San Diego CBS Workshop
On August 2, 2025, we hosted a workshop in San Diego and it was a great success! Being our seventh CBS community workshop, we are finally figuring out the nuances of how to host an amazing event with all the aspects that are important. Logistics have to be smooth so they don’t get in the way or distract from conversation and relationship-building - that includes everything from the venue, catering, marketing and advertising, AV support, sustainability, and parking to being child-friendly, supporting special needs, coordinating the team to best respond to difficult questions, and ensuring everyone’s voices are heard.
And of course our content and engagements have to be genuine, accurate, and tailored to a widely varying audience. We must communicate nuances between emotion and fact in ways that are respectful and approachable.
The Native Nuclear (previously TC-BC) team meeting with local indigenous groups in Chicago
Part of how we do this is to make special effort to gain context about the local community before we actually have the workshop. Here are some examples of how we have done that:
Raleigh workshop - we toured Harris Nuclear Plant
Chicago workshop - our partners at Native Nuclear met with the leaders from Midwest SOARRING Foundation in Lockport IL, and visited the Gichigamiin Indigenous Nations Museum in Evanston, the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern University and the American Indian Center in Chicago. We checked out the Chicago Pile and Argonne National Lab.
Oklahoma City workshop - Native Nuclear hosted a listening session the day before with Comanche Nation and Chickasaw Nation at First Americans Museum in Oklahoma
Washington DC workshop - Native Nuclear visited the National Museum of the American Indian
Las Vegas workshop - we visited the Atomic Testing Museum (sadly we couldn’t get in to see either Yucca Mountain or the Nevada Test Site)
Utah workshops - we toured the White Mesa Uranium Mill, and Heather also visited a coal-fired power plant and a copper mine during the same trip
This trip to San Diego, we wanted to connect with many local groups and people who have strong thoughts about nuclear, and perhaps what most comes to mind is the conversation around the storage of used fuel at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, which was shut down in 2013. So we decided to tour the station, which you can read about in a separate post HERE.
Paris, Jennifer, Heather and Fereshteh at SONGS
The workshop itself went smoothly, as we have finally figured out most of those positive attributes listed above. We also had a film crew joining us, to help capture the story behind why each of our groups is involved in this initiative and what we hope for the future. You can see the final versions of our video (a long and a shorter version) posted on the main policy page for Collaboration-Based Siting.
Paris did an amazing job guiding the day as our emcee. We used some new tools for audience engagement, and saw a real time word cloud of what people think of first when they hear the word “nuclear”.
Packed house!
We had great turnout and a really nice venue.
Attendees included southern California NAYGN members, employees of General Atomics & SCE, tribal representatives, students, families with children, and even someone angling to host used nuclear fuel storage in his backyard!
This amazing woman was spending her BIRTHDAY with us!
The NAYGN contingent - thanks for coming out and supporting our event!
Group photo