This thought-provoking article from Grist profiles five people who changed their minds on nuclear in various ways and for various reasons, and our co-founder Kristin Zaitz is one of them!

Read the full article here:
https://grist.org/article/these-5-people-changed-their-minds-about-nuclear-power-are-you-next/

The debate over nuclear energy has never seemed more important. After weighing every study on the subject, teams of scientist have predicted that warming of 1.5 degrees C (2.4 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels would bake 1.5 billion people in life-threatening heat waves at least once every five years, bleach coral reefs, and cause crop failure. And according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there’s no way to avoid that scenario without using nuclear power. After all, nuclear fission is the world’s second-largest source of low-carbon electricity after hydropower.

Yet here in the United States, utilities are planning to shut down nuclear power plants that are producing more than twice as much electricity as all the solar panels in the country. The main reason is the cost. Today’s reactors are so expensive that some say it would be better to invest in other options — fusion, batteries, or maybe a better version of nuclear.

Of course, it’s impossible to disentangle nuclear energy from the specter of nuclear war, its high-profile disasters (like Fukushima or Chernobyl), or from its legacy of poisoning vulnerable people, such as the Navajo and Bikini islanders.

Opinions about nuclear power are cast in granite. They don’t bend under pressure. They emerge unchanged after slamming into mountains of contrary evidence. Or at least that’s how it seems. But these five people bring a special insight into this debate, because they once stood on the other side.

Given Kristin Zaitz’s profile, you might think she’d be the last person to take a job at a nuclear power plant. She’s a trail-running, home-birthing, farmers-market shopping mother of three. She grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California, raised by the kind of back-to-the-land parents who prohibited flushing the toilet after peeing to save water. Zaitz started hiking as soon as she was big enough to carry a pack, often traipsing through the mountains for weeks with her uncle, a Sierra Club guide who had donated a big chunk of his life savings to Greenpeace (a longtime foe of nuclear power). At an age when other teenagers were starting to party, she was trekking up glaciers with her snowboard.

Her family talked about protecting the environment all the time, but the subject of nukes never came up. But when she went to California Polytechnic State University and found her group of likeminded people, she discovered she was anti-nuclear by clan, way of life, and birth. It came with the package.

In a class on public speaking, Zaitz got an assignment to research a controversial topic and picked nuclear energy. As she leafed through a stack of books in the university library, one preconception after another shattered.

“I had this image of nuclear waste from the Simpsons as glowing green bars that you picked up with tongs, or barrels oozing green goo,” she said. “I learned that it was solid fuel rods encased in dry casks, which is benign compared to particulate air pollution spewing everywhere.”

When she researched wind, solar, and other renewable sources, she began grappling with the amount of land solar panels would require to replace fossil fuels, the thousands of birds that wind turbines kill, and the damage hydropower dams do to river ecosystems. “I think my big realization was that every form of energy has a downside,” Zaitz said. Her speech in front of the class ended up being fairly neutral, not the anti-nuclear talk she’d expected to deliver.

When she graduated in 2001, a door opened for an internship at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant just up the road, and she tiptoed through. “I took the internship for stupid reasons,” she said. “I had a boyfriend in town, and I needed a job.”

At this point she knew that a lot of the worries people had about nuclear power were overblown, but she also figured there must be a kernel of truth behind people’s aversion to it. Zaitz soothed her qualms about her internship decision by telling herself that maybe she could serve as a watchdog on the inside and help anti-nuclear advocates pounce on problems at the plant. She was surprised to find that the workers there didn’t mind her scrutiny, because it was an established part of the nuclear industry’s “safety culture” to encourage probing questions. Older engineers were encouraging, kind, and often staunch environmentalists.

“This wasn’t Homer Simpson eating doughnuts in the control room,” she said. “They were awesome. It just didn’t seem possible that these people were covering up some awful conspiracy.”

And so she stayed.

“I ended up loving the job, and the people, and ditching the boyfriend,” she laughed.

Because she was a civil engineer, Zaitz got to scuba dive in the kelp forest around the plant to inspect the water intake system and rappel down the reactor containment domes looking for cracks while taking in the beauty of her surroundings. Humpback whales played in front of her workplace. She marveled at the way nature and reactors producing as much electricity as three coal plants could exist in harmony. As the years passed, she came to believe that plants like this produced the most environmentally friendly, and safest, source of energy.

In 2016, when the state of California and Pacific Gas and Electric, which owns the Diablo Canyon plant, began talking about shutting the reactors down, it hit Zaitz like a punch to the gut. She knew she could get another job easily enough, but she was worried about the climate.

“I’d always thought of this as the jewel of the country’s nuclear fleet — if it gets closed prematurely then we could be looking at early shutdowns for all the plants,” Zaitz said. “We could lose half of the United States’ clean electricity at a time when we are painting our faces and holding up signs at climate marches. The thought of it made me feel sick.”

Zaitz and her colleague Heather Hoff, a reactor operator, decided it was on them to stop that from happening. They hesitated out of fear they might get fired: After all, they were opposing the course of action that PG&E executives — their bosses — wanted. But a little research showed them that the company couldn’t restrict what employees did on their own time.

The pair decided to start Mothers for Nuclear because, as mothers themselves, they figured they could target an audience that doesn’t get a lot of direct attention from activists. “Throughout history, women have been the ones looking out for things that might harm their families,” Zaitz said. “We think it’s a group super motivated to save the planet.”

For the last few years they’ve been organizing through a website and social media, handing out fliers at local farmers markets, writing op-eds, and meeting with politicians in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. They made a trip to Fukushima last February to see for themselves what a nuclear accident looked like.

Zaitz’s stance led to some hard conversations with old friends. Sometimes people assume that she’s being paid to promote nuclear power. (It’s all on her own dime and time.) But most people are interested in her expertise and her story: “Support for nuclear power is not something that comes naturally to the friends of mine who are herbalists and homeschoolers and midwives,” she wrote on the Mothers for Nuclear website. “But they love me and trust me. What I find most moving is the willingness of everyone to not just listen but also to ask questions.”