Editor’s Note: In light of the forthcoming entrance of another Democrat into the governor’s mansion—and because exactly two decades have lapsed since Ann Richards’ passing—we’re resharing our October 6, 2006, cover story.

It is Molly Ivins’ touching and candid obituary for her friend, the last Dem to hold the state’s top office—until Gina Hinojosa, that is. Here, the tribute has been condensed and lightly copyedited.

Ann Richards’ public life was mostly about gender. She was outrageous and courageous on behalf of women everywhere.

She was also a legendary campfire cook, a beautiful ballroom dancer (she did do everything Fred Astaire did, backwards and in high heels), she loved movies, was a bossy momma, just as good as at-the-moment quips as at telling great stories, a reluctant hunter (“first, you have to get up at four in the morning and dress from head to foot like a woody vine”), a great laugher, fine canoeist, former drunk, and first woman governor of Texas to get there on her own credentials.

In retrospect, it sounds almost easy. I believe if Ann had been born 10 years earlier or started 10 years later, she could have been president. But it’s easy to forget how firmly sexism ruled this culture.      

When Ann first ran for statewide office in 1982, you could feel it: the start of a movement. Those women with big hair and big purses in Amarillo and Abilene flocked to hear her. 

She said that running the treasurer’s office was just like balancing a checkbook “except more zeroes.” That quaint simile is in fact true. “Women are trained to detail, and we are expected to juggle a lot of balls at once,” she would say. In fact, motherhood is splendid training for politics. All good mothers know what to do when there’s two kids and one cookie, and all good mothers know what to do when there are two kids in the back seat hitting each other, each one of them claiming the other one started it. All political problems are merely variations of those two situations.

Gina Hinojosa, now governor-elect, on the House floor in May 2025 (Jordan Vonderhaar for the Texas Observer)

Her 1988 speech at the Democratic National Convention “made her a star overnight,” as they say. Ann had told me years earlier, “You always think Washington and New York are going to be so much harder. I mean, our friends here all think we’re wonderful, but they’re our friends, what do they know? Actually, if you can do it in Texas, you can do it anywhere.”

Ann’s opponent in the 1990 election was not [Republican] Claytie Williams but [primary opponent] Jim Mattox, who was meaner and smarter. He finally dredged up some allegation about cocaine use, and Ann, according to her campaign manager Glenn Smith, was paralyzed by it. Among other things, she was just embarrassed to have her parents hear about it. So she wound up not commenting, which turned out to set the model for pols being asked about “youthful indiscretions.”

The fall campaign teeter-tottered along, a real nail-biter with Claytie Williams helping out several times. Ann was running for “a new Texas,” as vapid a slogan as has ever been dreamed up, and Claytie, with his good ol’ boy racism and sexism—he never meant to offend a soul—kept defining “old Texas” in the most helpful way.

Ann won on the women’s vote: She carried it by almost 60 percent, including suburban Republican women.

She inherited a huge mess as governor. The state’s economy was in the toilet—oil at $8 a barrel and vast destruction left by the idiot follies of the S&L scandals. I don’t know that many of us who voted for her had expected Ann to spend most of her time helping General Motors, Apple Computer, and other dispossessed citizens, but she was quite proud of steering those deals where the state gives a company tax breaks, free infrastructure, etc. The state’s economy did grow slightly faster than the national average in those years, but we had not thought she would be cutting tax deals with big corporations. 

The Observer was not ecstatic over her performance and, as I recall, rarely had much good to say about her. In the meantime, she also had to clean up the school funding mess and the prison mess (what good liberal builds 60,000 new prison cells?). She did put 14,000 beds into a prison alcohol rehab program. More than once she sat down with a circle of alcoholic convicts and said, “My name is Ann and I am an alcoholic.” (Bush later cut the program to 3,000 beds.)

Ann disappointed many liberals, but then, she was elected governor of Texas, not Sweden.

