![]() ![]() Hoff was especially struck by the fact that nuclear-power generation does not emit carbon dioxide or the other air pollutants associated with fossil fuels. It can generate energy at all hours and, unlike solar and wind power, does not depend on particular weather conditions to operate. For instance, nuclear reactors generate huge amounts of energy on a small footprint: Diablo Canyon, which accounts for roughly nine per cent of the electricity produced in California, occupies fewer than six hundred acres. She began to believe that nuclear power was a safe, potent source of clean energy with numerous advantages over other sources. She switched roles, working in the control room and then as a procedure writer, and got to know the workforce-mostly older, avuncular men. In the course of years, Hoff grew increasingly comfortable at the plant. “When I finally asked enough questions to understand the details, it wasn’t that scary.” “When four-thirty on Friday came, my co-workers were, like, ‘Shut up, Heather, we want to go home,’ ” she recalled. Still skeptical, she asked constant questions about the safety of the technology. The work took her on daily rounds of the facility, checking equipment performance-oil flows, temperatures, vibrations-and hunting for signs of malfunction. Nonetheless, Hoff decided to give Diablo Canyon a try. She considered herself an environmentalist, and took it for granted that environmentalism and nuclear power were at odds. Hoff grew up in Arizona, in an unconventional family that lived in a trailer with a composting toilet. Her mother had been pregnant with her in March, 1979, when the meltdown at a nuclear plant on Three Mile Island, in Pennsylvania, transfixed the nation. But Diablo Canyon is a nuclear facility-it consists of two reactors, each contained inside a giant concrete dome-and Hoff, like many people, was suspicious of nuclear power. One of the county’s major employers was the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, situated on the coastline outside the city. ![]() She was twenty-four years old and eager to start a career. But she’d so far found work only in a series of eclectic entry-level positions-shovelling grapes at a winery, assembling rectal thermometers for cows. in materials engineering from the nearby California Polytechnic State University. A few years earlier, she had earned a B.S. ![]() In 2004, Heather Hoff was working at a clothing store and living with her husband in San Luis Obispo, a small, laid-back city in the Central Coast region of California. ![]()
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