The Diablo Canyon control room turned this mom into a nuclear

Heather Hoff was working in the control room of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant near in San Luis Obispo County, Calif., when an earthquake caused a tsunami that shut off the power supply cooling three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. Three nuclear reactor cores at Fukushima melted down. 

“It was super scary,” Hoff told CNBC in a video interview. “It’s my worst nightmare as an operator — to be there and think about these other operators just across the ocean from us. They don’t know what’s going on with their plant. They have no power. They don’t know if people are hurt.”

In the first days after the accident, “what I was hearing on TV in the media was pretty scary,” Hoff said. 

But as time passed and information about the meltdown became more available, the consequences of the accident became clear. While three employees who worked for the Tokyo Electric Power Company died because of the earthquake and resulting tsunami, nobody died because of the nuclear reactor accident. 

“Three plants had meltdowns and that’s scary and horrible and expensive, but it didn’t really hurt anyone,” Hoff said. “And that was really surprising to me.” 

In the wake of the Fukushima accident, Hoff went from fearing that she would need to leave her job to being committed to the potential of nuclear to be a safe, clean contribution to the global energy supply.

“Now I feel even more strongly that nuclear is the right thing to do and that the damaging parts about nuclear are actually not the technology itself, but our fear, our human responses to nuclear.”

After going through her own evolution in her thinking about nuclear energy, Hoff went on to co-found an advocacy group, Mothers for Nuclear, in 2016 with her colleague and friend Kristin Zaitz.

“There’s so much fear and so much misinformation… it’s a convenient villain,” Hoff said. “It’s okay to be scared, but that’s not the same thing as dangerous.”