Fifty-six years ago, I walked into the Black Panther Party storefront headquarters on Grove Street — now Martin Luther King Jr. Way — in the heart of my native city of Oakland, California.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week, I asked for your thoughts on preparing for natural disasters.

Ed takes stock of his setup:

I live in the country, so I am in a better position than many others. My water comes from a naturally flowing spring, so I have unlimited water. I have a gasoline-powered generator; electricity would be available until my gas runs out (I generally keep five gallons on hand). I have three fireplaces to provide some heat and plenty of cut wood to fuel them. I believe I have enough canned goods on hand for two, maybe even three weeks.

Kacey writes from a place where four tectonic plates meet:

I am no stranger to earthquakes. They have become a relatively common occurrence in my life since moving to Japan in 2015. Fortunately, none of the quakes I’ve experienced caused serious damage or loss of life to my immediate surroundings. Unfortunately, I’ve done little more than the bare minimum to prepare for a natural disaster.

I have studied my local hazard map—I know the location of my nearest evacuation shelter; I know where the river is most likely to overrun its banks; I know which areas are ripe for soil liquefaction or where a landslide is most likely to occur. My apartment is safe from such threats. Otherwise, the only prep I’ve undertaken involved the purchase of 24 one-liter water bottles in 2020. I hear them slosh around in my trunk when I take sharp turns.

Any time an earthquake of any magnitude happens in Japan, I always tell myself, “I should be more prepared.” Yet I never do more. Nearly half of the population is similarly unprepared [according to a 2021 survey].. This lack of preparation may stem from an overconfidence in Japan’s disaster-response capability. Some may have a tough time justifying the financial cost of something they may never use; others may view disasters as a natural force about which they can do nothing.

Simply writing this response has once again stirred my motivation to go and get more prepared. Whether I actually do anything remains to be seen.

Alison recounts “the October 17, 1989, Loma Prieta earthquake—what my friends and I called the ‘Big-Enough One:’”

I was in San Francisco and was able to walk the four or five blocks to my brother and sis-in-law’s home, where they had power because their landlord had a generator. I stayed there for several days with my cats, their cats, foster cats, and younger brother. Unfortunately I can relate to the current conditions in Syria and Turkey with respect to rescue efforts and the sense of achieving a miracle when someone is recovered alive after a few days, the likelihood of which sadly eventually fades as survivability recedes.  

The Big-Enough One occurred during Game 3 of that year’s World Series, unusually between the San Francisco Giants and Oakland A's; otherwise the death toll would have been much higher when part of the Bay Bridge collapsed. I subsequently moved to Montreal, in time to experience the ice storm in January of 1998; here, the problem was that many power lines were downed by heavy ice, to the point that there was literally only one power line carrying electricity into all of Montreal for several days (for the geographically challenged, Montreal is on an island in the middle of the St. Lawrence River).  

Had that one last power line failed, the authorities would have been facing the task of evacuating some 3 million people from the island, through several tunnels (yes, there are bridges, but they were also completely coated in ice and not navigable). In this case, my in-laws had power (because they lived next to a major hospital and were on its power grid), so we could at least get a warm shower, and our building's owner had a generator that he alternated using in our building and another one that he owned so we could warm up at home for a few hours at a time.

Neither the 1989 quake nor the ice storm affected me deeply, except in a psychological sense. I still remember the sense of wonder that I experienced after the Big-Enough One when I realized that I was no longer worried that the ground would fall out from under me when I walked outside!

Robert describes another historic earthquake:

I was living in Kathmandu, Nepal, in August of 1988 when a 6.9 earthquake hit the city. Born and raised in San Francisco, I was no stranger to seismic disturbance. But this was different; the shaking and convulsing of everything around me was terribly frightening, but it was nothing compared to the screams of the people as I heard buildings collapsing around me. Houses shaking to pieces and the cries of children in fear and pain were terrifying; I have never forgotten what this sounded like. Almost immediately, everyone who could began helping the injured, clearing away rubble, and donating to the general relief effort.

Now, fast-forward to COVID. My wife and I were living near Palm Desert in Southern California at the start of the pandemic, when suddenly people were sweeping everything off the supermarket shelves: food, toilet paper, bottled water, and every disinfectant they could get their hands on. But what scared me most was the frenzied buying of guns and ammunition. We are no strangers to gun violence, and this experience had much to do with our decision to return to Northern California.

You ask for our thoughts on how to prepare for a natural disaster and what we may have neglected. Our current level of preparation is modest: important documents, credit cards, and a small amount of cash are ready to go at a moment’s notice; we have a small stove with plenty of fuel, and food for a few days. I suppose we could store a bit more food and water, but I’m not so sure that one can be adequately prepared for every eventuality.

In a pinch, we would share what we have, and would never dream of taking someone else’s provisions. We’ll do the best we can, but one thing I know we are not prepared for is violence.

Julianne is waiting for the Big One in the Pacific Northwest:

I live in Port Angeles, Washington, which is on the top of the Olympic Peninsula. Known locally as “upper left,” the peninsula is the farthest northwest span of the lower 48 states. It’s a spectacularly beautiful landscape: snowy mountain peaks; misty, temperate rainforests; crystal-clear glacial lakes; and a teeming ocean, all anchored by the Olympic National Park. The motto of Port Angeles is appropriately “Where the mountains meet the sea.” The residents of my area are hardworking, kind, and practical people.

What’s the catch? Well, a little thing called the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The CSZ is a convergent tectonic-plate boundary stretching from northern Vancouver Island to Northern California, with coastal Washington square in the middle of it. The last time the locked plates released was in 1700, long before the area was settled by white people. Evidence for the 1700 quake was preserved in Native oral histories. Geological evidence was unearthed much more recently, in the mid-1980s.

When the plates eventually slip, it’s estimated the earth will shake for five solid minutes at 9.5-plus magnitude. For comparison, the horrific recent quake in Turkey and Syria measured a 7.8 magnitude, making the one we’re expecting about 350 times stronger. When is the CSZ likely to cause another massive quake? Estimates place the risk at 37 percent in the next 50 years.

You may think that, given the recent growth in the Seattle area, local infrastructure would be designed to handle this obvious threat. However, the threat has only been recognized for a little over 30 years. There’s a lot of existing, inadequate building stock that will be replaced very slowly, if at all—especially in my community, which is not a wealthy area.  

When we were deciding where in Washington to live, I was able to do lots of research via government websites on factors like tsunami risk and soil liquefaction for given areas. It’s good that the info exists, but I know most local people really don’t want to know about their risk. Other preparations I’ve made include keeping survival supplies stashed in my car (in case I’m not home when the quake happens), as well as a month’s worth of food, water filters, and shelter supplies at my house. I hope it’s enough to help us survive an event that is likely to completely cut off our community from help for months, if not a year or more. Clearly, the priority for rescue efforts will be the very large population of Seattle (rightly), not our sleepy, isolated towns up on the edge of the country.   

I recently took a community-ed class on the CSZ at our great little community college, which made me feel justified in all my preparations. Paradoxically, the class helped me let go of a constant hum of low-level worry, and instead I’ve been able to move to a more fatalistic outlook. It’s coming; I’m fairly well prepared; not much else I can do, so why worry?

Alice lives in the Pacific Northwest, too, and wishes the government would do more to prepare for the coming earthquake:

When I retired a year or so ago, I immediately started preparing above and beyond the recommended “2 Weeks Ready” that is promoted by the state of Oregon. Overall, the preparation process has been expensive, stressful, time-consuming, and frankly a bit depressing. I am left feeling that the bulk of preparation, survival, and recovery is up to the individual. I am not in any way arguing that the “government” should step in and “rescue” citizens, and I wholeheartedly feel I need to do my part by being prepared. However, I feel that over the 40-odd years since Ronald Reagan was president, we have impaired the ability of government, both federal and state, to respond to disasters AND prevent them in the first place. In our quest to reduce the size and cost of government, we have lost sight of the need for a highly organized collective (i.e., “government”) that can respond when multistate disasters happen, as will be the case in a Cascadia event.  

I know from my own experience that preparation is time- and money-consuming. Not everyone has the ability or resources to do the necessary work to get ready. I think somewhere along the way, we the people lost sight of the idea that “we the people” are in fact “the government,” and that there is much good that we can do together. I would argue that this is the purpose of a government by and for the people: to set the conditions such that everyone has the opportunity to survive and thrive. Disaster preparedness is one area in which rugged individualism helps but will not get us individually or collectively where we need to be to survive and eventually thrive after a big event.