She ran again after four exhausting years, and it was fairly apparent she didn’t really want to do it. She had been working flat-out for the entire term. Although few people knew it, Ann had a form of grand mal epilepsy that could result in seizures: It was dangerous for her to get extremely tired. Ann pushed herself so hard and what she really needed was someone to force her to stop at the end of the day. But she felt under such pressure to run again—all those people who believed in her, all those women who were inspired by her.

One thing Ann delivered on was opening government to all the people. Her record of naming blacks and Hispanics to state boards and commissions, of working them into the bureaucracy so they rise at their own pace, has not been equaled since—not that Bush or Perry tried much.

The ’94 race was the full tide of Republican reaction. Newt Gingrich & Co. had taken Congress two years earlier, and it was God, Gays, and Guns. Naturally, rumors somehow spread about Ann and lesbians: She had appointed two openly gay people out of 800 or so appointments, but gay is gay. Ann had also said that if the Legislature passed a right-to-carry law, she would veto it. They did, and she did. The NRA put on a big push to convince her that we Texas women would feel ever so much safer if we could just carry guns in our purses. Ann said, when she issued her veto, “You know I am not a sexist, but there is not a woman in this state who could find a gun in her handbag.”

Had Ann been able to see just a little further into the future, she would have run like a racehorse. She really felt contempt for Bush and thought his ignorance and arrogance a dangerous combination. Depending on how liberal you are (and this magazine is lily-pure), you could also get mad about Ann’s lobbying career once she left office. When she was with the law firm of Verner, Lipfert, she actually lobbied for the tobacco companies. When I talked to her, it seemed to me more of a case of Ann getting paid for her political judgment, and she was right on every call she made. She told me the Senate had made a mistake by holding out for better than the attorneys’ general agreement with the tobacco companies, and she was right.

I’m glad she got to make money and take the grandkids on cruises and the girls down the Grand Canyon and all that good stuff. The most touching moment at a smaller service for Ann came from Bud Shrake, known as Ann’s “walker” when she was governor. Shrake is not likely to spill sticky sentiment across an occasion. He said simply, “She was the center of my life for 17 years. I loved her. A-men. A-women. A-Ann.”

I think what she said most often in her life was, “Idn’t it wonderful?”

The post Molly Ivins on Ann Richards’ Legacy appeared first on The Texas Observer.

My son is 3 now. So in just one or two vanishingly short years, he’ll enter Austin’s public school system. That doesn’t make me special—there are 70,000 kids in the Austin Independent School District (ISD)—but it does make me, well, nervous. 

Because public schools in the capital city and around Texas today are being roiled by an interventionist state government, one backed by out-of-state special interests. What’s happening now goes far beyond Texas’ historic financial neglect or legislative incapacity to properly finance the education system. What we have before us is a many-tentacled crisis, one that looks and acts like a colossal heist in broad daylight but whose full scope is hard to grasp amid the myriad particulars.

In other words, I needed to talk to someone. About private school vouchers, now in its first school year of implementation, which Republicans want to expand next session. About the growing number of Texas Education Agency (TEA) takeovers—whereby a single school’s failure on standardized tests can mean elected trustees are swept aside, soul-sucking pedagogical reforms are implemented, and campuses are parceled out to charter school operators (despite clear conflicts of interest)—one of which looms over Austin ISD as I write this. 

So I spoke in late September (prior to the elections) to Carrie Griffith, director of the two-year-old nonprofit Our Schools Our Democracy, a group that has lately brought an energetic and nerdy zeal to watchdogging not just the matters mentioned above but the longer-standing problem of unchecked charter expansion. On balance, I felt a bit better afterward.

GB: The name of your group makes it clear that you’re linking together public schools and democracy. But what exactly is the threat to democracy that comes from expanding charter schools, private school vouchers, and state takeovers?

