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Nuclear power is in a strange position today. Those who worry about climate change have come to see that it is essential.
如今，核能处于一个奇怪的位置。那些担心气候变化的人已经认识到核能的重要性。
The warming clock is ticking—another sort of countdown—and replacing fossil fuels is much easier with nuclear power in the equation.
全球变暖的时钟正在滴答作响——这是另一种倒计时——有了核能，把化石燃料替换掉就会容易很多。
And yet the industry, in many respects, looks unready to step into a major role. It has consistently flopped as a commercial proposition.
然而，从许多方面来看，核能行业似乎还没有准备好去担当重任。作为一项商业提议，它屡屡失败。
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.
十年又十年，该行业未能按承诺在预算内按时交付新核电站，而且，尽管有着令人羡慕的安全记录，但核能行业仍未消除公众对灾难性事故的恐惧。
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.
许多业内最具才智的人知道他们需要一种新方法，而且要尽快。为了寻找灵感，一些人把目光转向了SpaceX、特斯拉和苹果。
“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.
“是的，我们尝试这么做有点疯狂。”当我问及如何从零开始创办一家公司，力图使核能行业变得灵活、具有竞争力时，卡伊洛斯电力公司的联合创始人兼首席核能官佩尔·彼得森这样说。
“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.
“但在我的记忆中，我从来没有对我们想做的事是否可行缺乏信心。”这个行业的命运，以及在某种程度上整个地球的命运，都取决于他以及志同道合的企业家们最终能否信守承诺。
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.
当我开始报道这篇文章时，我想象这可能是对环保运动抵制核能的抨击。在整整一代人或更长的时间里，美国一直都是在被束缚住了手脚的情况下与气候变化——以及所有其他由化石燃料引起的问题——进行斗争。
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.
曾任内政部长和亚利桑那州州长的布鲁斯·巴比特在1979年三哩岛核电站部分熔毁(美国核电行业最严重的事故)后，加入了评估核电的总统委员会。
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.
尽管没有人死亡，甚至没有人受伤——而且这次事故还催生了新的规约与培训，在此之下，核电站第二座完好无损的反应堆直到2019年都安然无恙地运行着——但这次事故使公众和环保人士更加反对核能。
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.’”
在那之后，正如巴比特告诉我的，“环保界对核能的反对意见几乎一致。他们的立场是‘不要新建核电站，应该逐步淘汰现有的核基地’。”
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.
这就是美国选择的道路。如今，之前遗留下来的核电为美国提供了约20%的电力，但自1996年以来，美国仅启动了一座新的核电反应堆。
