The generation of electricity from the heat of splitting atoms — the most concentrated energy source humans have harnessed, and the one most entangled with weapons, catastrophe, and dread, now re-examined as a large, near-zero-carbon option in a warming world.
A single fuel pellet the size of a fingertip holds about as much energy as a ton of coal. That is the promise. The dread arrives with the same physics: the reactions that boil water inside a power plant are kin to the ones that flattened Hiroshima, and three accidents — Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima — have become global shorthand for what can go wrong. Nuclear power is the technology civilization is most divided about. It is by far the densest low-carbon electricity we know how to make, and the hardest to love. Its future turns on a single question: whether the fear or the carbon math wins.