When we were brainstorming names, we really wanted to make the connection to what we are seeing privatization do in terms of truly being a vote steal. By that I mean that the three publicly funded systems of schools—independent school districts, charter schools, and now private school vouchers—only one of those is publicly governed. And so as we are expanding systems with public taxpayer dollars but removing the elected governance and the right of the community to have a say, it’s a direct steal of their democratic input into a system that they’re funding.

Something that we try to make clear is that charter schools are not public schools. They’re defined as being public in the Texas Education Code because the lobby worked hard to get that definition in there, but we define public as being both publicly funded but also publicly governed. 

How exactly does a charter school affect overall public school districts—why is it a threat other than just that it’s not subject to as many regulations?

Charter schools are only just now beginning to be understood by the broad public as a threat. Whereas the voucher law is sort of the big bad wolf—it’s easy to understand that this is the diversion of public funds to private entities and that it’s a threat to our public schools—it’s much, much more difficult to understand why charter schools are also a threat, and so I like to call them the wolf in sheep’s clothing. 

They primarily, like private schools, can selectively admit and artificially cap enrollment. They have to be a little bit sneakier in the way that they sort of shape their enrollment because they can’t explicitly deny admission in the way that private schools can, but they absolutely can de facto. And so we see this in ways like having uniform requirements, not providing transportation, coaching students out, not providing special education services. But I think the biggest thing that readers really need to understand is that charter schools happen almost entirely outside the democratic process. The only element in the entire process of approving a charter school is when the original charter can be vetoed by the elected State Board of Education. 

Here in Austin, the pending takeover is a constant topic of conversation, and people seem a little confused about: Does TEA really have a choice in the matter at this point, given that we have the school ratings and that the statute seems to say the state “shall” take action?

So it is a “shall” statute, which is wrong. That needs to be changed. … My understanding is, in the Austin situation, there is kind of one final lever possible and that is if the parents of the schools that are triggering the takeover, if they themselves request that their schools be closed, then that could buy some time, which is a Sophie’s Choice and it’s really awful because those families don’t deserve to have their schools close.

Readers really need to understand that failure is being defined by the state, and it is being defined very, very narrowly, almost entirely based on standardized test scores. 

Is it possible or have you seen with your own eyes a school with an F that you know, in reality, is a nurturing, well-administered institution? 

Oh, 100 percent. I have three daughters in Austin ISD; my high school senior started kindergarten in our neighborhood public school that was rated F. She was a white minority, and I was an elementary school parent there for 13 years because of the age difference of my kids. Its accountability rating has increased because the demographics have changed; you’re getting more and more students who come from educated families. But the teachers are not different. The curriculum isn’t different. There were many years where the principals were the same. All three of my daughters had the same kindergarten teacher. The arts program is incredible. It’s an incredible, incredible school. 

Thinking ahead to January, to the next legislation session, if you assume Republicans probably still have the Senate and House [November 10 Editor’s Note: lol], what are two or three things that are within the realm of possibility to achieve for public schools?

High-level, our legislative priorities will always, regardless of who is governing, be transparency, fiscal responsibility, and fairness. … Thinking about vouchers, even though the comptroller’s office has already requested that the program be expanded to $4.4 billion, including waitlists … our ask and the ask of many people on all sides of the conversation is that it be capped until there is better data.

In terms of takeovers, I think that this situation where one campus can trigger the takeover is low-hanging fruit that a lot of reasonable people are scratching their heads at and thinking this really doesn’t make sense. So that will be a pretty basic ask. 

Charters … one thing that has consistently been on our agenda, we want that a charter school be required to provide notice that a campus or district is alternative accountability [i.e., uses different tracking standards] and what that means, because alternative accountability exists for very unique campuses like [those focused on severe special needs] and adult learning. But charters abuse it, and they identify as a part of the alternative accountability system way more and without there being a substantiated need.

Do you have any specific advice you give to Texas parents who are concerned or panicked about the state of their public education system? What do you recommend people do?

