Nuclear Energy: It's Mother Approved

Heather Matteson and Kristin Zaitz are just two moms who happen to work in nuclear energy.

If you ask them, they’ll both tell you how they reluctantly took jobs at Diablo Canyon—California’s only nuclear power plant.

“I was really nervous starting my job at the plant,” remembers Zaitz, a civil engineer at Diablo Canyon. “My friends made me a cake and put real firecrackers on top of it – the insinuation being that we were celebrating me going to this place that was going to blow up.”

Spoiler alert.

The plant did not blow up, but it did ignite curiosity in Matteson and Zaitz, who admittedly grew up skeptical of nuclear energy.

“I went in with the attitude of, I will ask a lot of questions and figure out what the real deal is,” said Matteson, a reactor operator at the plant. “I eventually asked enough questions and it made me even more sure that nuclear was a good thing.”

Mothers for Nuclear

It didn’t take long for Matteson and Zaitz to uncover the truth about nuclear—it’s clean, it’s reliable, and it produces a lot of power on a relatively small footprint compared to other energy sources.

That aligned perfectly with their passion for the environment.

“What I thought was so bad was actually doing one of the most important things that we should be doing, which is keeping our air clean and saving our land for our kids’ kids to enjoy in the future,” said Zaitz.

With rumblings (and the later reality) of a decision to retire Diablo Canyon early, Matteson and Zaitz took action and formed Mothers for Nuclear—a grassroots organization to build a dialogue around nuclear energy.

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