The U.S. stopped building nuclear reactors primarily because of the Three Mile Island accident and the PR/optics fallout from it, even though no one died, no one was injured, and there was no radiation dose to the public.
Isaiah Taylor explains that U.S. reactor construction halted after Three Mile Island — despite zero deaths, injuries, or public radiation exposure — because the incident was mismanaged as a PR crisis, causing public fear that killed industry momentum. ✦ AI generated
Isaiah Taylor · No Priors · 2026-07-02 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 4:20
“So for people who come from outside the nuclear industry, like why did we stop building reactors in this country?”
We stopped for a pretty simple reason, which is 3M Island. So, we were building a lot of reactors. We were doing really well. We had a nuclear incident in the 3M Island reactor. And in that incident, we essentially lost the ability to cool the reactor.
verbatim transcript · starts at 4:20
4:03conclusions about why uh when I was in high school, and I I still hold those conclusions today. And then it was a, you know, 10-year journey of like waiting for someone to solve the problem, watching every nuclear startup that popped up, trying to figure out if they were going to solve the problem. And eventually realizing that that no one was going to solve it at the pace
4:20and scale that was necessary. Uh, and so I started Valor. >> So for people who come from outside the nuclear industry, like why did we stop building reactors in this country? Yeah, we stopped for a pretty simple reason, which is 3M Island. So, we were building a lot of reactors. We were doing really well. Um, we had a a nuclear incident in the 3M 3M island reactor. And in that
4:42incident, we essentially lost the ability to uh cool the reactor. And in traditional uh lightwater reactors, you have to always be able to cool them, right? So, if you shut a reactor down in traditional nuclear, you have to keep cooling it even after shutdown. And in this case, the cooling system failed and so you had core meltdown. Now, nobody died, right? Uh in fact, not only did
5:04nobody die, nobody was injured and there was no radiation dose to the public. But, uh it was sort of a optics and PR situation um that was mismanaged in many many different ways and the public uh became fearful and and lost interest in nuclear. Now I think that actually turned around even like 15 20 years ago where suddenly uh people looked back on that and they said okay actually we do
5:30know how to build reactors really safe even learnings from that uh we've taken and incorporated into new designs but then there was a second problem which was once you stop an industry it's very hard to start it again and in the intervening time between 3M island and when people gained interest in nuclear again we also really changed how we build things in the United States. We went from a
5:54country that was very good at large scale civil infrastructure, right? Bridges, roads, um huge power plants, dams, highway systems, right? We were really good at large scale civil infrastructure. Um and we kind of atrophied at that skill set and we got much better at advanced manufacturing. And so my realization, one of the first realizations I had about this was if you're going to reboot nuclear and you're actually believe in in the atomic
6:18energy century, which I absolutely do, it's probably not going to look like what it did in the '60s. It's not going to look like civil infrastructure because we're not that good at that anymore. And what we're way better at is producing, you know, more complicated and uh more functional pieces of manufactured equipment. And so you're going to shift from the civil infrastructure way of building to a