Doug lives on the central Oregon coast:

I have ensured my home is tied to its foundation. I have installed 800 watts of solar panels on my garage roof and as much in panels stored as replacement/auxiliary use. I have a growing number of modern lithium-ion batteries I can charge from the solar panels. I can’t run my house off this system, but I don’t need to. I need light and power for truly essential things. I have a considerable amount of camping gear (and experience) including multi-fuel stove options and a decent amount of fuel stored. I have advanced first-aid training and stored gear, and emergency food and water. I have an emergency pack for the first 72 hours of survival in my car. I am also active in the local volunteer amateur-radio group of Auxiliary Communications Service (ACS), training and standing by to aid local government(s) communicate for resources and relay information to the state government. There is no place on earth that is truly safe, and that is never more the case with the ravages of climate change. I want to be here to help my neighbors and community, thus it is incumbent upon me to be prepared myself.

Jen no longer worries about that Big One––she moved away and feels happy that she did:

We lived in the Cascadia subduction zone for 30 years, and we always had to have an earthquake plan. We never had earthquake insurance, and our joke was that if there was a big earthquake, we’d just leave the gas turned on and a candle burning and run like hell. Eventually we set up a disaster-recovery kit that would allow us to live outside for a few weeks. We built a backyard shed and stored all of our camping gear, several tote boxes of food, and about 100 gallons of drinking water. The whole thing had to be broken down and replaced regularly—the water each year, and the food every three years or so. We also had pry bars, axes, and other hand tools stored where we could get them in the event the house collapsed. It was a headache and an expense, and while the risk of a major subduction-zone quake was not the only reason we decided to leave the area, it did factor into our decision.

We now live on the other side of the state in a rural area that is not wooded, so there is little wildfire danger. The climate change risk is low too—no risk of being underwater here, and our water sources aren’t dependent on rainfall. Not everybody has the flexibility to just up and move out of danger zones, but if you are thinking of moving for retirement or other reasons that aren’t job- or family-dependent, I highly recommend factoring in climate-change risk and disaster risk when you make up your wish list of places you want to explore. I didn’t realize what a chronic low-level worry it was until it wasn’t lurking there all the time.

EH muses on denial:

I have lived in California for all of my 77 years and I know what having the earth move under your feet feels like. The ground becomes like water and the shockwaves can make one feel seasick, as if standing in a dinghy that has been swamped by a passing speed boat. If you are up in a tall building, the steel and concrete actually sways, jumps, and cracks as you hold your breath waiting for it all to tumble down. Fortunately, I have not actually personally experienced real damage or injuries from any earthquake I have felt.

Yet, despite knowing the destructive power and killing potential of a large quake, I take only minimal precautions: strapping my water heater to the wall, having extra flashlights and some water reserves. I hope help will come from the rest of you if we suffer the Big One.

I sometimes say to myself what fools others are to live in flood zones or coastal areas that get hurricanes, or in the infamous tornado alley, not to mention the fire-prone and drought-plagued West; oh yeah, I live in San Diego, but it won’t happen to my neighborhood.

It is called denialism, and we all suffer from it in some form.

The biggest manifestation of denialism in the history of the Earth is our collective denial of global warming. This is a slow-moving natural disaster that could end human life.

Earl lives in the path of the occasional hurricane:

Here on the Gulf Coast, they’re inevitable, like blizzards in Buffalo and earthquakes in California. We prepare for the next storm with a new roof, knowing that even if it withstands winds, insurance rates will eventually go through it as repeat storms get more frequent due to climate change. Nevertheless, we stay.

We stay because of historical, social, psychological, financial, and familial inertia; it’s home; it’s where the heart and the family are. We trust the engineers and builders who construct bigger and better storm barriers and drainage systems. There is less trust in the power grid; more and more homes get whole-house generators, expensive but reassuring that the nightmare of evacuation and return won’t be necessary. We will ride out the storm with full power. At least we hope so.

Anna hunkers down in stormy weather:

Hurricanes may be the least-worst natural disaster because you can prepare, and you generally have decent advanced warning to make those preparations or decide to evacuate. I live on the Gulf Coast in Florida, so hurricane prep is an annual tradition. The major guiding principle: You can hide from the wind but you have to run from the water.

I don’t live in a flood zone, and I live in a house built to modern codes. I’ve had the big trees removed that could fall on the house. I don’t have any special needs that require uninterrupted electric service. So I have the luxury of hunkering down and riding out a hurricane.

Every year when the season cranks up, I make sure I have plenty of nonperishable food and basic supplies on hand, and I don’t stock up too heavily on perishables. I keep fillable water bottles on hand just in case, but historically, my municipal water and sewer services operate fine during and after storms. The most important prep for me is to reach out to my neighbors and make sure they are prepared, that we all know where everyone will be, and we are ready to help each other in the aftermath of cleanup and outages.

With all that in place, my experience with hurricanes is that there is a big damn mess to clean up outside, but otherwise it’s like camping out in my house. Newbies often don’t know what to expect and succumb to the hype. Panicky behavior makes it harder to prepare and to get through it and to recover afterward. Lots of people don’t have the resources to adequately prepare or to evacuate for a hurricane, and that’s a serious problem, but my city/county/state does a lot of outreach and assistance for those folks. Preparation, experience, and (most importantly) community is what gets you through it.

Bob was a Los Angeles Times staff photographer and has seen it all:

I’ve covered so many disasters I don’t know where to start. I’ve also suffered from PTSD, having spent too much time around people who have lost everything. I covered the Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes, the Painted Cave Fire in Santa Barbara, and another conflagration that burned homes in Malibu. I covered the Great Midwestern Flood in 1993, the Los Angeles Riots in 1992, and the Marines’ invasion of Somalia.

And after I retired, I volunteered for the Red Cross, where the most knowledgeable staffers at the Los Angeles regional headquarters quietly predicted in 2014 that there would be food riots in Los Angeles starting three days after the Big One. I quit the Red Cross after taking photos and video of an EF-5 tornado in Smithville, Mississippi, covered the flood on the Mississippi right after that, then went to the EF-5 tornado in Joplin, Missouri, and then Hurricane Irene.

After that, I needed two stents.

I’m 76 now and enjoying life, although I’m getting a hip transplant in two weeks. I live on a hill in Thousand Oaks, California. A few years ago we had a mass shooting at an upscale country-and-western bar featuring line dancing. A few days later, we had a brush fire that burned around the edges of the housing tracts and then headed into more rarified real estate in Malibu. My wife and I ended up sleeping in cars parked in a mall parking lot.

Our house made it through, so we were lucky.

I don’t have many brilliant observations. The problem with disasters is the one thing they are good at is ruining people’s lives. People usually don’t recover from disasters. If they’re lucky, they survive them.

I photographed a guy in Smithville who was walking around what was left of his house as he talked to his wife. He kept telling her it was all gone. Gone it was, with a half a bedroom left. So was his boat. In the Loma Prieta earthquake, I photographed a woman who was dazed, standing in front of her house. It was a beautiful old wooden mansion, but it was askew. She told me that that Sunday, she’d had a $400,000 mortgage on a $600,000 home. After the quake, she had a $400,000 mortgage.

In Malibu, in the middle of what was some of the most expensive real estate in the country, I saw a woman going through the wreckage of her home on a hillside overlooking the ocean. I asked if I could take her picture and she said yes. Fifteen minutes later, I thanked her. “Oh, no,” she said, “you can’t leave me.” So I stood there while she cried and she talked and she cried and she talked. “Okay,” she said after a while. “You can go now.” She probably rebuilt her home and came as close as you can to recovering. The one percent recover from disasters. Most disaster survivors simply don’t.

Ken knows what song he’ll be singing when the end is nigh:

My notion of “Disaster Planning” derives from my experience of the Cold War while living in the Northern Virginia suburbs outside Washington, D.C., within a triangle defined by the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA. Instantaneous nuclear annihilation was akin to auto exhaust: in the air, invisible, all the time— an accepted condition of life. While some wackos prepared to survive in well-stocked bunkers, while the Federal Government fantasized about survival in a string of underground facilities in a line running south from the city, I lived with the acceptance and understanding that at any moment I could be flashed from life to ash.

For a while I taught risk-management methodologies for federal contractors executing IT systems and software contracts. Therefore, I have the tools and techniques to identify, categorize, evaluate, and plan to mitigate knowable risks such as those that might befall me and my household: extended utility outages, wider physical destruction from severe weather, sea-level rise, economic collapse, civil war, etc. But I don’t bother with a personal-risk-management process.

One can always place blame on their parents. From a very early age, my mother (a closet existentialist) serenaded me with the chorus of a once popular song: “Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be. The future’s not ours to see. Que sera, sera.”

