By Grace Vanderhei Gabriel Ivory
Just over a year ago, the headlines were everywhere: Three Mile Island Unit 1 was coming back online as the Crane Clean Energy Center. A site that once defined an entire industry’s future has done it again, this time as a symbol of hope, optimism, and unity as we move toward a reliable and clean energy future.
For us, young professionals in the nuclear industry, this moment showed what’s possible when communities come together. From union members and business leaders to viral social media posts and major media outlets, everyone celebrated the announcement of the restart. In a society often defined by polarization, this was a rare moment of shared pride and common purpose. This was a moment of unity.
As 2025 draws to a close, nuclear energy sits at the center of a new national conversation—one driven by optimism, innovation, and a shared commitment to a cleaner future. Public support for nuclear energy is at historic highs, with six in ten Americans in favor of its expansion. Companies that defined Gen Z’s childhood, like Meta, Google, and Amazon, are partnering with nuclear producers to power the data centers that keep our digital lives running. For Gen Z, this isn’t just about keeping the lights on: it’s about building a future where clean energy powers our ambitions, our communities, and our planet.
Growing up, many of us felt politics was a binary choice – two parties, two options, and endless division. But today, nuclear energy stands out as something different: a safe haven for young people across the political spectrum. It’s one of the few issues drawing support from both sides, with the Biden and Trump administrations both advancing policies that strengthen nuclear energy’s role in America’s energy mix. For Gen Z, that bipartisanship represents progress, not politics. We know that America’s ability to deliver reliable, emissions-free energy will define the nation that Gen Z will lead tomorrow—politically, economically, and environmentally.
Now it’s up to all of us to seize this unique opportunity and recognize nuclear’s potential to redefine America’s energy conversation. Nuclear energy is more than a technology – it’s a catalyst for unity, resilience, and innovation. It can deliver on our generation’s hopes for a cleaner, fairer, and more sustainable world.
Nuclear power doesn’t just create reliable, emissions-free energy: it offers countless societal benefits. Generating stations do more than create electricity. They can also support system add-ons that help create clean water through desalination and create valuable medical materials for diagnosing heart disease and providing crucial cancer care.
When we think back to history class, we learned about iconic generational causes like the space race and the wonders that could be unlocked in the internet age. Each generation had something tangible to rally around, something that brought people together to move the world forward. For Gen Z, that unifying cause can be nuclear energy: a reliable, emissions-free solution that defines progress for our time.
We’ve seen it firsthand. We both took the leap to work in the nuclear industry, and more specifically, on a historic nuclear restart. Three Mile Island Unit 1 in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, closed for economic reasons in 2019, hurting hundreds of families whose livelihoods depended on it. Yet as demand for energy surged, the world rediscovered nuclear energy at a critical role. This momentum led to the announcement of the unit’s restart exactly five years after being shut down.
We are both at the beginning of our careers and are hopeful that the momentum we’re seeing now will carry forward for future generations. Being part of the nuclear renaissance, which is turning into a national movement, has filled our young careers with pride and purpose.
Whether you are Gen Z or not – clean nuclear energy can be a uniting force in a divided world. The bipartisan support, private investment, and widespread public acceptance happening today didn’t happen by coincidence – it happened because people came together to focus on what works. We can’t afford to lose that momentum. Let’s build on it and create the next generational cause: a nuclear energy-powered future.
Grace Vanderhei is former Miss America 2023 and a nuclear engineer, and Gabriel Ivory is a fellow engineer.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
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Shoot me now, just shoot me now. If the resurgence of nuclear electric power generation requires this level of absolute drivel and vacuous word-salads I don’t want to go there. It reads like the answer to a Miss America competition question.
If you were born before 1997 these kids are not talking at you.
Dave: One of the things that made it so easy for the anti-nukers to sell their garbage is that the nuclear industry would trot out their experts who offered lots of emotionless science and buzzwords which was way over the heads of the public. You may call this article drivel but I call it understanding the public – by expressing one’s passion about the benefits of radiation. Having an in-depth knowledge of radiation and then taking it down to an 8th grade level add in some empathy and passion and people will listen.
Well, one of the authors has had practice at that.