It’s sort of a long-term solution to a short-term problem, but vote. I mean, pay attention because it’s really important that people understand you can’t just assume that a Democrat on the ballot is going to be the candidate that’s best for education. There are so many well-funded Democrats that are infiltrating state boards and school boards to push these privatizing tricks on our districts. So really pay attention and stay connected to groups like mine and what the teacher unions are saying. 

And I always like to share with frustrated families … there really is nothing happening at the local level anymore that is the fault of the local governance. Local control doesn’t even exist anymore. So every complaint that a family has about a school really can be tracked back to the state, and that makes us feel as parents like we have less of a say, and it feels like a harder problem to solve. But just really celebrate and support your neighborhood public schools and be willing to do the thing that the teacher or the principal is asking for until we can get out of this mess and we can restore local control and adequate school funding and quality curriculum and teacher autonomy and a system that measures quality as we define it and not as the state is defining it. So, patience, compassion, and activism—those are the three answers.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Texans Are Losing Their Democracy, School by School appeared first on The Texas Observer.

You’ve probably heard by now that, in two months’ time, Texas will have the first Hispanic governor—one by the name of Gina Hinojosa—in its history as a U.S. state. And you might have heard, too, that we’re set to have, in Senfronia Thompson, both our first woman and first Black House Speaker as well. But the list of firsts ushered in by last week’s stunning election results goes much deeper than those two.

Lieutenant Governor-Elect Vikki Goodwin, come January, will be the first woman to hold her position. Railroad Commissioner-Elect Jon Rosenthal will be Texas’ first Jewish statewide officeholder, and Benjamin Flores will be the first Hispanic land commissioner. Incoming state Supreme Court Chief Justice Maggie Ellis is set to become the state’s first out LGBTQ+ statewide official. And, I’m sure, there are more firsts in there amid the statewide blue thrashing and certainly more scattered down to the local levels—among them Letitia Plummer, Alisa Simmons, and Dexter McCoy who are about to become the first-ever Black county judges in, respectively, Harris, Tarrant, and Fort Bend counties—after voters showed up to the polls en masse and almost indiscriminately sent Republicans packing in a full-throated repudiation of President Donald Trump and decades of one-party rule here.

What’s perhaps ironic is that this wave of identity-politics firsts comes as the culmination of an election cycle in which identity politics were decidedly muted. Led by the hyper-disciplined campaigns of Senator-Elect James Talarico and Hinojosa, Democrats here focused on affordability and corruption, along with a sometimes-squishy and often-newfound economic populism—rejecting what they called “culture wars.” (At times by just literally saying over and over that they are embracing populism and rejecting culture wars.) 

This was not, à la 2016, an election of sentiments like “Breaking up the big banks won’t end racism.” It was close to the reverse.

This was an election of Hinojosa lightly mocking preferred gender pronouns, pivoting away from pro-abortion rhetoric, and sharing animated video of herself taking out surveillance cameras with a gun. It was an election of Talarico deeming inoffensive theological statements “cringe” and playing nice with the anti-trans movement in its chosen guise of calling for fairness in youth sports.

I’m sure it was discussed, here and there, just how many barriers would be broken this November if the blue wave were big enough—but the topic was decidedly low-profile. In part because no one really predicted a sweep up and down the ballot and in part because that was just not the chosen vibe.

I’m not old enough to clearly recall an earlier era of liberalism when a more optimistic affirmative action-style politics was more en vogue—but it’s striking to me when reading books about Ann Richards’ work as governor or Bob Bullock’s time as comptroller how much emphasis is placed on their having diversified the ranks of the state bureaucracy. It’s perhaps a different tone than the more radical and pessimistic politics that emerged from the Black Lives Matter era, but nevertheless this last election stands in contrast both to what is derisively now called “Woke 1.0” and an even older variety of liberalism.

In the Texas Observer office, there still remains a 10-year-old coffee mug with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign logo, the words “History Made,” and the image of a broken glass ceiling. It is a bitter reminder, and I’ve often thought of getting rid of it but for some reason always hesitated, maybe unwittingly waiting for this year to come. This cycle when, with little explicit fanfare, that mug would have its day.