Photographs by Brian Finke

“WE WERE A BIT CRAZY”

Kairos Power’s new test facility is on a parched site a few miles south of the Albuquerque, New Mexico, airport. Around it, desert stretches toward hazy mountains on the horizon. The building looks like a factory or a warehouse; nothing about it betrays the moonshot exercise happening within. There, digital readouts count down the minutes, T-minus style, until power begins flowing to a test unit simulating the blistering heat of a new kind of nuclear reactor. In this test run, electricity, not uranium, will furnish the energy; graphite-encased fuel pebbles, each about the size of a golf ball, will be dummies containing no radioactive material. But everything else will be true to life, including the molten fluoride salt that will flow through the device to cool it. If all goes according to plan, the system—never tried before—will control and regulate a simulated chain reaction. When I glance at a countdown clock behind the receptionist during a visit last May, it says 31 days, 8 hours, 9 minutes, and 22 seconds until the experiment begins.

The test unit looks surprisingly unimpressive: a shiny cylindrical drum only about 16 feet tall, resembling an oversize water heater. The scale is unlike that of an existing commercial nuclear plant. Forget about those airport-scale compounds with their fortresslike containment enclosures and 40-story cooling towers belching steam. This reactor will sit in an ordinary building the size of, say, a suburban self-storage facility. It will be made in factories for easy shipping and rapid assembly. Customers will be able to buy just one, to power a chemical or steel plant, or a few, linked like batteries, to power a city. Most important, even if a local disaster cuts the power to the cooling system and safety systems fail, this reactor will not melt down, spew radioactive material, or become too hot and dangerous to approach. It will remain stable until normal conditions are restored.

Small and safe is the vision, at least. Dozens of companies and labs in the U.S. and abroad are pursuing it. Kairos is well along, with a permit to build a full-fledged nuclear test reactor already moving toward federal approval, hopefully by the end of 2023. That test will depend on this one in Albuquerque, because molten-salt reactor cooling has not been tried in the United States since the 1960s, when a five-year experiment at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee, proved the idea viable. In a few days, the test unit’s top will be installed, crowning the device with bristling pipes and sensors. Nearby, welders ready those pipes and valves. Engineers stand on top of scaffolding slotting graphite reflectors into place.

As I tour the facility, however, I soon realize that the crucial technology is not 16 feet tall but about 5 foot 6, balding, with jeans and thick, black-framed glasses. John Muratore runs this test operation and, as you would expect, is an experienced engineer; as you might not expect, he is a space engineer, not a nuclear one. As a boy in the ’60s, he was the archetypal kid who built model planes and joined the rocketry club and never stopped daydreaming about human flight. He spent 24 years working for NASA, where he was a flight controller for the space-shuttle program under the legendary flight director Gene Kranz, of Apollo 13 movie fame. Then he spent a decade working for SpaceX, Elon Musk’s world-beating private spaceflight company. Nuclear power wasn’t on his radar until recently, when Kairos’s executives called him for advice and wound up recruiting him. “A lot of it was the same,” he told me. “A launchpad and a nuclear reactor have a lot in common”—extreme temperatures, and many tons of concrete, and lots of pipes and valves and sensors and controls that must work together with extreme precision.

There’s another, more significant similarity: “The industry is hobbled by costs and schedule overruns, as was the launch industry prior to SpaceX.” Managing complex projects—and bringing new vigor to old ideas—is something Muratore’s 40 years in the space industry have taught him a lot about.

Nuclear power is in a strange position today. Those who worry about climate change have come to see that it is essential. The warming clock is ticking—another sort of countdown—and replacing fossil fuels is much easier with nuclear power in the equation. And yet the industry, in many respects, looks unready to step into a major role. It has consistently flopped as a commercial proposition. Decade after decade, it has broken its promises to deliver new plants on budget and on time, and, despite an enviable safety record, it has failed to put to rest the public’s fear of catastrophic accidents. Many of the industry’s best minds know they need a new approach, and soon. For inspiration, some have turned toward SpaceX, Tesla, and Apple.

Michael Thomas, a Kairos machinist, loads a part into a milling machine for modifications. (Brian Finke for The Atlantic)

“Yeah, we were a bit crazy to try to do this,” Per Peterson, Kairos’s co-founder and chief nuclear officer, told me when I asked about starting a company from scratch and setting out to make the nuclear industry agile and competitive. “But I don’t remember ever lacking the confidence that it was feasible for us to do what we wanted to do.” The fate of the industry, and in some measure the planet, depends on whether he and like-minded entrepreneurs can finally keep their promises.

“WHY CAN’T YOU BUILD US A NUCLEAR PLANT?”

When I started reporting this article, I imagined it might be a diatribe against the environmental movement’s resistance to nuclear power. For a generation or more, the United States has been fighting climate change—and all the other ills that result from fossil fuels—with one hand tied behind its back. Bruce Babbitt, a former secretary of the interior and governor of Arizona, was on a presidential commission to evaluate nuclear power after the Three Mile Island plant’s partial meltdown in 1979, the U.S. industry’s worst accident. Though no one died or was even injured—and the accident led to new protocols and training under which the plant’s second, intact reactor operated uneventfully until 2019—the accident hardened the public and environmentalists against nuclear energy. After that, as Babbitt told me, “opposition in the environmental community was near unanimous. The position was ‘No new nuclear plants, and we should phase out the existing nuclear base.’ ” Which was the road the U.S. took. Today legacy nuclear power supplies about 20 percent of American electricity, but the country has fired up only one new power reactor since 1996.

From an environmental point of view, this seems like a perverse strategy, because nuclear power, as most people know, is carbon-free—and is also, as fewer people realize, fantastically safe. Only the 1986 accident at Chernobyl, in Ukraine, has caused mass fatalities from radioactivity, and the plant there was subpar and mismanaged, by Western standards. Excluding Chernobyl, the total number of deaths attributed to a radiation accident at a commercial nuclear-power plant is zero or one, depending on your interpretation of Japan’s 2011 Fukushima accident. The Fukushima evacuation certainly caused deaths; Japanese authorities have estimated that more than 2,000 people may have died from disruptions in services such as nursing care and from stress-related factors such as alcoholism and depression. (Some experts now believe that the evacuation was far too large.) Even so, Japan’s decision to shut down its nuclear plants has been estimated to cause multiples of that death toll, on account of the increased fossil-fuel pollution that followed.

The real challenge with giant nuclear plants like Fukushima and Three Mile Island is not making them safe but doing so at a reasonable price, which is the problem that companies like Kairos are trying to solve. But even people who feel scared of nuclear power do not dispute that fossil fuels are orders of magnitude more dangerous. One study, published in 2021, estimated that air pollution from fossil fuels killed about 1 million people in 2017 alone. In fact, nuclear power’s safety record to date is easily on par with the wind and solar industries, because wind turbines and rooftop panels create minor risks such as falls and fire. As for nuclear waste, it has turned out to be a surprisingly manageable problem, partly because there isn’t much of it; all of the spent fuel the U.S. nuclear industry has ever created could be buried under a single football field to a depth of less than 10 yards, according to the Department of Energy. Unlike coal waste, which is of course spewed into the air we breathe, radioactive waste is stored in carefully monitored casks.

And so environmentalists, I thought, were betraying the environment by stigmatizing nuclear power. But I had to revise my view. Even without green opposition, nuclear power as we knew it would have fizzled—today’s environmentalists are not the main obstacle to its wide adoption.

To be sure, environmentalists do not love nuclear power. They much prefer solar and wind. But as Babbitt told me, “They’re all coming around. The attitudes in the environmental community are perceptibly changing.” Although only a handful of the mainline environmental organizations are openly “nuclear inclusive” (for example, the Nature Conservancy), many quietly accept that nuclear power can be part of the climate solution, and perhaps a necessary part.

Because solar and wind power are inherently intermittent, they require other energy sources to even out peaks and dips. Natural gas and coal can do that, but of course the goal is to retire them. Batteries can help but are much too expensive to rely on at present, and mining, manufacturing, and disposing of them entail their own environmental harms. Also, nuclear power is the only efficient way to provide zero-carbon heat for high-temperature industrial processes such as steelmaking, which account for about a fifth of energy consumption.

Perhaps most important, adding solar and wind capacity becomes more expensive and controversial as the most accessible land is used up. Nuclear energy’s footprint is extremely small. Solar-energy production uses dozens of times as much land per unit of energy produced; wind uses much more land than that. According to congressional testimony by Armond Cohen of the Clean Air Task Force, meeting all of the eastern United States’ energy needs might require 100,000 square miles of solar panels (an area greater than New England) or more than 800,000 square miles of onshore windmills (Alaska plus California), versus only a bit over 500 square miles of nuclear plants (the city of Phoenix, Arizona). Given the amount of real estate that solar and wind farms usurp, efforts to place them are running into entirely predictable local resistance, which will only increase as the easiest and cheapest sites are picked off.

