‘Going Nuclear’ and ‘Atomic Dreams’: Fission’s Big Comeback - 2025

Nuclear Power Industry

Mills, a physicist, is the executive director of the National Center on Energy Analytics and author of “The Cloud Revolution,” reported in late July 2025 that worries about the safety of nuclear power have stymied its promise of inexpensive energy. Two writers make the case for the benefits of a reactor-powered future.

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Seventy years ago, at the dawn of the nuclear age, atomic energy was viewed as the next great hope of modern civilization. Lewis Strauss, then the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, infamously said it could be the key to making energy “too cheap to meter” and a catalyst for an age of enduring peace. Today, a similar optimism animates the pursuit of nuclear energy. This time, however, the framing is that the peaceful atom is too important to ignore because of its potential to free us of fossil fuels.

In “Going Nuclear: How Atomic Energy Will Save the World,” Tim Gregory sees nuclear energy as the “only hope” for “mitigating” climate change because it eliminates “emissions released as a by-product of burning fossil fuels.” Similarly, in “Atomic Dreams: The New Nuclear Evangelists and the Fight for the Future of Energy,” Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow believes “nuclear advocacy and climate alarm … go hand in hand.” These books join dozens of other pro-nuke books published in the past few years.

Going Nuclear: How Atomic Energy Will Save the World

During the first era of nuclear enthusiasm, one of its most powerful proponents was Fred Hoyle, who made his case in “Energy or Extinction?” (1977). Hoyle, a brilliant British nuclear astrophysicist, was writing at a time of furious antinuclear activism. It was also a moment when experts thought that:

“...oil will soon run out and not be replaced by anything else” and thus there will be “no practical alternative to nuclear energy.”

Among other things, Hoyle’s book reminds us just how wrong brilliant people can be when it comes to forecasting global issues: World oil production has nearly doubled since Hoyle’s time, while coal and natural-gas production have more than doubled and tripled, respectively. As it turns out, there are alternatives to nuclear energy. But we now have furious anti-fossil-fuel activism. For some, going nuclear is the lesser of the two evils.

What hasn’t changed in the pro-nuke case is the sense of urgency and how the risk-benefit calculus is articulated.

Then and now, every pro-nuke case features the singular, astonishing fact of nuclear fission’s energy density. “A few crumbs” of uranium, Mr. Gregory notes, can “power a lightbulb for five years,” while “a comparable amount of coal” only does the job “for about 100 seconds.” Similarly, Ms. Tuhus-Dubrow cites Stewart Brand, the creator of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” who observed that one nuclear plant occupies “a third of a square mile, compared with more than 200 square miles for a wind farm and more than 50 square miles for a solar array.” Or, as my co-author Peter Huber and I wrote 20 years ago: “A bundle of enriched-uranium fuel-rods that could fit into a two-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen” could power New York City, including all its cars, for a year. Given nuclear’s staggering energy density, serious greens, we argued, must face reality and embrace the atom. Two decades later, maybe we’re finally there.

Ms. Tuhus-Dubrow, a California-based freelance journalist, assures us her point “is not to bash renewables” such as solar, wind and hydro power but “to honestly grapple with the problems that will attend the vast expansion of any industry” and to explore the fact that “nuclear has major challenges of its own.” Mr. Gregory, a nuclear chemist, introduces his encomium to uranium by observing that opposition to nuclear “is one of the great contradictions of our age,” coming at a time when we need nuclear energy most. Mr. Gregory wants to show “why this mistrust is misplaced.” The similarity between both books ends there.

Mr. Gregory’s “Going Nuclear” offers a master class in nuclear science, technology, economics and history, and also details myriad nonelectric uses of atomic power (e.g., space travel, medicine, agriculture, etc.) without shying away from its risks. The author highlights the many misconceptions produced by decades of cartoonish treatment by nuclear energy’s opponents (including Hollywood). He takes on the go-to boogeyman, nuclear waste, explaining that “far from being a liability” it is “a resource that can be put to good use.”

Mr. Gregory analogizes the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel—the so-called waste—as sensible recycling, noting that France, the global reprocessing leader, “doesn’t have indigenous reserves of uranium” but that its spent fuel in storage “contains as much energy as … 2.3 trillion barrels of oil.” (The U.S., which pioneered reprocessing, mistakenly abandoned its commercial pursuit under President Carter.)
 
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He also explains why “renewable is not synonymous with green” and rebuts the claim that renewables are “getting cheaper and cheaper” by showing how they in fact “become more expensive when we account for their system costs,” such as storability and reliability. Meanwhile, “nuclear becomes cheaper.”

He acknowledges the growing enthusiasm for small reactors—some designed to be the size of a 40-foot shipping container—but reminds us that such developments are still in their adolescence: “There are enormous engineering challenges to overcome.” And fusion, he asserts “won’t help us.” He notes that critical technical breakthroughs have not yet happened and thus trying to fuse atoms is “a distraction that robs our attention” from using the proven technique of “splitting atoms apart.”

His realism, however, doesn’t dampen his optimism: “I envisage a future where humanity will thrive on the Moon by deploying micro-nuclear reactors” and that one day, thanks to nuclear power, “Mars will welcome tourists and resident scientists, just as Antarctica does today.”

In contrast, “Atomic Dreams” is light on physics and heavy on people and movements. For Ms. Tuhus-Dubrow, the nuclear debate is best understood through “the people who are designing new types of reactors” and the activists “working to make the industry more democratic, representative, and responsive to communities.” She begins with the “long fight over Diablo Canyon,” since the turmoil around the iconic California nuclear reactor distills, “in many respects, the broader conflict.” It’s fitting that “Atomic Dreams” begins around 1977, when Hoyle first raised his alarm and just after California became the first state to ban nuclear construction.

Among the many stories explored in “Atomic Dreams,” Ms. Tuhus-Dubrow focuses, for inscrutable reasons, on Michael Shellenberger’s more than any other. Mr. Shellenberger, a journalist and activist—and arguably one of the central players in keeping California from shutting down all its nuclear reactors—championed nuclear energy well before it became fashionable. Revealingly, however, Ms. Tuhus-Dubrow labels him “a provocateur who had a long history of antagonizing environmentalists.” Indeed so: Environmentalists have long been vigorously antinuclear.

“Atomic Dreams” barely touches on the three pivotal nuclear accidents that have been central to the history of commercial nuclear energy—Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. But, for stories about people and their motivations, Ms. Tuhus-Dubrow chronicles an interesting journey of discovery leading to a reluctant bottom line: Nuclear energy’s advantages “cannot be lightly dismissed.”

Missing from both books is a dive into the explosive increase in electricity demand coming from data centers, crypto mining and artificial intelligence. The topic earns barely a mention, yet the energy needed to power these innovations has upended the somnolent electricity industry.

Inspired by the AI boom, for example, in recent years tech giants have committed billions of dollars to refurbishing retired nuclear plants, and have promised billions more to buy new ones. To attract these investments, some state governments have reversed longstanding nuclear bans. AI has also inspired investors to allocate some $3 billion in venture capital to developing next-generation small reactors. Meanwhile, tech titans are expected to spend more than $500 billion over the next half-dozen years on energy-gobbling infrastructure; a single data-center campus, for instance, requires as much electricity as a huge nuclear plant can produce—but a plant can take a decade or so to build.

Our near future is going to look a lot like those years following Hoyle’s earlier nuclear advocacy. To power the scale and velocity of digital aspirations, America will burn lots more natural gas from its prodigious resources, and China and India will burn lots more coal. And the machines that are building the 21st-century AI cloud, the world’s newest and biggest energy-using infrastructure? They’ll burn lots more oil.