Nuclear energy occupies a strange place in the American psyche—representing at once a dream of endless emissions-free power and a nightmare of catastrophic meltdowns and radioactive waste. The more prosaic downside is that new plants are extremely expensive: America’s most recent attempt to build a nuclear facility, in Georgia, was supposed to be completed in four years for $14 billion. Instead it took more than 10 years and had a final price tag of $35 billion—about 10 times the cost of a natural-gas plant with the same energy output.

But the United States might not have the luxury of treating nuclear energy as a lost cause: The Department of Energy estimates that the country must triple its nuclear-power output by 2050 to be on track for its climate targets. For all the recent progress in wind and solar energy, renewables on their own almost certainly won’t be enough. Arguably, then, we have no choice but to figure out how to build nuclear plants affordably again.

Half a century ago, nuclear energy seemed destined to become the power source of the future. The first commercial-reactor designs were approved in the 1950s, and by the late ’60s, America was pumping them out at a fraction of what they cost today. In 1970, the Atomic Energy Commission predicted that more than 1,000 reactors would be operating in the United States by the year 2000.

In the popular history of atomic energy in America, the turning point was the infamous meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant in 1979. In the aftermath of the accident, environmentalists pressured regulators to impose additional safety requirements on new and existing plants. Nuclear-energy advocates argue that these regulations were mostly unnecessary. All they did, in this telling, was make plants so expensive and slow to build that utility companies turned back to coal and gas. Activists and regulators had overreacted and killed America’s best shot at carbon-free energy.

This story contains some kernels of truth. The safety risk of nuclear energy is often wildly overblown. No one died at Three Mile Island, and later studies found that it didn’t have any adverse health effects on the local community. Even including the deadly meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power has most likely caused only a few hundred deaths, putting its safety record on par with wind turbines and solar panels, which occasionally catch fire or cause workers to fall. (The immediate areas around the sites of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters have, however, been rendered uninhabitable for decades because of the potential dangers of radiation.) Nuclear waste can be harmful if mishandled, but isn’t difficult to store safely. Air pollution from fossil fuels, meanwhile, is estimated to kill anywhere from 5 million to 9 million people every year.

[Read: Nuclear is hot, for the moment]

The claim that excessive regulation single-handedly ruined the American nuclear industry, however, doesn’t hold up. The cost of building new nuclear plants was already rising before Three Mile Island. Several nuclear-energy experts told me that a major driver of those cost increases was actually a lack of industry standards. According to Jessica Lovering, the executive director of Good Energy Collective and a co-author of a widely cited study on the cost of nuclear energy, throughout the ’60s and ’70s, utilities kept trying to build bigger, more ambitious reactors for every new project instead of just sticking with a single model. (Lovering used to be the head of nuclear policy at the Breakthrough Institute—a think tank that tends to warn against excessive regulation.) “It’s like if Boeing went through all the trouble to build one 737, then immediately threw out the design and started again from scratch,” she told me. “That’s a recipe for high costs.” The 94 nuclear reactors operating in the United States today are based on more than 50 different designs. In countries such as France and South Korea, by contrast, public utilities coalesced around a handful of reactor types and subsequently saw costs remain steady or fall.

Lovering also noted that the overregulation story leaves out a crucial fact: Because of a slowing economy, electricity demand flatlined in the early 1980s, causing American utilities to stop building basically every electricity-generating resource, not just nuclear plants. By the time the U.S. finally did try to build them again, in 2013, the American nuclear industry had all but withered away. “In the 1970s, we had a whole ecosystem of unionized workers and contractors and developers and utilities who knew how to build this stuff,” Josh Freed, who leads the climate and energy program at Third Way, a center-left think tank, told me. “But when we stopped building, that ecosystem died off.” This became obvious during the disastrous Vogtle project, in Georgia—the one that ended up costing $35 billion. Expensive changes had to be made to the reactor design midway through construction. Parts arrived late. Workers made all kinds of rookie mistakes. In one case, an incorrect rebar installation triggered a seven-and-a-half-month regulatory delay. Experts estimate that by the time it was finished, the project was four to six times more expensive per unit of energy produced than plants built in the early ’70s.

Given the impracticality of nuclear energy, some environmentalists argue that we should focus on wind and solar. These technologies can’t power the entire grid today, because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. With enough advances in battery-storage technology, however, they could in theory provide 24/7 power at a far lower price than building nuclear plants. “The nuclear industry has been promising cheap, clean energy for decades at this point,” David Schlissel, a director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told me. “Why waste our money on false hopes when we could be putting it towards technologies that have a real chance of working?”