Finally, as low- and middle-income countries develop over the next several decades, they will almost double the world’s demand for electricity. Total global energy consumption will rise by 30 percent by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency. Meeting this challenge while reducing carbon emissions will be much harder, if not impossible, without a nuclear assist.

Left: Javier Talamantes, a Kairos technologist, installs one of the thousands of sensors that feed data
to the test unit. Right: A sensor monitors environmental oxygen levels to ensure the safety of personnel working on the unit. (Brian Finke for The Atlantic)

Recognizing as much, three consecutive administrations—Barack Obama’s, Donald Trump’s, and now Joe Biden’s—have included next-generation nuclear power in their policy agenda. Both parties in Congress support federal R&D funding, which has run into the billions in the past few years. Two-thirds of the states have told the Associated Press they want to include nuclear power in their green-energy plans. “Today the topic of new nuclear is front of mind for all our member utilities,” says Doug True, a senior vice president and the chief nuclear officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group. “We have states saying, ‘Why can’t you build us a nuclear plant?’ ”

Thanks to those developments, the table is set for nuclear power in a way that has not been true for two generations. So what is the main problem for the nuclear-power industry? In sum: the nuclear-power industry.

“WE GOT BOGGED DOWN”

The U.S. has two big commercial reactors under construction, both at the same site in Georgia. The licensing process for them began in 2008; construction began in 2012, with a projected price of $14 billion and start-up planned for 2017 at the latest. As of February 2022, the projected cost had mushroomed to $30 billion, and the reactors still aren’t open. (Hopefully in 2023, the sponsoring utility says.)

No one who knows the industry is surprised. In the United States, construction delays on the Georgia reactors and others drove Westinghouse, the company building them, into bankruptcy. France started building a new reactor at its Flamanville plant in 2007, planning to open it in five years; as of this writing, it is still not ready. Britain approved a major plant in 2008 and probably won’t turn it on until 2027, and the project is 50 percent over budget. Delays and cost overruns are so routine that they are simply assumed. “Nuclear as it exists today,” Mike Laufer, a co-founder and the CEO of Kairos Power, told me, “is clean, it’s reliable, it’s safe. But it’s not affordable”—at least when it comes to building new plants—“and this is what’s holding nuclear back from a much bigger role in fighting climate change.”

Industry veterans recall the 1950s and ’60s as a time of new ideas and experimentation in nuclear power. For scientists and engineers, the atom had the same kind of romantic, adventurous appeal as the space program. In 1968, a company called General Atomics got a license to build a gas-cooled reactor in Colorado, a new design and potentially the start of a new era. Instead, it proved to be the industry’s last stab at fundamental innovation. Thanks to incremental upgrades, today’s legacy nuclear plants cost almost 40 percent less to run than they did in 2012, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, but if you had fallen asleep in the ’70s and awakened today, you would recognize the basic nuclear-power model as the same, both technologically and as a business proposition.

In particular, you would see the same gigantic plants and staggering building costs. In the 1970s, the industry stopped pursuing alternatives to using water to cool the hot nuclear core and transfer heat to steam turbines generating electricity. Water worked fine, but it had to be held under extreme pressure to stay fluid at fission temperatures, and if it boiled off, meltdowns were an inherent risk. Accidents could be reliably prevented, but only by building in elaborate safety measures, all of which necessitated costly engineering and heavy regulatory oversight. One executive likens constructing this style of plant to building a pyramid point-down: You could do it, but only with some heroic engineering. Reactors needed electric-powered pumps, and redundant cooling systems in case those failed, and massive containment structures in case those failed. The need for all of that redundancy and mass raised costs, inducing utility companies to seek economies of scale by making big reactors. Designing giant plants, each bespoke for a specific site, took years; licensing and building them took years more. “We got bogged down,” Kairos’s Peterson explained. “As we made plants bigger, we also made them unconstructable.” The creativity of the ’60s gave way to an industry that became, as John Muratore, the Kairos engineer, told me, “very formal, very bureaucratic, very slow, driven by safety concerns.” Meanwhile, as plants became ever more expensive, the relative cost of fossil fuels was declining and renewables were coming online—and, after the accident at Three Mile Island, public hostility became a problem, too.

Left to right: The Kairos Power co-founders Mike Laufer, Per Peterson, and Edward Blandford outside the facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (Brian Finke for The Atlantic)

And so, in a generation, nuclear power went from the fuel of the future to not worth the bother. Supply chains withered; talented engineers and executives sought greener pastures. The United States, once the industry’s world leader, became an also-ran. Today, as Peterson said, we find ourselves “mired in this world where all you can get are light-water reactors, and they’re challenging and expensive to build, and we don’t have good alternatives. Breaking out of that set of problems is one of the critical things we need to do today.” That requires technological breakthroughs; more important, however, it requires attitudinal ones.

“BUILD A LITTLE, TEST A LITTLE, FIX A LITTLE”

Born in Brooklyn in 1956, John Muratore remembers visiting the 1964–65 World’s Fair, where an exhibit touted the energy of the atom in all its futuristic glory. He got an irradiated dime there and carried it around for years. (He now has a replacement that he bought on eBay.) Still, flight was his obsession, and so he took his Yale engineering degree to the Air Force’s aerospace program and then, perhaps inevitably, to NASA. After achieving his dream of serving as flight director—he oversaw five space-shuttle missions, including the first repair of the Hubble Space Telescope—he shifted to developing mission-control software. “We used a rapid iterative-build technology,” he told me, meaning that his team figured out how to develop new features in months instead of the previously customary years. The operative philosophy was build a little, test a little, fix a little.

That led him and some of his colleagues to wonder: Could they build a spacecraft the same way? In place of projects that were perfected on paper before ever being tried in space, could Silicon Valley–style trial and error work at NASA? He joined a team that used exactly those methods to build the X‑38, an emergency-reentry vehicle for astronauts on the International Space Station. Again, the team built, tested, fixed, and then repeated the cycle, learning by iterating. After a series of flights in which it was dropped from planes at varying altitudes, the X-38 was on the verge of its decisive space trial when the George W. Bush administration canceled it in a fit of parsimony. That disappointment eventually led Muratore out of NASA and, after an interlude as a professor, to SpaceX.

SpaceX was one of several private-sector competitors in a NASA program to relaunch, as it were, crewed spaceflight. The company set ambitious schedules and took big risks, a method that had its downsides: Prototypes blew up. But SpaceX proved its point. Today it is worth about $125 billion and has transformed spaceflight from a government program to a viable commercial business.

Per Peterson was among those who noticed how quickly and thoroughly SpaceX had revolutionized a staid (and in some ways troubled) industry. By his own account, Peterson had grown up “a bit of a flaming environmentalist and pretty liberal”; he put himself through college working in a bike shop before getting his doctorate, becoming an expert on heat transfer, and, as a professor at UC Berkeley in the 1990s, researching how to make nuclear-power plants safer. He came to understand how molten salt could replace water to cool a reactor core. Unlike water, molten salt stays liquid at high temperatures, so it doesn’t require ultrahigh pressurization and won’t boil away. That lets engineers dispense with heavy containment structures, allowing for smaller, cheaper, safer reactors.

Left: In-house machinery produces custom components, allowing Kairos Power to create and test prototypes quickly. Right: Muratore supervises operations in the on-site control room. (Brian Finke for The Atlantic)

Salt cooling is a technology that dates back to the 1960s but has not yet been successfully commercialized. Peterson, Mike Laufer, and a third colleague named Edward Blandford thought they could make that breakthrough by applying SpaceX’s methods. They founded Kairos in Oakland, California, in 2017, and today they have 300 employees, including Muratore, whom they nabbed in 2020. At the Kairos test center in Albuquerque, Muratore showed me an on-site machine shop—run by another SpaceX veteran—where engineers can fabricate parts in a matter of hours, and then walk them over to the test unit to see how they perform, and then refine and rework them. The idea is to make any errors fast and early, before they cause delays and overruns, and to learn during the design process how to simplify and speed up real-world manufacturing. Build a little, test a little, fix a little.

“WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GO SMALLER?”

Peterson and his colleagues were not the only people to be frustrated by the industry’s failures, nor were they the only ones to launch ambitious start-ups. José Reyes, for instance, the Manhattan-born child of a Honduran father and a Dominican mother, was attracted to nuclear power in the go-go years of the 1970s, before Three Mile Island and ballooning costs kneecapped the industry. After training as a nuclear engineer, he worked for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and then, at Oregon State University, on reactor design and testing. “I wanted to build something that was remarkably safe,” he told me. And he was intrigued by the countercultural idea of inverting traditional assumptions about economies of scale. “What happens when you go smaller?” he started to wonder. “That was kind of a surprise. You can start making these in factories.” In 2007, he co-founded NuScale Power to bring his concept to market. He says the company plans to deliver its first commercial reactor in 2027.

