Alexander Kaufman is a senior reporter at HuffPost, based in New York. He covers energy and climate change. A two-time winner of the SEAL Environmental Journalism Award and a 2024 recipient of the Covering Climate Now Journalism Award, he has filed stories from the Arctic and the Amazon, Europe and East Asia.
Domes Beach is on the northwest point of Puerto Rico , in Rincon and known for big wave surfing during the winter. Near the beach is a defunct nuclear facility.RINCÓN, Puerto Rico — At the end of a dirt road leading to a prime surfing spot in this vacation town on the northwest coast sits a giant, hemispheric bulb bulging out from between the palm trees. When the structure popped up more than six decades ago, federal scientists called it the “dome of the future.
The imported fossil fuels Puerto Rico burns to produce most of its electricity are dirty and expensive. Solar panels and wind turbines can only do so much in a place with limited land, and the lithium batteries on the market today can’t store power from those weather-dependent renewables for more than a couple of days. The Caribbean archipelago is physically isolated, with no high-voltage lines connecting its grid to neighboring systems.
For much of the 20th century, the U.S. military used the Puerto Rican island of Vieques for target practice, leaving behind spent munitions containing toxic metals thatPuerto Rico’s largest power station, a coal-fired plant on the main island’s southeast coast, stacked a mountain of ash several stories high without the proper covering, allowing it to spread into waterways and blow into the air. The surrounding municipality now suffers from one of the highest cancer rates in the entire U.S.
That the awesome power of atomic fission first went on display worldwide in the form of mushroom cloud explosions did little to reassure an anxious public. Nuclear-powered naval submarines, after all, predated the first civilian nuclear power plant.In 1979, the Hollywood blockbuster “The China Syndrome” premiered, starring Jane Fonda as a reporter who discovers a nuclear plant owner’s attempt to cover up a dangerous accident.
Estimates vary as to the number of people who died due to stress or other complications from the resulting evacuation. No one is confirmed to have died of acute radiation exposure in the wake of the meltdown, though the Japanese government paid out compensation to one emergency worker who died form a likely unrelated case of lung cancer.
When Jorge Navarro Suárez, a lawmaker in Puerto Rico’s House of Representatives, held a hearing in 2019 to examine the potential for nuclear power on the island, the eventSo it was no surprise when in 2020, ahead of that year’s gubernatorial election, nearly every candidate came out against nuclear energy during in a
ëz, earning both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. By the time he graduated, the 2008 global recession had hit and the economy was tanking. Nuñez had never planned to leave Puerto Rico, but an academic adviser told him the engineering giant Bechtel was hiring for an entry-level position in its Frederick, Maryland, headquarters.
Department of Energy to conduct a study into the possibility of building a small modular reactor on the island.
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