The Patriot Post® · Americans Are Warming Up to Nuclear

For the third consecutive year, a majority of Americans favor expanding nuclear power. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 56% of U.S. adults support increasing the use of nuclear energy to power the electric grid. This represents a significant swing in opinion from only four years ago, when just 43% supported increasing nuclear power.

While a significant majority still favors more solar and wind power (78% and 72%, respectively), the growth in support for nuclear power has much to do with an increasing number of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents favoring it (67%) in addition to 49% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents. Furthermore, men significantly favor nuclear power more than women do, by a 70% to 44% margin.

Nuclear power holds the smallest bipartisan opinion gap (just 18%) compared to all the energy-generating options. This is likely because nuclear energy offers a truly zero-carbon emissions alternative to fossil fuel-based energy. Unlike renewable energy, it is also a proven power source capable of meeting the growing energy demands of the developing gig economy.

Last year, a new nuclear power plant in Georgia went online. It was the first such plant constructed in the U.S. in decades. Why? The answer is fear, and the source of that fear is both the Three Mile Island incident in 1979 (our Jack DeVine was there and tells the real story) and the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, in 1986. This was further stoked by the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the USSR and the fear of global nuclear annihilation.

Although those fears have diminished considerably since the end of the Cold War, they nonetheless caused Washington to impose a litany of regulations on nuclear power that has stymied the development of new plants.

However, with climate change becoming the Democrats’ main “existential crisis” bogeyman and spurring the Biden/Harris administration’s war on fossil fuel — despite the practical reality that renewable energy can’t possibly meet our nation’s current energy demands — something had to give. And since the leftist radicals running the Biden/Harris administration are not willing to give up their zero-carbon pipe dream, they have reluctantly warmed to nuclear power.

As Joe Biden’s climate adviser, Ali Zaidi, acknowledged, “We need to pull as many of the tools for decarbonization off the sidelines and onto the field.” That includes nuclear. National Review’s John Fund observes, “Even the Biden administration has announced it will be removing barriers to the construction of new nuclear plants in response to pleas from investors who are lining up to finance new projects. Investment in advanced fission technologies grew more than tenfold, to $3.9 billion, in the first seven months of 2024 from $355 million in all of 2023.”

Indeed, Kamala Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, grudgingly lifted the state’s moratorium on constructing new nuclear plants in order to keep alive the Gopher State’s goal of zero-carbon emissions energy production by 2040. That speaks volumes.

If future energy production is to have zero carbon emissions, then the only way to truly achieve this is via nuclear. It appears that more Americans are warming up to this reality.