In my interviews with nuclear entrepreneurs like Peterson and Reyes, a pattern developed. The newcomers have engineering backgrounds but few if any ties to traditional nuclear utilities. They think that climate change is a dire problem, that nuclear power can ameliorate it, and that time is short. They don’t believe that conventional thinking offers sufficient answers, and so they take inspiration from elsewhere. Clay Sell, the CEO of an advanced-nuclear company called X-energy, cited both SpaceX and Apple, likening the company’s design process to the creation of the iPhone. Francesco Venneri, the Italian-born founder of a company he named (lest anyone miss the point) Ultra Safe Nuclear, said, “The model we’re trying to imitate is Tesla.”

The engineering choices that these companies and entrepreneurs are making vary. For instance, NuScale’s designs use water as the coolant, but rely on convection and gravity, not pumps, so they stay cool if electricity fails; Ultra Safe’s and X-energy’s use helium gas. TerraPower, another competitor, recently launched its own test of salt cooling, but using a different kind of salt from Kairos. What these diverse efforts share philosophically, though, is much more important than their technological differences: They seek to invert the industry’s lethargic, scale-driven business model. They think of themselves as building airplanes instead of airports—that is, as shifting the industry paradigm to mass production. (NuScale thinks it could sell three modular reactors a month; Ultra Safe hopes to start with 10 a year.) They all believe they can make nuclear fission inherently safe—and, crucially, win the public’s confidence.

Today Kairos, NuScale, Ultra Safe, and X-energy all say they can deploy advanced commercial reactors before the decade is out. The space is now rife with contenders; Third Way has identified nearly 150 companies and national labs around the world that are working on small, advanced nuclear reactors. The needed technologies are here. The goal is defined. So we’re back to the same old question: Can the industry deliver?

Some skepticism is warranted. Even if the innovators can eventually crack the code of affordable mass production, their Version 1.0 products won’t be cheap; to get launched, they will need risk-friendly investors and customers, as well as backing from Congress, the Energy Department, and government labs, not unlike the NASA incentives that propelled SpaceX. Perhaps the single biggest challenge, and one SpaceX did not face, is to modernize the slow-moving federal regulatory apparatus, which was built in our parents and grandparents’ era, when schedules were relaxed and cost overruns were fobbed off on utility customers.

Kairos Power, in Albuquerque, New Mexico (Brian Finke for The Atlantic)

Still, I came away from my conversations about the industry convinced that today presents the best opportunity in two generations for reinvention to take hold. The perception that the fight against runaway global warming could be lost within the next 20 years is a powerful motivator. So, too, is the realization that continued global reliance on oil and gas is a boon to democracy’s adversaries, most notably Russia. And if the United States fails to develop a competitive nuclear industry, our rivals will be happy to fill the gap. Russia is the predominant supplier of nuclear-power reactors in the global market, and China, which plans to build more domestic reactors in the next 15 years than the rest of the world has built in the past 35, hopes to elbow Russia aside. Those countries are also in the race to perfect the advanced, unconventional technologies that Kairos and its competitors are pursuing; China, for example, hopes to deploy a salt-cooled commercial reactor around 2030. Of course, we can assume that China and Russia will exploit any geostrategic leverage they can gain by dominating the global nuclear business. For reasons of grand strategy—as well as for safety and reliability—it would be better if U.S. companies and technologies were in the lead. All of this is on the minds of bureaucrats and politicians today.

“IT’S ALL VERY SIMILAR”

In September, I joined a Zoom call to check on the progress of Kairos Power’s simulation experiment in Albuquerque. I saw the control room I had toured several months earlier: two rows of computer monitors facing a bank of screens that show video feeds and data streams. Besides John Muratore, only two operators—a test director and a test engineer—were in the room. Dozens of other engineers and executives monitored the proceedings from afar. The test didn’t present much of a spectacle. Supply-chain problems with heaters had delayed the launch by several weeks, but in August electricity had begun flowing into the shiny drum that mimicked an advanced reactor. Inside the simulator, hundreds of sensors dispatched data to the control room as the core’s temperature rose to the levels of a nuclear reaction.

That day, it measured almost 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet according to Muratore, the test unit was cool to the touch. At that high temperature, he told me, the system had been stable for several days, though hot spots needed attention. Early in 2023, after the hardware passed muster, salt would be introduced for weeks of evaluating and tweaking. With the results in hand, the company would begin construction of its full-fledged test reactor, with live nuclear fuel, in Oak Ridge—the same place the previous U.S. experiment with a salt-cooled reactor had been conducted, back in the 1960s. What’s old is new again.

Or rather, to be more precise, what is newest and potentially most significant about Kairos’s test is not a technological invention. Rather, it is innovation more broadly conceived. First and foremost, Kairos is devising not a nuclear technology but a business technology: a method of organizing a very complex project to be faster, simpler, more efficient, and cheaper. This kind of process innovation may not look like much, but it’s what nuclear power needs if it is to fulfill its extraordinary promise.

As my virtual tour wound down, I asked to meet the test director. Up from behind a monitor popped Davis Libbey. When I asked about his background, he said he was a recent recruit from—I should have seen this coming—SpaceX. John Muratore had snapped him up just a few months earlier. Apart from having to deal with very hot rather than very cold temperatures, he said, switching from spaceflight to nuclear power had been seamless. “From a control-room standpoint, this is very much what you’d see in South Texas or Hawthorne,” he said, referring to a SpaceX launch site and to its headquarters in California. “It’s all very similar.”

For the sake of the nuclear industry and the planet, we need to hope so.

WHAT ABOUT NUCLEAR WASTE?

In 1987, Congress authorized a national nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain, in Nevada; for good measure, it banned permanently storing nuclear waste anywhere else. Unfortunately, that repository never opened and, thanks to obstacles both political and practical, apparently never will. Meanwhile, nuclear waste sits safely but only (in theory) temporarily at reactor sites around the country. To win public acceptance, Elizabeth Muller told me recently, the nuclear industry needs to resolve the waste problem, not just downplay it.

Muller is in her early 40s, the daughter of a physics professor. Alarmed by climate change, in 2010 she and her father started a climate-science nonprofit, Berkeley Earth, which argued that replacing coal with shale gas (a controversial proposition among some environmentalists, because it involves the water-injection process known as fracking) had to be part of the solution in the near term—and that the longer-term transition from hydrocarbons would require more nuclear power.

From their focus on natural gas, the Mullers knew that, by using computer-assisted directional drilling, an oil or gas rig can drill for miles in any direction, not just straight down but nosing horizontally along rich seams deep underground. (This transformative technology enabled the fracking revolution.) At a forum in 2015, Muller and her father, Richard Muller, heard a presentation about using boreholes to deposit nuclear waste in deep geological strata that have been stable for epochs. Her father, Muller said, “immediately thought of drilling horizontally into shale formations that have held volatile materials for millions of years.” Because geological strata are stacked horizontally, like pancakes, a vertical hole passes rapidly through them, exposing little area for potential storage. Instead, by drilling sideways to follow a suitable formation, “you get a lot more space at a given depth.” That creates more storage options at any given location, without having to truck waste to some distant (and currently nonexistent) repository.

Months after that forum, the Mullers founded a company, Deep Isolation. In 2018, they received seed funding, and the following year they showed that a drill rig on the surface could deposit specially designed waste canisters in horizontal boreholes, then later retrieve them, without any humans needing to work underground. The demonstration opened the possibility that waste can be safely stored, monitored, and if need be recovered near the sites that produce it, where communities are already accustomed to having nuclear neighbors. The company now employs about 50 people, Muller told me, and has won customer contracts in multiple countries, including the United States.

Can Deep Isolation succeed? Maybe, maybe not, but its greater significance is as an example of how the Big Nuclear mindset is cracking. Even a few years ago, the idea of an unconventional commercial start-up taking on the most intractable problem the industry faces—a problem that has defeated billions of dollars and ambitious government planning—would have seemed far-fetched, if not inconceivable.

Senator Dianne Feinstein hasn’t yet announced whether she’s retiring, but the race to replace her has already begun. The 2024 contest will be the first wide-open Democratic Senate primary in California since 1992, when Feinstein, who is now 89 years old, was first elected to the seat.

The field is quickly getting crowded: U.S. Representatives Adam Schiff and Katie Porter have announced their candidacies, and Barbara Lee is expected to join them. The state’s Democratic strategists aren’t ruling out other contenders eventually jumping in as well, although most expect Feinstein to retire rather than run again.