He may be right about the technology. But just because it might one day be technically feasible to power the entire grid with renewables doesn’t mean it will ever be politically feasible. That’s because wind and solar require land—a lot of land. According to Princeton University’s “Net-Zero America” study, reaching net-zero emissions with renewables alone would involve placing solar panels on land equivalent to the area of Virginia and setting up wind farms spanning an area equivalent to Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma combined. The more land you need, the more you run into the meat grinder of American NIMBYism. Efforts to build renewables are already getting bogged down by local opposition, costly lawsuits, and permitting delays. These challenges will only intensify as the easiest sites come off the board.

Transmission lines, which are needed to transport renewable energy from where it’s generated to where it’s used, may present an even bigger challenge. Some lines have taken nearly two decades just to receive their full suite of approvals. “There’s a chance we will suddenly get our act together and overcome the many, many constraints to deploying renewables,” Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton Zero-Carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization Lab, told me. “But I’m certainly not willing to bet the fate of the planet on that happening.”

The case for nuclear, then, is less about technological possibilities than it is about political realities. Nuclear can generate the same amount of power while using 1/30th as much land as solar and about 1/200th as much as wind. Reactors can be built anywhere, not just in areas with lots of natural wind and sunshine, eliminating the need for huge transmission lines and making it easier to select sites without as much local opposition. And nuclear plants happen to generate the greatest number of high-paying jobs of any energy source, by far. (On average, they employ six times as many workers as an equivalent wind or solar project does and pay those workers 50 percent more.) That helps explain why four different towns in Wyoming recently fought over the right to host a nuclear project. Nuclear power is also the only energy source with overwhelming bipartisan support in Washington, which makes Congress more likely to address future bottlenecks and hurdles as they arise.

[Brian Deese: The next front in the war against climate change]

As for how to make the economics work, there are two schools of thought. One holds that if America forgot how to build nuclear because we stopped doing it, we just need to start back up. Pick a design, build lots of plants, and we’ll eventually get better. Other countries have done this with great success; South Korea, for instance, slashed the cost of constructing nuclear plants in half from 1971 to 2008. Here, the Vogtle project carries a silver lining: The second of the plant’s two reactors was about 30 percent cheaper to build than the first, because workers and project managers learned from their mistakes the first time around. “I consider Vogtle a success,” Mike Goff, acting assistant secretary for the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, told me. “We learned all kinds of hard lessons. Now we just need to apply them to future projects.”

The second school of thought is that we’ve been building nuclear reactors the wrong way all along. This camp points out that over the past half century, basically every kind of major infrastructure project—highways, skyscrapers, subways—has gotten more expensive, whereas manufactured goods—TVs, solar panels, electric-vehicle batteries—have gotten cheaper. Lowering costs turns out to be much easier when a product is mass-produced on an assembly line than when it has to be built from scratch in the real world every single time. That’s why dozens of companies are now racing to build nuclear reactors that are, in a phrase I heard from multiple sources, “more like airplanes and less like airports.” Some are simply smaller versions of the reactors the U.S. used to build; others involve brand-new designs that are less likely to melt down and therefore don’t require nearly as much big, expensive equipment to operate safely. What unites them is a belief that the secret to making nuclear cheap is making it smaller, less complicated, and easier to mass-produce.

Both paths remain unproven—so the Biden administration is placing bets on each of them. The president’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, included generous tax credits that could reduce the cost of a nuclear project by 30 to 50 percent, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included $2.5 billion to fund the construction of two new reactors using original designs. The Department of Energy, meanwhile, is exploring different options for permanent nuclear-waste storage, investing in building a domestic supply chain for uranium, and helping companies navigate the process of getting reactor designs approved.

There’s no guarantee that the U.S. will ever relearn the art of building nuclear energy efficiently. Betting on the future of atomic power requires a leap of faith. But America may have to take that leap, because the alternative is so much worse. “We just have to be successful,” Mike Goff told me. “Failure is not an option.”

The Pat McAfee Show, hosted by the ex–NFL punter turned TV presenter, is the only program on ESPN that opens with a warning label. It was one of the few concessions McAfee made to his new Disney-owned employer when he brought his YouTube hit to the network in September in a five-year, $85 million deal. The label urges viewers to please bear in mind that the show is “meant to be comedic informative”—entertainment, in other words, not journalism—and that the often dopey opinions and sometimes false facts shared by him or his guests “do not necessarily reflect the beliefs” of anyone else at ESPN. The warning ends with a jokey plea: “Don’t sue us.”

