People still smoke indoors at the bar in Atomic City, Idaho, population: 52. The walls are plastered with one-dollar bills and a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag.
“Where were you Monday?” bar and nearby race track owner Vickie O’Haro asks one of her regulars who typically comes in every day.
O’Haro knows her customers’ orders without asking: cold beers or shots called “atomic bombs” — fitting since her regulars mostly work down the road at Idaho National Laboratory, or INL, America’s nuclear energy testing grounds since 1949.
A March Gallup poll shows a majority of Americans still oppose a nuclear energy plant in their area, but that’s not the case here.
“ I live 10 miles away, and I'm fine,” O’Haro said. “I'm not glowing in the dark, you know? There's nothing to be scared of.”
New nuclear power has stalled out for decades, largely due to public opinion.
But, now, the industry is having a moment. President Donald Trump fast-tracked new projects, and now a new generation of small nuclear reactors is poised to come online in the next few years.
Three companies at INL, plus one in central Utah, switched on new types of reactors this summer.
“ I think it's actually pretty cool to be happening in my backyard,” O’Haro said.
Zoom out, and INL is a pretty big backyard. It’s 900 square miles of remote, sagebrush-filled high desert, almost the size of Rhode Island.
And it’s in an unassuming building there that one startup, Deployable Energy, recently took its test reactor “critical.” That means it had a sustained chain reaction for the first time, proving the design works and could someday generate electricity.
Standing in the control room, Lance Maul, chief operating officer at Deployable Energy, described this as a “real moment in history for the nation.”
“This could be a real turning point for the energy future,” said Maul, who has an Australian accent and was sporting a man bun and a scraggly beard, which he referred to as his “criticality beard” — he and other employees swore not to shave until the reactor went critical, but he decided to keep it as a “memento.”
Maul said the goal isn’t your 20th-century reactor: massive, expensive nuclear plants. It’s micro reactors, which could power 1,000 homes versus 1 million.
“It’s something deployable,” Maul said. “It's something that you can put on the back of a truck. It is a fundamentally different proposition.”
Nuclear optimists like Maul see a future where these reactors are mass-produced and power remote communities, military bases and AI data centers. They see them as a solution to meet America’s rising energy demand without emitting carbon.
Trump is also a fan. Last year, the Department of Energy sped up reactor permitting. That means getting rid of hundreds of pages of regulations, without telling the public, NPR reporting has shown.
“I have no confidence in the Department of Energy and its oversight of this at all,” said Edwin Lyman, nuclear power safety director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a national nonprofit science advocacy group.
He said he worries about reduced standards around radiation, security and environmental contamination.
Plus, the federal commission that oversees commercial nuclear development has lost hundreds of staff, especially safety experts, due to cuts by the Trump administration and resignations, according to reporting from ProPublica. Companies now testing their reactors will seek approval from that commission.
“I don't think cutting corners when you're talking about nuclear safety is a good idea,” Lyman said. “I'm concerned about its impact on the communities around INL.”
But at the bar in Atomic City, where lab workers drink after a long day, O’Haro said she’s not worried.
“It’s safe. If it wasn’t safe, my guys would tell me that we weren’t safe,” she said, before turning up the country music playing in the background.
Despite the majority of Americans opposing new nuclear plants near them, polling also shows growing support for the U.S. “emphasizing” nuclear power more broadly.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