As it stands, the contest will offer voters a choice between three distinct eras of Democratic thinking: Porter, 49, embodies the pugnacious anti-corporate populism associated with Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren; Schiff, 62, is a more mainstream liberal, shaped by Clinton-era centrism; and Lee, 76, is an uncompromising leftist and living link to the most confrontational elements of the 1960s social movements.

With or without Feinstein in the race, a Democrat is almost guaranteed to win the Senate seat in 2024. California hasn’t elected a Republican senator since Pete Wilson in 1988, and Carly Fiorina in 2010 has been the only GOP Senate nominee in this century to reach 40 percent of the statewide vote.

California Democrats haven’t seen a Senate primary as energetic as the one now developing since 1992, when the party actually battled through two of them. Not only did Feinstein win the nomination for Wilson’s Senate seat, which he’d vacated after beating her for governor in 1990, but Barbara Boxer, then a U.S. representative, beat two Democratic men to win the nomination for the Senate seat left open by the retirement of Alan Cranston. Both Feinstein and Boxer then won in November—and served together for nearly the next quarter century.

This time, the three principal contenders are separated along lines of gender, ideology, and geography. Female candidates have often had an advantage in California Democratic primaries because, as in other states, women account for close to 60 percent of Democratic voters. Given that Governor Gavin Newsom appointed a man (California’s then–secretary of state, Alex Padilla) to replace Kamala Harris in the Senate after she was elected vice president, some Democratic operatives believe that some voters of both genders may prefer to maintain at least one woman senator.

“Would the California Democratic electorate buy replacing two women with two males? I hate to put it that crassly, but that is going to be a factor,” Garry South, a Democratic consultant, told me. But if Lee joins Porter in the race, voters who want to elect a woman may split between them, diluting any advantage.

[Read: The Democrats’ new spokesman in the culture wars]

The same split might recur on ideology. Porter’s supporters already are working to portray her as a more committed progressive than Schiff. Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Campaign Change Committee, which has endorsed Porter, told me there is a difference between the two not only on ideology but also in boldness.

Many Democrats would share Green’s basic assessment. Schiff, a former assistant U.S. attorney, was first elected in 2000 as part of the backlash against the House GOP’s impeachment of Bill Clinton. Following the September 11, 2001, attacks, Schiff voted both for the PATRIOT Act and to authorize the Iraq War. Over time, he migrated more into the liberal mainstream, and since Democrats recaptured the House majority in 2018, virtually every member of the House Democratic caucus has voted for all of the party’s key initiatives. That means there’s little space between Porter’s voting record and Schiff’s. “It would be hard to get a piece of paper between them on most major issues,” South told me.

Porter, a former law professor, still clearly embodies another strain of Democratic energy. Influenced by Warren, whom she studied under at Harvard Law School, Porter has become famous for dismantling hostile witnesses during congressional hearings while scribbling furiously on a whiteboard. Porter is a more logical fit for the activists and voters seeking a crusading progressive champion than Schiff, whose style is more cerebral and contained. (It’s telling that Warren has already endorsed Porter, while former Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she’ll back Schiff if Feinstein, as expected, doesn’t run.)

But for Porter, efforts to frame Schiff as insufficiently liberal, even implicitly, will be complicated by his prominent roles in Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial and on the January 6 committee. For many voters, those credentials are likely enough to establish his liberal bona fides.

And Lee may further hinder Porter’s ability to consolidate liberal voters. A former chair of the House Progressive Caucus, Lee was the only House or Senate member in either party to vote against the use of force in Afghanistan immediately after the 9/11 attacks. She also voted against the Iraq War authorization, which Schiff supported. Her unbending liberal profile will inevitably attract some voters on the left.

The final line separating the three contenders previously has been the most decisive: geography. Both Porter, who represents a seat in Orange County, and Schiff, who holds a district in Los Angeles, are based in Southern California, while Lee represents a district centered on Oakland and Berkeley. There’s a long history of candidates from Northern California beating those from the south in statewide Democratic primaries: Boxer, Feinstein, Harris, and Newsom all defeated opponents from Southern California.

“Northern Californians have had a tendency to be very loyal to their candidates,” Mel Levine, a former Democratic representative from Los Angeles who lost the 1992 Senate primary to Boxer, told me. But many observers doubt that Lee can consolidate support in the Bay Area nearly as much as those predecessors. That’s partly because of her militant politics and her age but also because she hasn’t had to advertise much over the years to win her reliably Democratic district, which has limited her name recognition.

[David A. Graham: Dianne Feinstein is the future of the Senate]

Exactly how much voters know about Porter and Schiff is uncertain, too. Traditionally, House members are largely invisible to California voters. Schiff and Porter have assets that were unavailable to earlier generations of congressional representatives: Both are superstars on MSNBC and CNN and have built robust online grassroots fundraising networks. But many California strategists doubt that their national exposure will translate into anything more than the most cursory awareness among voters in the state.

While California voters “paid attention to the Trump impeachment, were they watching Adam Schiff on the floor? Probably not,” Rose Kapolczynski, a California Democratic consultant, told me. “Have they been watching Katie Porter and her whiteboard in hearings? Probably not. All the candidates are going to need to expand beyond the MSNBC/Democratic Twitter base to reach those millions of voters who are not paying attention now and probably won’t be paying attention until next year.”

As they run against one another next spring, the Democratic contenders also must keep an eye on the November election. Since 2012, California has selected its Senate nominees in an open primary, which puts all the candidates on a single ballot, with the top two finishers advancing to the general election in November. If two Democrats emerge from the primary, the general election could be decided by the millions of Republican voters who then would be forced to choose between them.

Most California experts I spoke with give Schiff a slight edge (among other things, he has much more money in the bank than his competitors), but all expect a dynamic, and unpredictable, contest. What’s virtually certain is that the race will end with a new Democratic senator likely to quickly emerge as a rising star in the party. For years, many Democrats have grumbled about Feinstein’s eroding physical and mental capacity and reluctance to confront Republicans. Whatever else happens along the way, there’s little chance anyone will say the same about California’s next senator.

After two years of virtual screenings, the Sundance Film Festival debuted a hybrid event for the first time, welcoming both in-person and online attendees to enjoy a fresh helping of titles. As ever, the festival, which The Atlantic tuned in to from home, set the stage for the year to come in indie movies: Veteran directors debuted their latest work, newcomers hit the ground with impressive ideas, and distributors entered a frenzy of dealmaking with hopes of scoring the next CODA, Minari, or Promising Young Woman—just to name a few recent Sundance premieres that went on to become major awards contenders. The festival yielded plenty of noteworthy features; below are our favorites from 10 days of pressing “Play.”

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Cassandro (Amazon)

The first fiction feature from the Oscar-winning documentarian Roger Ross Williams, Cassandro is a zesty peek into a world that might be unfamiliar to many: the luchadores of Mexican wrestling. Gael García Bernal plays Saúl Armendáriz, a real-life figure who helped transform the sport in the 1980s and ’90s. His onstage character, Cassandro, was flamboyant and wore drag, a persona known as an exótico in the scripted world of wrestling. Exóticos usually lose their fights, but Armendáriz turned Cassandro into a beloved champion. Bernal gives one of his richest performances ever, lending energy to the biopic, a genre that can often feel staid and repetitive.  — David Sims

Fremont (no distribution set)

Babak Jalali’s film has more than a touch of Jim Jarmusch to it, especially in its handsomely grainy black-and-white photography and its gentle, slice-of-life plotting. It follows Donya (played by first-time actor Anaita Wali Zada), an Afghan immigrant living in the Oakland suburb of Fremont and writing fortune-cookie mottos for a San Francisco factory. The leisurely movie is focused mostly on Donya’s therapy sessions with a ruminative psychiatrist (an excellent Gregg Turkington) and her search for further companionship. But Fremont also goes in some surprising directions, and includes a brief but memorable appearance from The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White as a potential new friend.  — D.S.

Mutt (no distribution set)

This intense and tender debut film, which draws from the background of its own Chilean, Serbian, and trans director, Vuk Lungulov-Klotz, is one of my favorite kinds of indie dramas. Set during one wild day in New York City, Mutt has a terrific sense of location, a crackling contemporary authenticity, and a real fun feel, even as it digs into the complex interpersonal dramas surrounding a 20-something trans man named Feña (Lio Mehiel). He’s dealing with the return of an ex-boyfriend, the arrival of his father in town, and the emotional turmoil of his teenaged half-sister, who is skipping school. The film bounces from one plot to another with zippy aplomb, delving into its protagonist’s inner conflicts without any preachiness. Mehiel’s performance was a highlight of the festival.  — D.S.