Our “Great State,” as Molly Ivins called it, lies now covered in glorious glass shards—good ol’ boys, watch your step.

The mug

The post In Texas, the Glass Ceiling Shattered in a Gas-and-Groceries Cycle appeared first on The Texas Observer.

In September, tech industry executives in freshly pressed suits watched as about 50 locals protested outside the downtown Austin Marriott hotel, where the suits had gathered for an annual conference focused on the artificial intelligence data center build-out. 

With chants of “We need clean water, data centers make us hotter,” the protest was emblematic of one of the most pressing issues industry leaders had gathered there to address: the problem of what they called the “Not in My Backyard” backlash to the data center boom.

But it wasn’t just data center developers who were worried about the backlash. Leaders of the state’s nascent nuclear energy sector also expressed alarm over how popular opposition to AI and the disruptive infrastructure that fuels it might impact the public’s perception of the state’s distinct but related nuclear renaissance.

One panel moderator asked nuclear industry leaders what they were getting right and wrong about commercialization of new reactor designs in today’s political context, specifically alluding to the protest outside the hotel.

Brian Gitt, head of business development at the nuclear startup Oklo, a publicly traded, California-based company focused on bringing novel microreactors to market, skirted the matter of community relations in his answer, focusing instead on regulation and licensing. Gitt avoided the issue again when the Texas Observer approached him afterward, offering a connection with the firm’s official spokesperson rather than answer questions related to Oklo’s controversial piloting of an experimental reactor in one rural Texas community’s backyard.

Oklo quietly hit a key milestone in its business plan on August 6, conducting the first startup of its “Groves” microreactor—one among a fleet of innovative models for cleanly generating steam (and thus, power) through nuclear fission—in Caldwell County, the heart of Texas barbecue country. Oklo’s reactor, consisting of a cylindrical metal core small enough to fit in a shipping container and buried belowground, is situated at the site of a technology hub dubbed by its tech-bro founders “Proto-Town,” a ranch near Lockhart designed to host space for everything from reverse osmosis water desalination to next-generation air conditioners. It’s part of an ongoing Silicon Valley invasion of once-quiet patches of Central Texas beyond the outskirts of Austin.

(Illustrations by Dave Maupin)

The Oklo microreactor at Proto-Town exemplifies the kind of slimmer, shippable design that nuclear startups are hoping will be market-ready by 2030. Promoters say that smaller, standardized power generators like these not only offer billions in savings over the hulking, Homer Simpson-style nuke plants of yore but also reduce risks of a catastrophic meltdown by using cutting-edge fuels and cooling techniques. 

After decades of stigma, these startups—responding to increased interest in the technology’s ability to provide 24-7 carbon-free power—have followed the AI data center boom to Texas. The state’s grid operator projects data centers could quadruple the state’s energy demand by 2032, and Governor Greg Abbott’s August directive to audit new data center grid connection requests may slow, but not halt, that growth. Nuclear startups are hoping to fill a significant portion of the new demand: Deloitte estimates that nuclear firms could meet as much as 10 percent of new data center demand nationally by 2035.

While Groves isn’t powering any of Caldwell’s four proposed data center developments, its test run lays the groundwork for future commercial reactors, and it proves to tech giants like Google that Oklo can provide rapidly dispatchable power for energy-hungry server farms by demonstrating how quickly the firm can achieve “criticality,” or initial start up.

Oklo’s reactor is one of about a dozen that received a federal green light under a new U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) program designed to fast-track just these kinds of pilot tests. President Donald Trump authorized the program in a series of executive orders designed to speed up nuclear licensing and approvals to meet data centers’ enormous energy demands.