McAfee is an athlete, not a reporter, and when it comes to stuff like accuracy, he’s careful to set the bar very low. He has become the epitome of athlete encroachment on terrain historically controlled by nonathlete journalists, and to put it mildly, the journalists are not happy about it. McAfee couldn’t care less.

Pat McAfee’s influence is bigger than his audience. His hours-long show airs during TV’s midday dead zone, when most sports fans are at work or school. It averages just 332,000 live viewers on its linear broadcast, according to the most recent figures from ESPN, and factoring in other platforms like ESPN’s YouTube channel and TikTok, its daily audience tops out at just under 900,000—a fraction of the eight-figure viewership for Monday Night Football. But the numbers belie how much attention he gets for the more provocative things that are said on the show, including the dingbat views of the Jets quarterback and anti-vaxxer Aaron Rodgers. Airtime equals power, and no one at ESPN spends more time on air than Pat McAfee. From the moment he arrived, he’s arguably been the network’s most influential mouthpiece and indisputably its most polarizing.

If you’re a newcomer to The Pat McAfee Show, it can be tough to follow. The show is filled with locker-room joshing delivered in the outer-Pittsburgh Yinzer accent of McAfee’s youth. It’s one of America’s more unsung regional accents, super fun to imitate, but McAfee and his supporting panel of regulars—even the ones who aren’t from Pittsburgh—lay it on so thick, you might need to consult an English-to-Yinzer dictionary. Teams win chompionships. Joe Flacco, the name of the aging Super Bowl–winning quarterback, is pronounced Jee-oh Flacc-kew. Even the ticker at the bottom of the screen has a Yinzer accent: Program is spelled “progrum.”

[Keith O'Brien: You’ll miss sports journalism when it’s gone]

Everyone observes a firm dress code: down. Way down. McAfee, who has bouffant hair that crests like a giant wave at Nazaré, prefers black tees and white tanks. Boston Connor, one of two members of McAfee’s peanut gallery known as the Toxic Table, has a porn ’stache, an intentional mullet, and an endless supply of animal-stencil T-shirts: wolves, lions, elephants, snow owls. He looks as though he saw Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover and thought to himself, That guy looks awesome. Ty Schmit, the other half of the Toxic Table, favors Green Bay Packers jerseys and University of Iowa hoodies. McAfee will often wrap up segments by leading all of them in a round of applause for themselves, like they just aced a tackling drill. “Good seg, good seg,” he’ll say.

Watching an episode of The Pat McAfee Show is like attending mass at sports church. Since its inception in 2015 as a YouTube livecast on Barstool Sports and continuing through its move to ESPN, the show has been broadcast from an enormous studio–slash–home gymnasium dubbed “the Thunderdome” on McAfee’s property outside Indianapolis, the city where he spent eight seasons with the Colts as a punter. His co-stars all appear to be cast in his image—jocular white dudes with beards—only paler and softer of flesh. They’re not athletes, they’re not journalists, they’re not even particularly good on TV, and yet they’re on ESPN for 15 hours a week because they’re friends with McAfee. When he really gets rolling, his flock will join in with some call-and-response, but instead of crying out “Amen” or “Praise Jesus,” they belch out a loud WHADD. Roughly translated, it means “Damn right.”

By the time McAfee retired unexpectedly from football at age 29 to concentrate full-time on The Pat McAfee Show, he’d made $15 million in the NFL, and according to the prevailing wisdom at the time, he was out of his mind to walk away from a job that paid him a fortune to kick a ball five or six times a game. In the NFL, though, kickers are marginal figures who get the spotlight only when they screw up. On The Pat McAfee Show, he’s the pope. He often describes himself as a “dumb punter” and his buddies on the show as “a collection of stooges,” but he’s far more shrewd than he lets on, and he proved it when he accepted ESPN’s offer. (He’s also a regular panelist on ESPN’s College GameDay, and a commentator for the WWE’s Monday Night Raw. McAfee might love pro wrestling even more than he loves football.)

The men who watch The Pat McAfee Show—its audience is almost entirely male—share a lot in common with Pat McAfee. It’s on in the weight room at the team training complex (whadd), or in the living room at the fraternity house (whadd), or on the TV above the bar at Buffalo Wild Wings (whadd). It’s like background noise for committed sports fans. It’s not so much content as friendly company. His viewers aren’t watching McAfee’s progrum with focused attention, or for trenchant insights. They’re watching because of the easy camaraderie, because he and his pals are a quality hang, solid guys who like talking sports and crushing beers.

