Has nuclear power entered a new era of acceptance?

The news that NextEra Energy Resources, the owner of Iowa’s only nuclear power plant, is beginning the process to reopen the plant by 2028, mirrors a nationwide trend.

Concurrently, the public support for nuclear power is the highest it’s been in more than a decade as government and private industry struggle to reduce reliance on planet-warming fossil fuels and find energy sources to run new data centers.

“We are in active discussions with customers today,” NextEra CEO John Ketchum said during an earnings call Friday. “There’s a lot of interest in the plant as we look forward.”

The 50-year-old Duane Arnold Energy Center near Palo — which can produce 600 megawatts of power — was in the process of being decommissioned when it closed in 2020 after the August derecho damaged the plant’s cooling tower.

Despite that, Ketchum said, the plant “is really in good shape. ... Building a cooling tower is run-of-the-mill.”

He said NextEra has filed a request with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to potentially restore the Duane Arnold Energy Center’s operating license.

The construction of data centers in Iowa has increased demand for electricity in the state, leading Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds to sign an executive order this month creating a Nuclear Energy Task Force.

That task force, she said, is to make recommendations “for how we can move forward with nuclear energy in Iowa.”

The state, she said, is committed to a “forward-focused, all-of-the-above energy strategy that serves to keep consumer prices low and position Iowa for future growth.”

Google and another as-yet-unnamed company are proposing to build two or more large data centers in southwest Cedar Rapids.

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Changing attitudes

Although a string of nuclear disasters decades ago had caused the majority of older Americans to distrust the technology, this hasn’t been the case for younger generations.

Old-school environmentalists “grew up in the generation of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. … The Gen Zers today did not,” said David Weisman, 63, who has been involved in the movement to get Diablo Canyon shut down since the ’90s and works as the legislative director of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility.

“They don’t remember how paralyzed with fright the nation was the week after Three Mile Island. … They don’t recall the shock of Chernobyl less than seven years later.”

Many of these younger nuclear advocates — outwardly vocal on social media sites such as X and Instagram — hope the renewed interest will fuel a second renaissance in nuclear power, one that helps the U.S. and the globe meet ambitious climate goals.

“I think we are the generation that’s ready to make this change and accept facts over feelings, and ready to transition to a cleaner, more reliable and safer energy source,” said Veronica Annala, 23, a college student at Texas A&M and president of the school’s new Nuclear Advocacy Resource Organization.

In the past few months, Microsoft announced plans to fund the reopening of Three Mile Island’s shuttered unit to power a data center. Amazon and Google also have invested in new nuclear technology to meet clean energy goals.

Artificial intelligence pushing demand

While some advocates wish nuclear revitalization wasn’t being driven by energy-hungry AI technology, the excitement around nuclear power is more palpable than it has been in a generation, they say.

“There’s so many things happening at the same time. … This is the actual nuclear renaissance,” said Gabriel Ivory, 22, a student at Texas A&M and vice president of the Nuclear Advocacy Resource Organization. “When you look at Three Mile Island restarting — that was something nobody would have ever even thought of.”

Poll shows shift in nuclear politics

This enthusiasm also has been accompanied by a surprising political shift.

During the Cold War nuclear energy frenzy of the 1970s and ’80s, nuclear supporters — often Republicans — touted the jobs the plants would create, and argued that the United States needed to remain a commanding leader of nuclear technology and weaponry on the global stage.

Meanwhile, environmental groups, often aligned with the Democratic Party, opposed nuclear power based on the potential negative impact on surrounding ecosystems, the thorny problem of storing spent fuel and the small but real risk of a nuclear meltdown.

“In America, … it has been highly politicized,” said Jenifer Avellaneda Diaz, 29, who works in the industry and runs the advocacy account Nuclear Hazelnut. “That is a little bit shameful because we have great experts here — a lot of doctors, a lot of scientists, a lot of engineers, mathematicians, physicists.”

Today, younger Republicans are 11 percent less likely to support new nuclear plants in the U.S. than their older counterparts.

The opposite is true for the left: Younger Democrats are 9 percent more likely to support new nuclear than older Democrats, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.

As a result, while Republicans older than 65 are 27 percent more likely to support nuclear energy than their Democratic peers, Republicans ages 18 to 29 are only 7 percent more likely to support it than their Democratic counterparts.

“Young Democrats and young Republicans may be looking at numbers — but two separate sets of numbers,” said Weisman. “The young Republicans may be looking at the cost per megawatt hour, and the young Democrats are looking at a different number: parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere.”

This newfound enthusiasm has also affected the nuclear industry, where two dominant age groups have emerged: baby boomers who mostly took nuclear jobs for consistent work, and millennials and Gen Zers who made a motivated choice to enter a stigmatized field, advocates in the industry say.

“You get all sorts of different backgrounds, and that really just blooms into all sorts of fresh new ideas, and I think that’s part of what’s making the industry exciting right now,” said Matt Wargon, 33, past chair of the Young Members Group of the American Nuclear Society.

New supporters, new technologies

Like the workers themselves, the industry has formed two bubbles: the traditional plants that have been operating for decades and a slew of new technologies — from small reactors that could power or heat single factories to a potentially safer class of large-scale reactors that use molten salt in their cores instead of pressurized water.

At existing plants, younger folks have injected innovation into long-standing operation norms, improving safety and efficiency. At the startups, those who’ve worked in the industry for decades provide “invaluable” knowledge that simply isn’t in textbooks, industry workers say.

The infusion of new talent and ideas is a significant change from when Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 and the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986 devastated the industry.

Regulations became stricter, and development on new reactors and new technology slowed to a halt.

False narratives around the technology ricocheted through society.

Members of the Young Members Group recall their parents worrying about radiation affecting their ability to have children. (The average worker at Diablo receives significantly less radiation in a week than a passenger does on a single East to West Coast airplane flight.)

“Radiation is invisible — you can’t see it. You can’t smell it. You can’t hear it,” Wargon said. “And people tend to fear the unknown.”

Only as the memories faded and new generations entered the workforce did the reputation of nuclear power slowly recover.