Atomic Dreams

For readers of topical, journalistic nonfiction and those interested in environmental issues, the inside story of how the “nuclearists”—an idiosyncratic and surprising coalition of activists and experts—have turned the contentious debate about nuclear energy on its head, changing the future of our energy landscape in the process.

On June 21, 2016, Pacific Gas & Electric Company announced that the nuclear plant Diablo Canyon in San Luis Obispo, first constructed in the 1960s and which currently provides 9% of California’s electricity and 17% of its zero-emission power, would be decommissioned and closed by 2025. Then suddenly, just last year, Governor Gavin Newsom announced he was reversing that decision, and that the Biden-Harris administration would award the plant $1.1 billion in credits. What happened in between?
 
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow follows the fascinating and lively cast of scientists, environmentalists, activists, and local tribe members with high stakes in the reversal, taking readers inside plants and research facilities, to town halls and the halls of Congress, and into the living rooms of everyday people whose lives and livelihoods are affected not just by local plants but by the consequences of climate change. With vivid, on-the-ground reporting, Tuhus-Dubrow shows how nuclear energy, once wildly controversial, eliciting fears of nuclear weapons proliferation or toxic radioactive waste, is fast becoming not only one of the most promising pieces of the puzzle that is our fight against climate change, but also one of the few issues that has—shockingly—a new and diverse coalition of supporters.
 
Illuminating the very human conversation around nuclear for the first time, from the roots of the American environmental movement to the present, Atomic Dreams offers a look at why we fear certain things, how people’s minds can change, and what a grand-scale political reversal looks like up close, even when it feels, so often, like change is impossible.