Bonus Ep: Big Money Bought the Forest

In 'Timber Wars,' we've talked about how the northern spotted owl took the blame for a lot of other things that cost jobs and hurt timber-dependent towns, like automation and international competition. Well, there was another huge thing the owl took the fall for—something that cost timber towns even more money than locking up the national forests, at least in Oregon.

In a year-long investigation, OPB, the Oregonian, and ProPublica explored how Wall Street real estate trusts and other investors gained control of the state’s private forestlands—and how they’ve profited at the expense of rural communities.

The scramble to meet the energy demands of AI and data centers is leading to what some are calling a "Nuclear Renaissance," and the Pacific Northwest is at the heart of it. Oregon and Washington are the sites of the world’s first full-scale nuclear power plant (Hanford), the world’s then largest pressurized-water nuclear reactor (Trojan Nuclear Power Plant), the only company with regulatory approval to build small modular reactors (NuScale), and a growing number of power-hungry data centers — and yet Oregon has a constitutional amendment banning new nuclear projects. Why? It all comes back to the region's history with nuclear, and the legacy of the environmental movement in the Northwest.

"Trojan Wars," from OPB and 30 Minutes West, tells the story of how our grand plans for cheap, reliable, carbon-free power in the 20th century ended up in a heap of concrete and barrels of nuclear waste on the banks of the Columbia River. And we ask: What went wrong the first time around? And is it possible to get it right this time?