Dani Zigon

My daughter was born January 16, 2021.

On February 16, 2021, Winter Storm Uri took out the power to my home and millions of other Texans’ homes. If you’ve had a child recently, you know the internet is obsessed with “safe sleep.” You’re inundated with messages about how “back is best,” about the dangers of pillows, warning you that you should never fall asleep with your baby in your arms. My daughter was lying in her bassinet that night, the house was around 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and I remember thinking to myself, “Is she more likely to freeze to death in her bassinet or suffocate in my arms if I sleep with her in a rocking chair covered in blankets?”

We were among the lucky ones. Our power returned relatively quickly, my daughter and I both warm, healthy, and happy, but I was left thinking about what energy poverty means in modern society. In most Western countries, it’s a chronic phenomenon, evaluated based on the cost of energy as a percentage of stable household income over a long period of time. But this is different. It’s acute energy poverty. You can’t control when it happens. When it does, prices can skyrocket, leading to ruin. People die from lack of ability to heat or cool themselves and from unsafe, irregular conversions to fuel sources they’re not equipped to run (think carbon monoxide poisoning in the middle of Texas from running a wood-burning fire, during a snowpocalypse, in a fireplace that never gets inspected).

And it’s not just happening in Texas—it’s happening across the country and the world. Energy security means that when you go to flip a switch, you’re confident the light will come on. I no longer have that confidence during extreme weather, and since large load growth is forecasted to outpace supply by a factor of 2, my family’s livelihood is deeply tied to how fast we can bring online a new, firm, clean, reliable energy supply.

I’m a Mother for Nuclear because this generation deserves to be certain they can power the forces that keep them alive, and because the next generation deserves clean air and land to build their lives upon. Nuclear power is the backbone that will make both reasonable visions for the future a possibility, so that no other new mother has to experience what I did in 2021.

Dani Zigon is Director for Nuclear Policy at UT Austin. She holds a MS in energy policy from UT Austin and a BS in nuclear engineering from Purdue. She has spent the last 15 years professionally pursuing energy security everywhere. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her daughter, Eve, and rocket scientist husband, Carter.