Seriously? Nuclear Energy has been demonized for nearly 40 years, a little ‘ra ra ciss boom ba’ is helpful and encouraging to see from Gen Z especially. I’ve had to live through the stupidity that denigrated and dismissed nuclear energy so it would be nice to see it embraced for the incredible future it can bring. Leave fossil fuels for making products, let’s burn/use nuclear anywhere we can for energy usage as there’s little more its useful for (other than making REALLY cool ‘booms’ in the right configuration…and away from populated areas. 🙂 )…
I am glad that you and people like you see the benefits of nuclear power. Many of my generation (boomer) have embraced those benefits for decades. Don’t overlook the benefits of fossil fuels, they bring way more to the table than just electricity. We can’t keep our modern society without them. Wind and solar are out as far as grid capable electricity production is concerned, they are too expensive, intermittent, have huge footprints, destroy flora and fauna and so on. Work hard to make fossil fuel and nuclear the best they can be. By the way a divided nation is not particular to current times it is pretty normal. There are always going to be those opposed to you no matter what you think.
Getting support behind nuclear should be The Final Nail in the coffin of grid connected wind and solar. See what I did there? 😄
After all, once you have *emissions free* (NOT that it matters!) power that works 24/7, who needs worse-than-useless wind and solar and their Ponzi scheme of subsidies?!
To many gullible zealots the photo above would be equivalent to looking into the bottomless pit of hell because for years stock photos of cooling towers billowing steam have been staple accompaniments to scary climate-change stories at the BBC Guardian etc.:
” coal-power-plant-co2-emissions-and-air-pollution-ratcliffe-on-soar- …” (Alamy).
Especially when that capture images where the sun is behind the steam and the photo shows it as black or dark gray.
You are correct, but for that to be successful nuclear power has to be much, much less expensive. We can’t spent 14 years and 35 billion dollars to get two 1 Gwe plants, as we did for Vogtle. The first commercial US nuclear plant took less that 3 years from breaking ground to making power.
Most of the cost of nuclear is the cost of fear, baked into the regulatory and legal system. South Korea can build the equivalent for a third of the cost in a third of the time. If we want to revive US nuclear, we have to fix that by removing the ability of anti-nuclear NGOs to cause endless delays.
Look up Thorcon Power, co-founded by a US MIT-trained engineer but started in Indonesia, because he judged that innovative solutions were impossible in the US due to a sclerotic Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Their goal is building nuclear capacity at about 3 cents/kWh. Nuclear needs to be cheaper than coal to put a real dent in global CO2 emissions.
The things to which you refer are human social and political problems. The regulatory and approval process does not need to be as complex as our political systems have forced it to be. Do also try to remember that at least one NRC Chair Greg Jaczko was actively opposed to nuclear power in any form. He was put into control of the NRC explicitly to prevent any new nuclear plants from being built.
So your problem is essentially with the dysfunctionality of the United States. Canada is building new nuclear power plants right now.
Canada has one nuclear power plant under construction, its slated to go online in 2030 (that’s government 2030, sometime before 2040 in the real world) and its only 300 MW. There are more on the drawing boards, so its a start. Maybe.
Ontario has the first of four under construction. The United States has nothing. You Americans imagine that if it doesn’t happen in the US, it doesn’t happen anywhere.
I’m not American…
Yes its the first of four planned but only one has actually been permitted and under construction. This is Ontario the poster child for brain dead power decisions, who managed to contract so much wind power with feed in guarantees that they have to sell the excess power into the US at negative prices, which they then hide from the public by subsidizing the customers. So tax payers are footing the bill to pay Americans to take their power while also footing the bill for subsidies to wind companies to generate the power. If there’s a way to screw this up, they will find it. At end of day, its till an SMR at only 300 MW, but its a start.
Alberta has one in the planning stages as well I believe, not sure what kind of capacity it will have. Other reactors are being upgraded, but that’s upgrades to existing reactors, not new reactors (but a way better choice than more wind).
Not to mention that Canada is not building it. GE Hitachi is building it. Yes, yes, they are sub-contracting a few scraps to local industry but that’s more for show.
The CANDU reactors could have been built instead of fields of windmills but Canada not only chose windmills instead, we stopped investing in the CANDU platform. Korea went really? We’ll just pick up where you left off then and now they have competitive SMR’s based on the tech we were too stupid to continue developing.
