Host Tony Schick introduces us to Randy Settler and his family. The Settlers, members of the Yakama Nation, have been deeply affected by the Northwest’s salmon policies for generations. They lost their home, their primary food source, their ancestral fishing grounds. Randy and his parents went to jail for exercising their fishing rights. And they won some important victories along the way. Now, he’s passing the fight on to younger people in the tribe.
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?