American Women Promote Nuclear Energy Use

Nuclear energy attracts negative controversy all across the globe. And yet America has a rising number of women advocating the use of nuclear energy. These women defy sociocultural trends to occupy space in this industry. They wear uranium encrusted necklaces to state their keenness in the subject.

While the world may have its reservation on nuclear energy, Kristin Zaitz an engineering manager at Diablo Canyon Power Plant thinks otherwise. She believes it to be ‘cleaner’ than fossil fuels.

“We all have our perceptions of nuclear,” Zaitz said, New Delhi Times reported.

She visited her power plant during both her pregnancies and scuba dived to inspect it stands on the California coast.

Zaitz calls her power plant safe, but Diablo Canyon is on the verge on closing down. There is an abundant availability of cheap natural gas to counter its requirement. It also proves to be more efficient in comparison with nuclear energy. And general public safety concern rose with disasters at nuclear plants in Fukushima, Japan, Chernobyl in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) and Three Mile Island in the United States.

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Zaitz and many other advocators of nuclear energy say that closing down of a reactor-based generating station affects the system because of lack of wind and solar power. This pushes energy companies towards fossil fuels — coal and natural gas—use of which an environmental hazard.

“As mothers, I think we also have an important role to play in letting the public know that we support nuclear energy for the future.”

Another supporter of nuclear energy, Heather Matteson, a reactor operator, started Mothers for Nuclear. Its aim is to promote that using nuclear energy is clean, safe and better for the environment than some alternative energy sources.

“I went into the plant very skeptical of nuclear and being scared of it,” said Matteson. “It took me six to seven years to really feel like this is something good for the environment. I don’t want people to take six to seven years to make that decision. We don’t have that long.”

Industry experts contend that women promoting nuclear energy usage can influence other women too. Recently, at the U.S. Women in Nuclear Conference in San Francisco women workers for nuclear energy emphasised upon creating awareness for it in public.

“As mothers, I think we also have an important role to play in letting the public know that we support nuclear for the future, for our children,” said Matteson. “And we don’t know other mothers supporting nuclear power in a vocal way. We thought there was a gap to fill.”

“Wanting to bring power to people. There are still more than a billion people in the world who don’t have electricity.”

These women also voiced that its use is actually for the betterment of the world. “I went into this wanting to do something good for the world,” Lenka Kollar, business strategy director at NuScale, a firm in Oregon that designs and markets small modular reactors. “Wanting to bring power to people. There are still more than a billion people in the world who don’t have electricity.”

However, there are critics for the fact how some nuclear energy benefactor are manipulating women. “Using mothers’ voices to argue for a technology that is fundamentally dangerous and that has been demonstrated by disasters like Fukushima to be not safe for the communities that surround the power plants or even cities that are hundreds of miles away is disingenuous,” said Kendra Klein, a staff scientist with Friends of the Earth, an environmental group.

Picture credit- Generation Atomic