Nuclear Power Hats

Nuclear power has a loud, self-identifying fan base. The American Nuclear Society ran a headline about nuclear bros taking to social media, and Generation Atomic sells pins and shirts to people who treat reactors as a cause. The case they make comes with a footnote: Our World in Data puts nuclear at 0.03 deaths per terawatt-hour against 24.62 for coal, while cautioning that the lowest rates overlap in uncertainty, which is exactly the kind of caveat an evangelist recites unprompted. The subject is also back in the news. Crane, the former Three Mile Island Unit 1, is being restarted for Microsoft with a $1 billion Department of Energy loan, and Palisades in Michigan and Duane Arnold in Iowa are two more shut plants being returned to service. These nuclear power hats cover both sides of the gate. Two badges, NUCLEAR ENERGY and NAVY NUKE, name the cause and the Navy machinist's mate, nuclear. The sentence designs carry the evangelism and the jokes: the safest-per-terawatt-hour footnote, the good-news pitch, a demand to restart the reactors, and a fancier take on the old meme that nuclear power is just boiling water. Fission beats fossils in one short line. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat. Wear one to the rally, the plant, or the dinner where someone brings up the power bill.