I feel an Avro Arrow reference lurking…
David Hoffer, said: “Not to mention that Canada is not building it. GE Hitachi is building it. Yes, yes, they are sub-contracting a few scraps to local industry but that’s more for show.”
———
Google AI delivers this information concerning the Darlington SMR team:
“The Darlington Small Modular Reactor (SMR) project is being delivered through an alliance of companies working with Ontario Power Generation (OPG). The primary contractors are Aecon, GE Hitachi, and Atkins Réalis (formerly SNC-Lavalin). The roles of each main partner in the integrated project delivery model are as follows:
— OPG: Serves as the license holder and has overall responsibility for the project, including operator training, commissioning, and oversight.
— Aecon (specifically the Aecon Kiewit Nuclear Partners partnership with Kiewit Nuclear Canada): The constructor responsible for all construction services, including project management, planning, and execution.
— GE Hitachi (GE Vernova): The technology developer responsible for the design of the BWRX-300 reactor, procurement of major components, engineering, and support.
— Atkins Réalis (Candu Energy Inc.): The architect and engineer, providing design, engineering, procurement support, construction support, and commissioning services.
Another 80 Ontario-based companies have also signed agreements to provide additional services and supplies for the project.”
———
BWXT Canada in Ontario will be supplying the reactor vessel. Which is the single most important component of the project. If the vessel isn’t delivered on time and to its approved design specification, the project will not be completed on cost and schedule.
It would be useful to know where all the other components are coming from, and who is manufacturing those other components — how many are being sourced from Canadian manufacturers, from US manufacturers, and from sources in Asia and Europe.
Jaczko, who worked for Harry Reid, was put in place specifically to prevent the Yucca Mountain repository in Reid’s state, Nevada. Yes, Jaczko is a strident anti-nuke (I know someone who knew him when he was in graduate school at Wisconsin-Madison … he was always that way), but it was politics surrounding the Nevada disposal site that got him in charge of the NRC. Ironically, one of the reasons that he was fired was for being a sexist jerk.
The real story behind the Yucca Mountain cancellation is that knowledgeable staffs inside the Congress and inside the Department of Energy knew that storing our spent nuclear fuel underground was a thoroughly stupid policy. For these several reasons:
— Much more likely than not, our spent nuclear fuel would be retrieved within a hundred years time and either be reprocessed or reused.
— The WIPP underground repository for defense wastes in New Mexico had been opened and was much more suitable technically for permanent disposal of radioactive wastes than was Yucca Mountain.
— Only a small portion of the total area reserved for WIPP defense waste operations was being utilized. WIPP could be expanded to handle civilian nuclear wastes with no further technical or safety issues.
— Interim storage underground was incredibly expensive compared with interim storage on the surface either on the reactor sites or in a centralized storage location.
— Underground interim storage had few additional environmental risk reduction benefits over surface storage worth the huge expense of underground storage. Ten to twenty times what interim surface storage would cost.
The easiest, fastest way for Congress and for US-DOE to deal with the reality of the situation — i.e., that Yucca Mountain was a huge white elephant — was for Obama to first cancel the project on the DOE side and then for Congress to de-fund it on their side.
It is not “anti-nuclear NGOs” that have caused nuclear to be so expansive but the mindset and obstinacy of the nuclear establishment itself. Read Gordian Knot substack for the sorry tale,.
Do we really need to “put a real dent in global CO2 emissions”?
Most of the valid pollution from coal has been solved. Sulfur and particulate carbon have been successfully addressed.
CO2 is NOT a “climate pollutant.”
It certainly CAN be cheaper than it is but cheaper than coal? Besides who cares about CO2 emissions really? Personally I love them, they make my plants grow better, which makes the insects happy, making the birds and other animals that eat insects happy and on-and-on…I’m looking forward to 3000 or 4000 ppm so we can have really big ass plants and maybe grow dinosaurs again (though that will all take longer than I presume I have left)…
The down side is weeds. They are growing exceptionally well of late.
We know that because of sophisticated and well financed nuclear opposition, especially here in America, that legacy long construction time mega-scale nuclear is too vulnerable to tested and proven delay tactics.