Those May 2025 orders slashed Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff, initiated a rewrite of at least 27 NRC rules, and broadened the DOE’s role. Previously, the DOE’s regulatory authority had been limited to nuclear weapons-related research reactors on military bases. While the NRC will continue to license and approve commercial reactors, Trump’s orders created a DOE fast track for experimental designs under pared-down regulations.

Abbott has jumped on Trump’s nuclear bandwagon—a turnaround from his 2020 opposition to one firm’s bid to store spent nuclear fuel rods in West Texas. Just three years later, Abbott established a working group to study microreactor development. The group recommended creating a nonregulatory agency to support the industry in November 2025, and the Texas Advanced Nuclear Energy Office began distributing $350 million in public grants this fall.

Now, as startups rush to prove their models to investors in rural counties like Caldwell, the firms are generating some of the same grassroots resistance that sparked Abbott’s statewide data center audit as well as city-level bans and short-lived county-level moratoriums against the centers in places like San Marcos and Hill County.

That much is apparent to the industry itself. As Constellation Energy’s Bob Kinscherf put it during the panel featuring Oklo’s Gitt, “It’s hard enough to get a data center sited, then say, ‘Oh, by the way, there’s going to be a nuclear reactor there too.’”

That’s very much the case in Caldwell. Lockhart resident and local data center opponent Bonnie Marshall started Lockhart Nuke Watch in May to watchdog Groves. She began meeting with Oklo representatives and county officials to raise concerns about the microreactor’s lack of what she considers an adequate containment structure, as well as the firm’s plan to store radioactive spent fuel on-site before transferring it elsewhere. She wants Oklo to train the county’s local volunteer firefighters, pay for the necessary specialized equipment, and hold a town hall about public safety. 

“My purpose is not to be anti-nuclear or even anti-Oklo. My purpose is just that they’ve been so secret,” Marshall told the Observer. 

According to records obtained by the Observer, Oklo’s emergency plan for Groves states that no significant planning is needed for a radioactive leak, largely due to the fact that its test runs are generating only about 100 watts of power—around that of a light bulb. While the plan designates a radiation safety officer and indicates that local first responders would participate in on-site evacuation drills, it doesn’t explain whether those drills include containment efforts or whether the facility itself is prepared with hazmat suits.

Oklo spokesperson Bonita Chester told the Observer that “if abnormal radiological conditions were detected, personnel would secure the affected area, protect workers, assess conditions, and make the required notifications.” She also confirmed to the Observer that while the facility has personal protective equipment and anti-contamination clothing, hazmat suits “are not identified as necessary for the anticipated on-site response.” While Chester said the firm has met with residents and businesses and visited schools and nonprofits in Caldwell, she declined to confirm whether the firm has already held drills or if it would hold a meeting to address public safety concerns.

Nuclear watchdogs have raised other concerns about Oklo’s fast-tracked tests. Nuclear Information & Resource Service (NIRS) Executive Director Tim Judson pointed out that Groves’ August 2025 DOE green light came three years after the NRC denied a separate Oklo application for a license to operate a microreactor at the Idaho National Laboratory, on the basis that the firm hadn’t provided enough safety information. Despite NIRS’ concerns, Oklo’s Idaho project was approved by the DOE in August 2025. 

In an April interview, Judson characterized nuclear startups’ claims of inherent safety as largely baseless. While microreactor impact radiuses may be small, Judson warned that radioactive contamination can drift with the wind. Moreover, microreactors rely on uranium fuel often mined on or near national monuments and Indigenous lands and produce radioactive waste. Many do not have any reinforced containment structure beyond the metal vessels enclosing their reactor cores and the surrounding housing, and none have been tested under the real-world disaster conditions they’re likely to face. 

He also pointed to a radioactive release in 1986 at a smaller prototype reactor in Germany after fuel lodged in its suction hopper. That event was largely overshadowed by the Chernobyl meltdown that same year—a catastrophe that killed 20 people, poisoned thousands, and forced the relocation of 200,000 people from what is now a radioactive exclusion zone in Ukraine. It was Chernobyl, together with the earlier 1979 Three Mile Island accident, that turned Americans against nuclear power for generations.