Photo by Guy Ferrandis/SBS Productions. Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Passages (Mubi)

Ira Sachs, one of the most exciting indie filmmakers working (his career gems include Little Men and Love Is Strange), had a bit of a misstep with his sedate last feature, Frankie. But the spiky romantic drama Passages is a welcome return to form, led by three marvelous performances and a refreshingly direct depiction of sexuality on-screen. Passages follows Tomas (Franz Rogowski), a gay filmmaker in a long-term relationship with Martin (Ben Whishaw), who finds himself drawn to a woman named Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), creating a bizarre love triangle that nobody really wants to be a part of. Rogowski invests Tomas with compelling toxicity; there’s something undeniably magnetic about him, even as, more and more, he emotionally wrecks the people in his life. Passages is not a movie for anyone looking for a sympathetic protagonist, but it is a brutally funny and honest portrayal of soured love.  — D.S.

Talk to Me (A24)

One of the big acquisitions at the festival was this gnarly Australian horror, which the indie-fright experts at A24 will release in theaters this year. Talk to Me is a sterling entry in the séance-gone-wrong subgenre, portraying a group of wayward friends who find a spooky embalmed hand and start using it to contact the dead. Some of the early set pieces of possession from beyond the grave have an anarchic-prankster element—think Ouija meets Jackass—but as things spin out of control, the visuals get impressively gory and intense, rendered with nasty glee by the brothers Danny and Michael Philippou (making their feature debut).  — D.S.

Theater Camp (Searchlight Pictures)

Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s comedy was a charming surprise at the festival and has already been picked up by Searchlight for a theatrical release. It had all the risk factors for a grating mess, given that the main characters are adult camp counselors who have never outgrown their childhood sanctuary, a scrappy arts center called AdirondACTS. Gordon and Ben Platt play Rebecca-Diane and Amos, who spend their time sniping at the teenagers in their charge. The ensemble is filled with firecracker comic performances from Jimmy Tatro, Ayo Edebiri, Patti Harrison, and others. Theater Camp works because it manages to balance caustic one-liners with just the right amount of heart, injecting a little sentimentality into a largely scathing satire.  — D.S.

Photograph by Focus Features. Courtesy of Sundance Institute

A Thousand and One (Focus Features)

The winner of this year’s Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Dramatic Competition category, A. V. Rockwell’s feature debut is a novelistic wonder anchored by a fantastic lead performance from Teyana Taylor (who is probably best known as a skilled singer, dancer, and choreographer). Taylor plays Inez, a Harlem mother who abducts her son from the foster-care system after she’s released from prison. The film then follows their relationship through his entire adolescence, spanning almost two decades as Inez tries to hold her family together without running further afoul of the law. Rockwell’s script methodically builds to a heart-wrenching climax, but Taylor’s deep grasp of Inez’s strengths and flaws is what gives the story its power.  — D.S.

You Hurt My Feelings (A24)

Nicole Holofcener is maybe cinema’s reigning master of the comedy of manners, but she hasn’t had a real hit in a few years—her last film, the Netflix release The Land of Steady Habits, was a rare misfire. You Hurt My Feelings puts her right back in her comfort zone, with a satire of the chattering classes that zeroes in on the tiny, unspoken slights that can ruin entire relationships. Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is a novelist who’s wracked with self-doubt over her latest project; her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), is a therapist wondering if he’s actually any good at what he does. Through a series of funny misunderstandings, those insecurities fester and spill over catastrophically, and Holofcener depicts all the fallout with her typical witty deftness.  — D.S.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (A24)

The writer-director Raven Jackson’s debut feature, co-produced by Barry Jenkins, is more of a poetic collage than a straightforward movie. Though All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt traces a coming-of-age, Jackson is not concerned with delivering a linear story; instead, she carefully and steadily trains her lens on what her subject, a Black woman living in rural Mississippi, observes: fingertips tenderly brushing an ex-lover’s back; crickets chirping on a humid summer afternoon; mud squishing underneath people’s feet. I yearned at first for a more conventional narrative, but the film—with its gorgeous imagery and soundscape—had me spellbound before long. It’s an immersive meditation on how a lifetime is made up of so many small memories—and a reminder to pay more attention to every feeling.  — Shirley Li

Drift (no distribution set)

For the first 15 minutes of Drift, the film’s protagonist, Jacqueline (played by Cynthia Erivo), doesn’t utter a word. She’s stranded and roaming on a Greek island, offering foot massages for euros while dodging the authorities. But what seems like a portrait of a mysterious woman turns into a touching exploration of care and friendship when Jacqueline meets Callie (Alia Shawkat), a tour guide with her own reasons for wandering the Mediterranean coast alone. In his first English-language film, the Singaporean director Anthony Chen draws a pair of quietly stirring performances from his leads. Even as the plot risks becoming a touch too melodramatic, Erivo and Shawkat keep the story grounded, capturing how a single connection can transform a life of grief.  — S.L.

Eileen (no distribution set)

Adapted from Ottessa Moshfegh’s debut novel, Eileen is dark and unpredictable, seductive and sharp. In 1960s Boston, meek Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) longs for a more exciting life than the one she has as a secretary who also babysits her alcoholic father. When the glamorous psychologist Rebecca (Anne Hathaway, at perhaps her career best) swans in, Eileen is immediately infatuated—but Eileen is no Carol, even though the director William Oldroyd sneakily unspools the story like a romance, with glances across crowded rooms and close-ups of illicit touches. Oldroyd has a knack for telling tales of young women with disturbing wants, and he knows what the audience likely craves from Eileen: more confidence, more guts—the typical ingredients to self-discovery. All the more fun, then, that Eileen becomes something decidedly different. Desire, the film warns convincingly, is a dangerous thing.  — S.L.

Magazine Dreams (no distribution set)

I’d be surprised if Jonathan Majors isn’t a part of the awards conversation this time next year. His performance as the tortured bodybuilder Killian Maddox is tremendous, even as Magazine Dreams evolves from a compelling character study into a painful viewing experience. Written and directed by Elijah Bynum, the film has an unsubtle story; in the tradition of films such as Taxi Driver and Joker, it tracks how a lonely, socially inept man grows violent by trying to mold the world to his vision. But though every second of Killian’s self-destruction comes with cinematic flair—one long, mesmerizing take follows him barreling onto a competition stage right after getting beat up—Majors finds the character’s vulnerability too. Killian’s intimidating physicality belies a fragile ego and a splintering state of mind. Majors infuses him with humanity, making it impossible to root against his potential salvation.  — S.L.

Photo by Parisa Taghizadeh. Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Polite Society (Focus Features)

If Jane Austen, Edgar Wright, Tina Fey, and Jordan Peele collaborated on a movie together, the result would be something like Polite Society—and that’s not including the Bollywood-influenced dance number or the many martial-arts showdowns that pepper the film. The pleasure of watching the writer-director Nida Manzoor’s zany, if somewhat bloated, debut comes from not knowing what genre she might possibly riff on in the next scene. The story follows a London teenager and wannabe stuntwoman named Ria (played winningly by Priya Kansara) as she tries to break apart her beloved sister’s engagement, which Ria finds surprising and therefore, you know, totally dodgy. Her well-intentioned quest quickly becomes chaotic, and Manzoor suffuses every moment with heightened silliness and lively tricks. Like a reverse spin kick done in midair, Polite Society is audacious, awesome, and hard to ignore.  — S.L.

Rye Lane (Searchlight Pictures)

Call it a “weep-cute”: When Yas (Vivian Oparah) overhears Dom (Industry’s David Jonsson) sobbing in the bathroom after being dumped, she initiates a conversation that turns into a walk-and-talk through South London and—what else?—a budding romance. But Rye Lane isn’t just another entry into an embattled genre; the film offers a refreshing take on the risks that come with falling for someone new. Directed with fizzy energy by Raine Allen-Miller, the film stylishly tracks how Yas and Dom, both reeling from recent breakups, navigate heartache while keeping an eye on each other. The script is lighthearted and astute at the same time, flowing easily from flirtatious banter to guarded-but-revealing exchanges. Plus, there’s an A-list cameo for the ages about halfway through.  — S.L.

Photograph by Dustin Lane. Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Sometimes I Think About Dying (no distribution set)

Don’t feel sorry for Fran, the quiet office worker played by Daisy Ridley. She likes her life just the way it is, even if, every now and then, she imagines her own demise to pass the time. Despite what the title may imply, the director Rachel Lambert’s wonderfully restrained film is more quirky than gloomy—and rather unexpectedly sweet. Ridley is excellent as an introvert with a penchant for cottage cheese, and she’s well matched by the comedian Dave Merheje as Robert, a new employee with whom she timidly pursues a relationship. Sometimes may be the funniest film I screened this year at Sundance; it’s a droll and perceptive look at how we tend to treat one another with more kindness than we do ourselves. To Fran, the mundane can be sublime, even beautiful. She just needs a push to see the same in herself.  — S.L.

