The decision to extend Diablo's license was vindication for Heather Hoff and Kristin Zaitz, who work at the plant and founded Mothers for Nuclear.

All right.

[laughs] Oh, wow.

Now we're really going slow.

Are you excited to play on the swing?

Yes.

Who's going to do the tire swing, girls?

I'm going to do it.

Are you going to do on top of the the tire swing or inside of it?

[laughter] You kicked me in the face.

[laughter] Oh, boy.

That's heavier [laughter] So much more dangerous than nuclear power.

So much more dangerous?

[laughter] I met Heather Hoff many years ago when we had young kids and we were doing environmental service projects together.

Then in 2015, we heard that Diablo Canyon was under threat of premature closure.

I was worried about that because it had taken me such a long time to change my mind from being suspicious about the place to then just believing that it aligned with my environmental values.

Because our personal reason for founding Mothers for Nuclear was from an environmental perspective, for land conservation, and for climate reasons.

We tend to be a little hippie liberal leaning [chuckles] environmentalists.

There weren't a whole lot of people like us working in nuclear, so we decided that we had a special voice, a special perspective that we wanted to share with the world.

We went to a gathering of employees and other people who cared, and we heard really more about the threat.

After that meeting, we were the last ones in the room.

We knew we had to do something about it.

We didn't know what yet, so we just started organizing people.

We organized an event at a local brewery.

We had a little silent auction, and we were going to organize a march from San Francisco to Sacramento to tell lawmakers that we needed to keep Diablo Canyon open.

We made all of our own signs and at the end, we showed up at the California State Lands Commission meeting in Sacramento, and we all spoke about what we cared about and we only grew from there.

When Heather and I started Mothers for Nuclear, we were saying something that the company that employed us was not saying, which was, we should keep existing nuclear power plants open.

We knew that public opinion has to change in order to bring about support for policies and politics that support nuclear, and that will then get us to more clean energy.

Nuclear energy is such a powerful hope for me because it's a way that we can power our planet while still protecting our environment from climate change.

I think nuclear is going to be our savior, it's going to be the way that we address climate change, the way that we decarbonize our electricity supply, and the way that we do it with the least impact on our planet.

Climate change is used as part of the argument for all sorts of things.

It's an argument for renewable energy, but a whole set of people are using it as an argument for nuclear energy.

People who came to see this as climate change is so important that the dangers of nuclear power were being overvalued, and its positive attributes in the fight against climate change were undervalued.

They like to present themselves as people who were following the science, not fearmongers.