After Three Mile Island, new commercial nuclear plants in the United States ground to a halt for a decade, picking up briefly in the late ’80s before another two-decade lull. Amid growing demand for an always-on, carbon-free source of energy in the face of worsening climate impacts, interest in nuclear energy slowly picked up again, though meltdowns at a nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011 forced the evacuations of 100,000 people and once again gave the fuel source a black mark. 

In need of a rebrand, industry leaders began to promote microreactors—comparatively small devices incapable of turning, say, Austin into another Chernobyl. Trump’s executive orders turbocharged the shift: With just three commercial reactors coming online in the United States in the past decade, the NRC now expects to review more than 30 new license requests from microreactor startups—the equivalent of light speed for the industry. 

“There’s also a way in which [microreactors play] into the cultural wars around renewable energy—for Republicans to be able to say they’ve got an alternative that isn’t [wind and solar],” Judson said. “The irony of which is that, as you know, in Texas, renewable energy is growing by leaps and bounds.”

Politics aside, nuclear power could play a role in addressing the climate crisis, strategically replacing fracked gas power plants until solar, wind, and battery storage can meet demand and provide a form of backup power in case of shortages. But, rather than partnering with independent regulators to demonstrate to a new generation of Americans that its technology is safe, the industry has so far advocated for gutting federal regulation to rapidly sell its model to AI data centers—an association that not only further jeopardizes the industry’s credibility but inflames the very climate crisis nuclear startups say they hope to mitigate.

On an overcast day in mid-June, I climbed into Diane Wilson’s white pickup parked outside the civic center of her 1,200-person coastal hometown, Seadrift, to visit the site of a proposed nuclear project a few miles northwest. Blue and red lights flashed behind us as we headed up State Highway 185. Wilson pulled over to the shoulder. 

Her face obscured by a ball cap and sunglasses, Police Chief Cheyenne Beaver   told Wilson, 78, she was being stopped for an expired registration. Beaver requested proof of insurance, and when Wilson went for her phone, she discovered she’d accidentally left it back at the civic center, telling Beaver she’d intended to invite her to the nuclear safety “People’s Conference” that Wilson had just hosted there. Beaver ran Wilson’s plates, found her insurance up-to-date, and let her off with a warning.

That might be in part due to who Wilson is. The activist and former shrimp boat captain, whose silver curls frame a resolute face, is known around the world for her decades-long campaign against a Taiwanese petrochemical company. In 2019, the firm buckled under Wilson’s Clean Water Act suit, settling with her for $50 million and agreeing to stop releasing waste from its Texas plant after Wilson and her organization collected more than 30 million of its plastic pellets, or “nurdles,” in local waters. She later won one of the most prestigious awards for environmental activism, the Goldman Environmental Prize, in 2023. Locally, she’s long been known as an eccentric crusader for environmental justice—an “Unreasonable Woman,” as her 2006 memoir title declares.

When we arrived at Dow Chemical’s 4,700-acre Seadrift facility, Wilson hopped out to show me the open field where one of North America’s largest chemical manufacturers, in partnership with the Maryland-based startup X-energy, hopes to build four 80-megawatt nuclear energy reactors to power its plastic-producing chemical complex. An idled train snaked along both the field and the road, obscuring most of the site where Dow’s new nuclear plant will be—if Wilson’s challenge to its NRC construction permit fails, that is.

Back in March, I reached Wilson as she camped out in a ditch beside the train tracks on the 16th day of a monthlong hunger strike, train blasts disrupting our connection every few minutes. In June, she showed me the spot where she’d camped out, leaving just twice to attempt to hand-deliver her “No Nukes, No Nurdles” demands to Dow, spending a night in Calhoun County Jail after her second attempt.