In stark contrast with much of ESPN’s morning and daytime programming, with its fire-breathing takes and verbal warfare that 30 Rock once lampooned with a fake show called Sports Shouting, The Pat McAfee Show has very little conflict. No one’s arguing or talking over one another or putting guests on the spot. This is surely a big reason why so many notable sports figures are willing to come on the show.

In April alone, McAfee hosted the women’s basketball phenom Caitlin Clark; the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy; UConn’s back-to-back national-champion head coach, Dan Hurley; and Major League Baseball’s top pitching prospect, Paul Skenes (better known to McAfee’s viewers as Livvy Dunne’s boyfriend). During last week’s NFL Draft, McAfee offered a reminder about why he’s so valuable to ESPN, booking a pair of coveted media-averse guests: the former New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. They feel comfortable letting down their guard around McAfee because he sees athletes, coaches, and the business of sports through the same prism that they do. ESPN may be paying his salary, but McAfee is clear about where his loyalties lie.

Since McAfee joined ESPN, he’s given just one extended interview of his own, and it was to a popular podcast called All the Smoke hosted by the ex-NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, whom McAfee befriended during Jackson’s stint with the Indiana Pacers. McAfee doesn’t talk with journalists unless it’s on his show and he’s the one doing the interviewing, and they’re rarely invited. (He didn’t respond to my requests for an interview.) ESPN’s NFL correspondent and scoop machine Adam Schefter appears often, and the NBA reporter Brian Windhorst has dropped by during the playoffs—mostly to talk about the Pacers—but they’re exceptions. Almost from the jump, the suspicions between McAfee and ESPN journalists have been mutual.

[Jemele Hill: Aaron Rodgers is lighting his football legacy on fire]

When ESPN offered McAfee that $85 million, its parent company, Disney, was in the midst of corporate-wide layoffs. ESPN was hit particularly hard. Lots of people got fired to pay for McAfee. Yet upon arriving, McAfee sounded hurt that he didn’t get a warmer reception. Just four months after joining the network, he accused ESPN executives of “actively trying to sabotage” his show, and he called out one of them by name, the powerful event and studio production chief Norby Williamson. Williamson, McAfee said live on air, was “a rat.”

It was a stunning moment—the kind of public airing of grievances that ESPN is renowned for not tolerating. Many past ESPN talents, such as Jemele Hill (now a writer for The Atlantic) and Bill Simmons, have been pushed out for far less. And yet McAfee suffered no consequences. No suspension, no public reprimand. Then, three months later, Williamson was fired. If any doubt remained about who had the power now at ESPN—the suits or the dumb punter—it vanished along with Williamson. McAfee could seemingly get away with anything, and then boast about it in public. Before Williamson got guillotined, McAfee bristled during his appearance on All the Smoke at the notion that he’d gone after one of his bosses: “I’m like, I don’t got a motherfucking boss! What are we … like, are we talking [ESPN Chairman] Jimmy Pitaro or [Disney CEO] Bob Iger? Is that who we’re talking about? Because those are people who could technically be described as my boss.”

No relationship, though, better crystallizes the growing enmity between McAfee and ESPN’s news division than his continued indulgence of his good friend, the New York Jets quarterback, defiant anti-vaxxer, ayahuasca enthusiast—and, for a brief moment, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s rumored running mate—Aaron Rodgers.

On October 23, 2023, during one of his weekly appearances on The Pat McAfee Show, Rodgers took a veiled shot at the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, referring to Kelce as “Mr. Pfizer” for his participation in an awareness campaign urging people to get vaccinated against COVID. McAfee made sure to note on air that he was vaccinated, an implicit rejection of Rodgers’s position, but he didn’t challenge his friend about it and he expressed surprise afterward that anyone expected him to. That’s not the line of work he’s in, folks. He was just kibbitzing with his freethinking friend.

Then on January 2, 2024, Rodgers shared on McAfee’s show a slanderous rumor about the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel and Jeffrey Epstein that deserves no repeating here. Kimmel’s show airs on ABC, which, like ESPN, is owned by Disney, meaning that McAfee had let his buddy use his platform to smear a co-worker. Kimmel responded angrily on X, calling Rodgers “a soft-brained wacko” and threatening to sue. This time, even McAfee seemed to know that Rodgers had gone too far. Later that day, he met with the only two people at Disney he recognizes as authority figures, Jimmy Pitaro and Bob Iger, then expressed contrition during his broadcast the next day. He chalked it up to “shit talk” gone awry and added, “We apologize for being part of it.”  