Most Americans want to see the police reformed. A Gallup poll conducted in May, two years after the murder of George Floyd, found that 50 percent of adults favored “major changes” to policing, 39 percent wanted “minor changes,” and only 11 percent thought no changes were required. Despite this general consensus and a patchwork of recent policy shifts in communities across the country, injustices continue to accumulate, and it would be easy to see the problems with policing as intractable.

Three high-profile deaths just since the start of this year would seem to confirm this feeling. On January 3, Keenan Anderson, a 31-year-old Black high-school teacher (and cousin of Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter), died after Los Angeles police shocked him repeatedly with a Taser. The next day, cops in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shot and killed Sayed Faisal, a 20-year-old Bangladeshi American college student who allegedly approached them with a knife. And less than a week after that, another Black man, 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, died following a beating by Memphis police officers. Video footage of the incident, released this past Friday, led to mass protest in many cities and an anguished response to yet another senseless death. Nothing we’re doing to fix policing seems to be working—or so it might appear.

Against this backdrop, two new books chronicle horrific incidents of police abuse, cover-ups, and intransigence. But they also offer something else: light pouring through the cracks, concrete evidence that police departments can change for the better.

In The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland, the journalists Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham tell the story of Oakland, California’s police department. The title refers to a small group of officers who allegedly brutalized residents of impoverished, high-crime, largely Black West Oakland starting in the late 1990s. The actions of these cops became known only because a rookie named Keith Batt was assigned to train with one of them. Batt was deeply troubled by what he observed—behavior that Batt said included kidnapping, assault, and filing false police reports. He contacted internal-affairs investigators and became the main witness in a criminal case against the officers (three of whom stood trial; none was convicted).

[Read: No such thing as a bad apple]

In harrowing detail, Winston and BondGraham describe the terror that Batt said Oaklanders endured at the hands of the Riders, as well as the ostracism Batt faced when he refused to honor the “blue wall of silence” that has long characterized cop culture.

While the Riders’ actions may have been extreme, Winston and BondGraham view them as symptomatic of larger issues. As Oakland underwent deindustrialization in the 1970s and ’80s, poverty and crime rose. Turning away from local jobs initiatives, city leaders embraced ill-fated redevelopment efforts and pressed their often-racist police department to “clean up the streets.” When rogue cops took things too far, their supervisors looked the other way, knowing perfectly well what their marching orders were.

The Riders were significant in another respect: A lawsuit brought by the group’s alleged victims became the catalyst for a consent decree, a potentially powerful weapon for effecting change within police departments. Consent decrees are legally binding settlement agreements. In the usual course of affairs, after the Department of Justice has investigated a police agency and found that it has systematically violated people’s rights, the feds spell out changes in policy and procedure that the agency must undertake, changes that would bring it into line with established best practices. An independent monitor reports periodically to a judge on whether the department is meeting its marks.

Although the DOJ never investigated Oakland, the consent-decree model appealed to the civil-rights attorneys John Burris and Jim Chanin. In 2003, representing victims in the Riders case, they were able to maneuver the city into an unusual “negotiated” consent decree, which committed Oakland PD to a range of tasks, from better documenting the use of force to enhanced field training for young officers.

Consent decrees have been used to improve policing in cities such as Detroit and New Orleans, but they are expensive to administer and don’t always work. Winston and BondGraham show how the Oakland police resisted the required reforms at every turn. Top brass, middle management, frontline officers, and the police union displayed an “obstructionist mindset.” Oakland cops continued to shoot people at a furious pace. A poster in the department’s firing range was captioned You shut the fuck up. We’ll protect America. Keep out of our fucking way, liberal pussies.

The Riders Come Out at Night is a longish book, and its story is largely a condemnation of the Oakland police. But readers who stick with it to the end will discover something surprising. Although change was slow to come to Oakland, it did come. The turning point was the ascension of a reform-oriented police chief. Under Sean Whent, a longtime Oakland cop who led the department from 2013 to 2016, internal-affairs complaints dropped dramatically, the police did a better job protecting protesters’ rights, and the agency tackled racial bias.

Winston and BondGraham don’t put it in these terms, but Whent was arguably able to make progress because he helped shift the department’s culture. My own research on other cities suggests that the key to successful police reform is to pair sensible legal and policy restrictions on police behavior with new models of what it means to be a good cop, so that the hyperaggressive, “us versus them” culture of the profession bends in a different direction.

Whent believed not only that Oakland residents had a right to respectful policing, but that such policing would help the department control crime; the resulting trust would lubricate the all-important flow of information between cops and the community. Unlike his predecessors, he leaned into the consent decree (there was also intense legal pressure on him to do so), and enough of his cops followed suit that on the streets, things began to change.  

“The reforms that began in 2003 … have profoundly changed the Oakland police, and the city, for the better,” Winston and BondGraham conclude. “Today OPD officers are involved in far fewer deadly use-of-force incidents.” What’s more, where “Oakland cops were once known for abusive, explicit language,” now “audits of police body camera footage rarely flag instances in which officers curse or show impatience or anger.” The police have also “been able to steadily dial back their most problematic enforcement activities,” so that “Oakland is one of the only law enforcement agencies in America that could actually show (before the George Floyd protests) that it took action to reduce racial profiling.”

A similarly hopeful lesson might be drawn from Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable, by the UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz. Many cops perform their difficult job admirably, but part of the problem with reforming the police is that when this isn’t the case, officers aren’t always held to account for their misdeeds. Schwartz’s focus is on understanding why this should be, and she lands on 11 areas where law, policy, and politics have converged to make it hard for victims of police abuse to get justice.

Among Schwartz’s insights: There aren’t enough lawyers with the expertise to file federal civil-rights cases against police, especially outside large urban centers. This is partially a function of the fee structure allowed by the courts; only rarely can plaintiffs’ attorneys recoup their full costs, so relatively few lawyers find this kind of work financially viable.  

Schwartz’s special expertise is qualified immunity. This arcane legal doctrine dictates that a public official can’t be held responsible for violating someone’s rights unless the courts have already established that the particular circumstances do in fact constitute a violation. Although that sounds reasonable—you shouldn’t hold an official liable unless they knew that what they were doing was wrong—judges have interpreted this in a bizarro fashion.

Schwartz describes a case from Hawaii. A woman in an argument with her husband asked her daughter to call the cops and was Tasered when she accidentally bumped one of them. The Taser was used in so-called dart mode, where the weapon shoots out electrified probes. Her case against the officer ended up getting dismissed because, according to the appellate court, there had never before been a relevant ruling concerning Tasers, much less Tasers in dart mode, and therefore the officer couldn’t be held liable. Dart mode or not, the officer should have known not to do it.

Schwartz’s research shows that qualified-immunity defenses are raised in about 37 percent of lawsuits against the police. Although they’re successful only about 9 percent of the time, they gum up the litigation process because each qualified-immunity claim must be resolved before a case can proceed. The doctrine is a farce in any event, because police officers aren’t regularly updated on the intricacies of federal case law. Schwartz favors ending qualified immunity and argues that this won’t open the door to endless litigation.

Far more common than plaintiffs winning cases in court is cities settling with the victims of police abuse. (Settlements and legal awards cost Chicago nearly half a billion dollars from 2010 to 2020.) Usually cities pay these settlements out of their general funds. Police-department budgets don’t take the hit, so departments have little reason to retrain their officers and improve operating procedures. Schwartz urges cities to change this budgeting practice, giving police departments a financial incentive to learn from their mistakes.

Where’s the cause for hope? Schwartz observes that several of the changes she favors around qualified immunity were enshrined in state law in Colorado in 2020. It’s too early to tell what the effects of the Colorado law will be, but in theory, greater legal liability should deter police abuse. Other states may soon follow Colorado’s lead.

[Read: The state where protests have already forced major police reforms]

Many more levers need to be pulled to get police accountability to where it should be, but we are seeing progress. Even Schwartz, a fierce critic of law enforcement, acknowledges that over the past half century, “departments as a whole have become more professional and have improved their policies and trainings,” if only “to a degree,” in part because civil-rights attorneys and others in the community have kept the pressure on. The cops who were seen beating Tyre Nichols last month in Memphis? They were promptly fired by Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis. They’ve now been arrested and charged with second-degree murder. There was a time not long ago when neither of those things would have happened so quickly.

The narrative that nothing ever gets better in policing isn’t just wrong; it’s an abdication of responsibility. It’s easier to lose oneself in resignation and despair than to bear down—motivated by a belief in the possibility of change—and put in the hard work of reforming a flawed but essential institution.