the U.S. That's just over a tenth of the number officials hoped for. Today, there are 94. So what happened?
There was a mentality that serious accidents could not happen. in the nuclear power world.
Victor Galinsky is a nuclear physicist. He worked on nuclear policy under Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan. He first started working in government in 1971. His job was to review licenses for new reactors. He said there was a lot of pressure to approve reactors quickly.
You could not raise the possibility of a serious accident. You couldn't say, you know, you should not grant this license because they're not adequate provisions to prevent a serious accident because a serious accident was deemed to be essentially not credible
A New York Times investigation in 1974 found that in just the previous year alone, the government found over 3,000 safety violations at nuclear power plants. But they only imposed penalties eight times. Critics, like consumer advocate and future presidential candidate Ralph Nader, said that the government put the commercial interests of the industry over safety.
You have a situation where technological arrogance... and corporate and governmental investment in the billions refuse to recognize that they have made a terrible mistake.
When we come back, the accident that nobody thought could happen, happens.
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Chapter 4: How is the nuclear industry evolving in response to new energy needs?
It's sort of interesting how emergencies work. You imagine everybody's running around scurrying. In reality, everything slows down.
The people living near the plant, in a town near Harrisburg called Middletown, were also confused about the information they were hearing. At first, they were told not to worry. It wasn't until two days after the accident, a Friday, that things became alarming. Former Middletown resident Paula Kinney was the mother of three young children at the time.
She was at home when the governor made an announcement.
My next door neighbor, I was setting her hair in my kitchen dining room and Governor Thornburg came on TV and he said as a precaution, we're going to evacuate people within the five mile radius and those who have preschool children. I am advising those who may be particularly susceptible to the effects of any radiation
That is pregnant women and preschool age children to leave the area within a five mile radius of the three miles. And that's when all hell broke loose. The situation here has become more and more confusing each day. Telephone lines in the Harrisburg area are jammed and immediate highways are too as more people decide to leave. I think we're very close to a chaotic situation.
Part of it, I think, is a lack of credibility of what we're being told. We were getting conflicting messages. If you live in a brick house, open your windows. If you live in a brick house, keep your window shut, your doors shut. I mean, it was complete chaos.
She remembers lines at gas stations and traffic leading out of Middletown as the community emptied out.
When the children were brought home, I was so panicked inside, but I didn't want to reflect my panic to my children. So I just said, we're going to go to Nana and Pop-Ops in Wilkes-Barre. We're going to go visit them and have like a little mini vacation.
Kenny and her family drove an hour and a half away to her in-laws' house.
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Chapter 5: What are the challenges in restarting the Three Mile Island reactor?
A series of no-nukes rallies took place across the country.
This is the first major rally after the Harrisburg accident, and it was an accident.
Like this one in San Francisco, where Ralph Nader addressed the crowd.
There will be other rallies all over the country as more people who never had an opinion on atomic energy join those of you who have been working to stop this technological Vietnam right here
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.
In addition to this long-term protest against nuclear, there was also kind of a simmering skepticism about the ability of nuclear agencies to do their job well and to be operating in the public interest and to be honest.
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.
A new online chatbot is making waves on social media for both its precise and also painfully honest answers.
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Chapter 6: How are tech companies influencing the nuclear energy landscape?
This is new in the U.S. Previously, if you closed a nuclear reactor down, if you're decommissioning a nuclear power plant, that's just it, kind of end of story. That plant goes away.
If $1.6 billion for Three Mile Island sounds like a lot, in the world of nuclear, it's a bargain. A Bill Gates-backed company called TerraPower just got permitting to build an advanced type of reactor. The project is estimated to cost between $4 and $10 billion. Here's Gates on CBS in 2024.
I feel great about the support we're getting from the federal government in this nuclear space to take our history of excellence and solve the problem that our current reactors are just way too expensive.
TerraPower is among a swath of startups developing their own, smaller, next-generation nuclear reactors. The designs use different kinds of fuel, different kinds of cooling systems, and make bold promises. Some are even venturing into the world of nuclear fusion.
I think we're going to get nuclear fusion to work in the next few years.
Here's OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman, in 2023.
And importantly, not just as a scientific demonstration, but as incredibly cheap energy and at global scale.
You might remember that people have been talking about nuclear fusion since the 1950s. The joke about nuclear fusion is that it's been about 10 or 20 years away for the past 80 years. But that hasn't dissuaded big tech. Sam Altman is invested in a fusion company, as is Bill Gates. Even the Trump family is invested in a fusion energy company.
The Trump administration is trying to support all these nuclear endeavors. President Trump has set ambitious goals to build reactors as fast as possible. He aims to have several operating by this year's Fourth of July.
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Chapter 7: What innovations are being pursued in nuclear technology today?
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