Once again, there was no evident discipline for McAfee. And a week later, Rodgers was right back on the show for his regular appearance, during which the quarterback notably did not apologize to Kimmel. (The next day, McAfee announced that Rodgers would not return to the program for the remainder of the NFL season, but no one seriously doubts that he’ll be back before the fall.)

Two months later, CNN reported that Rodgers had, in private conversations, expressed suspicions that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a government inside job. After Rodgers tweeted a denial—“I am not and have never been of the opinion that the events did not take place”—McAfee read it aloud on his show. “I’m happy to hear that,” McAfee said. “That is good news.” Anyone expecting McAfee to denounce his friend should’ve known better by then.  

[From the September 2013 issue: The global dominance of ESPN]

On All the Smoke, after the Kimmel smear but before the Sandy Hook nonsense, McAfee shared that he’d lost sleep over his role in the Rodgers saga, saying, “Maybe I am fucking this up completely.” But he also offered a novel defense, which is that his relationship with Rodgers had enabled him to tease out a more honest and complete portrait of a historic figure in sports. “Whenever there’s documentaries made about Aaron Rodgers, they are going to use so much of our show,” he said. “Is that not journalism?”

No. It is not. Journalism requires an active pursuit of the truth. This was more like stepping on a rake. He’s not completely wrong, though. We can debate forever the ethics of platforming public figures who say odious things, but it’s also true that Rodgers used to be considered among the more thoughtful, intellectually curious stars in the NFL. And now, thanks in no small measure to The Pat McAfee Show, we’ve heard enough of his self-satisfied, moronic bloviating to know better.  

April 5 had all the makings of a triumphant day for McAfee: Williamson had been fired in the morning, and the show would be broadcasting live from Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, site of that weekend’s WrestleMania XL. Borrowing from the College GameDay script, McAfee likes to take his show on the road, and wherever he goes, he’s greeted by a brigade of fans packed behind his broadcast platform like thick stogies. This day, at least 20 percent of them had fake championship belts slung over their shoulders like they were Triple H. You could swap any of them for Boston Connor, and no one would notice for an hour, including Pat. “Mac-uh-fee!” they chanted. “Mac-uh-fee! Mac-uh-fee!”  

Right away, though, something went wrong. To viewers at home, nothing seemed amiss, but inside the arena, the sound wasn’t working. The fans couldn’t hear anything. McAfee didn’t realize until sound technicians started scrambling behind the podium, frantically working to rectify the situation. Now the crowd began a new chant: “We want speakers! We want speakers!” Minutes of airtime passed. McAfee’s mood soured. “Obviously a massive week in Philadelphia—we’ve got all these people staring at us, can’t hear a damn thing we’re saying,” he said. “One of the most uncomfortable situations I’ve ever been placed in in my entire life right now.” Every time he tried to move forward with the show, the crowd would cut him off and start chanting again, and now they were getting salty. “Bulllll-shiiiit! Bullll-shiiiit! Bulllshiiiit!”

[Read: Sports streaming makes losers of us all]

On TV, you could see the panic bleed into McAfee’s eyes as it dawned on him how bad this could get. This was a three-hour broadcast. If they started bringing out WWE legends and the sound still wasn’t fixed—folks, this was a wrestling crowd in Philadelphia. They would absolutely turn on him. The situation required McAfee and his Toxic Table to do something they were deeply ill-prepared for: be television professionals. Buy time. Improvise.

Instead, McAfee and his panelists exchanged small talk for a while like they were waiting for an elevator to arrive. Apropos of nothing, Pat congratulated two crew members named Nick and Carly, who’d apparently just had a baby, and led the panel in a round of applause for them. A producer handed a mobile microphone to Boston Connor and instructed him to go interview fans, but Connor doesn’t really know how to do that, so instead he approached someone dressed as the WWE star Cody Rhodes and, unprovoked, called him a “crybaby bitch.”

Anything can happen on live television, as the cliché goes, which is why TV professionals always have a plan B. McAfee, though, barely has a plan A. Even on its better days, his show is slapdash to the point that it feels like an act of defiance, like a noogie to the heads of all those suits in Bristol. (“We don’t really like to plan or think things out,” McAfee says often.) Finally, after more than 30 minutes, the sound in the arena got fixed. McAfee, champion of the working man, led the panel in another round of applause: “Big shout-out to the Philadelphia union for coming through,” he said. He hinted that it must have been the suits, who were always out to get him, who’d screwed up. “Hey, I come from Pittsburgh. Believe me, I very much understand the entire process of the entire thing.” Whatever had gone wrong, disorder was now restored.