We urgently need an assembly line factory to annually produce at least 100 each, <100 MW cookie cutter identical SMR’s that are transported to the job site on semi-trailers for plug and play.
Adding nuclear capacity is a public policy decision. We buy nuclear for purposes of gaining energy reliability and security. Benefits for which we are obliged to pay a premium over what gas-fired generation costs.
Here in the year 2025, the lack of a robust nuclear industrial base is the most serious impediment to accelerated nuclear construction in the United States.
The next most serious impediment is stiff competition from gas-fired power generation as an inherently cheaper and faster means of quickly getting new capacity on line. The existence of this competition limits how much money private interests are willing to devote to nuclear.
If all the anti-nuclear groups suddenly disappeared tomorrow, those two factors would still comprise 95% of the barriers which impede faster construction of nuclear power plants.
Building excess capacity is not an impediment, it’s been proved time and again business can quickly expand production if there is money to be made. On the other hand they will drag their feet if the climate is unstable so as to not make a bad investment.
-Lawsuits are still ongoing with new ones being filed essentially daily. Green blob just has to drag things out 3 years which is really easy in court, if things flip again gang green doesn’t even have to win the lawsuits they filed they’ll get their way.
-Narrow margins for republicans in both house and senate that can easily flip. Heck at the current rate of retirees it may not even wait until the next election to flip. If they flip we’ll be back to a pro green anti nuke establishment and there’s not a whole lot the president can do about it.
-WH will have a new administration in 3 years and we don’t know who it will be.
If you look at the safety aspect nuclear is the most safe method of producing electricity. But since you can’t lubricate/make plastics/medicine/clothes/and do a plethora of other things without fossil fuels it will never ‘go away’ no matter how hard the activists try.
Another reason why you should work to reduce the amount that you burn the stuff just to move electrons around as much as possible. This material has other useful purposes.
Having lived in Germany and endured the rise of the green party in the wake of the anti nuclear movement of the 80’s (as well as the common stupidity called “german Angst”) I conclude that history is full of irony. The comeback of nuclear energy is the ultimate and well deserved “in your face” to all those tree huggers and self appointed deluded “saviours” of the planet.
Well I lay back and relax while observing Germany from a save distance when this bunch of loons runs out of options and reality strikes back and hard.
“Nuke, baby nuke”, Germany will wake up when it’s too late, when the lights are already out before the last tries to leave. Other countries are a bit smarter.
Requiem for a once decent place sarc²
This is music to my ears, having been a Health Physicist during the anti-nuke years and debating the scoundrels who took advantage of folks induced fear and ignorance of radiation. I hope Grace and Ivory enjoy using radiation to help folks as much as I enjoyed it all. May you both have wonderful careers. I took much pleasure in educating folks about radiation by building, in a simple manner, on their high school knowledge and showing how easy it is to protect oneself (time, distance shileding and contamination control).
“…has filled our young careers with pride and purpose”. Go get them ladies!
And for the generation brought up on smartphones and the internet it seems electricity is everything. It is not even a source of energy. Yes, nuclear provides a stable base load but good luck with anything that requires energy density. Even smart phones need daily charging now. Taking a flight to the next COP??. Police cars that grind to a halt, barbecues? the list goes on.
Hydrocarbons are here to stay.
Poor Ms. Vanderhei doesn’t fully appreciate the insidious nature of the (literal) powers of darkness. They are constant and well funded. It takes many years to build and bring online a new reactor, which gives the anti-nuclear crowd more than adequate time to scare people and kill it. Even if it was 95% done.
Maybe she needs to start doing the equivalent of Greta’s “Fridays for the Future.”
Ah, I am being picky. So downvote me.
“clean energy”
I prefer reliable energy.
CO2 is not a “climate pollutant.”
Three Mile Island is also known to be the site of the first major nuclear accident. Those that were known about anyway. It spurred the environmental activists worldwide to protest against nuclear power plants. Now they are all the rage even though the planet and its people are still experiencing the pollution from Chernobyl and Fukushima. CO2 doesn’t have a halflife and it doesn’t ruin the DNA of species.
I cannot help but think that this whole ‘green energy’ thing has been a ruse to get people to embrace that which was once being rejected.