Welcome to Water and Power, a newsletter about the elements of our survival—and those who seek to profit off them. Water & Power delivers unique reporting to prepare you to engage on the issues dear to your heart, including notices of upcoming events and highlights from across the media landscape. This members-only newsletter is free to read but will increasing fold in benefits exclusively for paying subscribers.
If you know someone who would appreciate this research and analysis, pass it along. Subscribe to this and our growing roster of Deceleration newsletters. Paying supports from the $5/month level up may leave a comment below. Reader support makes this work possible. — Greg Harman
SEADRIFT, Texas—Dow is hoping to convert its sprawling plastics and packaging materials plant here from gas-fired power to a complex of four modular nuclear reactors. The project, a partnership between Dow and X-energy, is in the vanguard of a wave of new interest and applications for nuclear power projects the state. These so-called “advanced” new-generation reactors, with only two examples in operation, are intended to pave the way toward mass production, a gamble intended to bring down the historically outsized construction costs that have dogged the industry.
Positive press generated to date credits Dow's potential switch for a significant reduction in greenhouse gases. Widespread oil and gas industry expansion in recent decades, alongside the corresponding destruction of climate-stabilizing ecosystems—like Earth's forests—are rapidly overheating the planet and increasing the millions of annual avoidable deaths due to industrial warming and fossil fuel pollution. But longtime critics of Dow don’t see much praiseworthy in this proposed swapping out of gas for nukes. They only see the acceleration of decades of plasticization of area waterways.
Seadrift resident Diane Wilson, founder of the San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeepers, recently challenged Dow's local operations via a 25-day hunger strike, which only concluded with her March 2026 arrest while attempting to deliver her demand letter to Dow officials here.
“They literally locked the front door, peeked through the windows, and called the cops,” she wrote Deceleration this week.
Those demands, later sent by certified letter, included a desired commitment from Dow for “zero discharge” of plastics and a rescinding of its nuclear power application, which has already cleared an early hurdle with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. (The company did not respond to Deceleration’s request for comment before our publication deadline.)
“Violating the Clean Water Act and using the region as a guinea pig for dangerous nuclear reactors are completely unacceptable,” Wilson wrote Jim Fitterling, Dow’s chair and chief executive officer.
Last weekend, Wilson opened a community gathering on the topic of nuclear reactors, saying her primarily concern is the ongoing operation of the facility, which she described as a voracious plastics polluter.
The People's Conference on Nuclear Power Reactors sought to meld the fight against plastics pollution with resistance to the revival of nuclear power.
"I know a lot of bad things that they have done," Wilson said. "That really destroys my trust in [Dow], and primarily that is what I have an issue with."
In Brief
Attendees and speakers at the recent People's Conference on Nuclear Power Reactors in Seadrift, Texas. Images: Greg Harman
Radioactive Waste & Cancer
The Seadrift conference speakers recognized the plastics pollution issue but focused on what was described as a compounding threat: operating nuclear pollution and long-lived radioactive waste.
Speakers experienced in battling nuclear power behemoths—hailing from cities like San Diego, Calif., to Buffalo, New York, to Austin, Texas—insisted that the new generation of reactors generate the same hazards as do the larger power plants etched into global awareness: Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three-Mile Island.
Tim Judson, executive director of Nuclear Information & Resource Service, which describes itself as "a national non-profit organization devoted to a nuclear-free, carbon-free world," walked the small roomful of attendees through the process of uranium mining, nuclear power production, and problem of radioactive waste disposal. Critics of the technology routinely point to the well-documented challenges of disposing of its waste stream, some of which remains hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years.
“The thing that everyone thinks about is the high-level radioactive waste, the fuel,” Judson said. “But the reactor itself is releasing radiation all the time. So there is something called ‘routine’ waste. This is when the reactor is releasing liquid and gaseous radioactive waste. It’s just part of the normal operation.”
Another speaker shared their recent research into the potential consequence of those releases: Cancers. Potentially a lot of them.
A study examining state cancer registries and proximity to nuclear power plants in the United States published in Nature Communications this February found "a positive association between nuclear power plants proximity and cancer mortality." Results were most apparent among women in the 55–64 age group and among men aged 65–74.
"Nuclear power plants emit radioactive pollutants that can disperse into the surrounding environment, leading to potential human exposure through inhalation, ingestion, and direct contact," that article reads. "These pollutants can be transported through air, water, and soil, contributing to long-term environmental contamination."
The potential public health impact of ionizing radiation emitted by power plants is surprisingly understudied, said Yazan Alwadi, a research fellow in the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, joining the Seadrift audience via Zoom.
Wilson asked if Alwadi's team faced any blowback from industry after publication of their findings.
"Yes. A lot, actually," he responded. "That month of emails I got was overwhelming in the beginning. Many of them were not very friendly. ... That month of backlash was far exceeding what I expected."
Alwadi, however, was careful to remind their audience more than once that the discovery of these many documented correlations between cancer-related deaths with proximity to nuclear power plants does not mean reactors cause cancer. What it shows definitively is a potential relationship the demands further investigation.
"While our findings cannot establish causality," the paper's abstract states, "they highlight the need for further research into potential exposure pathways, latency effects, and cancer-specific risks, emphasizing the importance of addressing these potentially substantial but overlooked risks to public health."