Dow, through its subsidiary Union Carbide, announced it had selected this site for its nuclear plant in May 2023—one day after Calhoun County granted the company a 10-year tax abatement in exchange for $4 million in onetime fees. (Based on the plant’s estimated cost, the tax abatement appears to generate a savings of as much as $82 million over the 10-year period.) While the project’s construction application is currently under NRC review, X-energy has already received $80 million in public subsidies through a separate DOE initiative. 

Flush with $200,000 in Goldman Prize money, Wilson hired Austin-based attorney Marisa Perales to represent Wilson’s nonprofit, San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper, in a legal intervention to try to stop the reactors. Their August 2025 intervention became the first such challenge to a modern microreactor in the United States. 

The nonprofit’s safety argument relies on an affidavit submitted by nuclear physicist Edwin Lyman, who argues that the proposed design is unproven in the event of a catastrophe. 

Before Wilson and I headed out to Dow’s Seadrift facility to see the planned nuclear site, she and about 30 others at the civic center listened intently as Lyman presented on the company’s so-called pebble-bed design, as part of the nuclear safety conference.

Lyman, speaking remotely from Washington, D.C., described the reactor as akin to a gumball machine in which 220,000 graphite “pebbles” the size of billiard balls are constantly bouncing around. The balls contain as many as 19,000 tiny particles of radioactive uranium fuel, and their collisions are what create the fission reaction that generates energy. Spent pebbles are discharged from the bottom of the reactor, and new ones are loaded into the top. 

X-energy CEO J. Clay Sell has claimed this design is meltdown-proof because the balls’ coating will withstand temperatures up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The DOE calls it “the most robust nuclear fuel on earth.” Sell and dozens of nuclear developers are hoping to cut costs by relying on these “self-containing” pebbles to do the same work that reinforced lead and concrete containment barriers do for large reactors.

But Lyman contends that, since there’s no way to individually test the billions of balls that would need to be produced, mass manufacturing could render a significant portion defective. Moreover, earthquakes, fires, and floods could compromise a reactor’s cooling system, effectively melting the pebbles and releasing toxic radiation.

Administrative law judges from the NRC rejected Waterkeepers’ claims in June about the project—which has been handled by a Dow subsidiary, Long Mott Energy LLC—including striking the nonprofit’s contention about inadequate containment on a technicality. The group filed an administrative appeal.

Wilson points to Winter Storm Uri in 2021, which caused an automatic shutdown about 65 miles northeast of Seadrift at the South Texas Project, one of the state’s two large nuclear plants, both of which began construction in the mid-’70s. As that storm showed, freak events driven by climate change could threaten reactors in ways the firm can’t necessarily predict. 

Wilson also simply doesn’t trust Dow or Union Carbide, which became a Dow subsidiary in 2001. A decade before that acquisition, an explosion at Union Carbide’s chemical facility in Seadrift—the same site where the reactors are planned—killed one worker and injured 26 others, leading the firm to pay the Occupational Safety and Health Administration a $1.5 million fine. Seven years prior to that, a company in which Union Carbide held majority ownership was responsible for the worst industrial accident in the history of the globe: a horrific gas leak that killed up to 16,000 people in Bhopal, India.

Neither Dow, X-energy, nor the firms’ attorneys responded to the Observer’s requests for comment about the ongoing intervention or concerns regarding the firms’ safety records. 

Wilson opposes Dow’s reactors not only because of safety risks but because they would power the very plastic and chemical pollution that she has fought for years. Like other environmental justice activists who convened at the June safety conference, she opposes both AI data centers and nuclear energy in any form. Wilson and her allies argue that nuclear reactors are actively displacing forms of renewable energy that they do want to see.

John Daniel was there when Wilson was arrested outside Dow’s office in March. A 65-year-old retired plant worker, Daniel said he left Dow’s Freeport plant after the firm froze his pension following 22 years as a technician. He and his two sons grow corn and run cattle on 450 acres just a mile away from Dow’s proposed reactor site, and he told the Observer the reactors have pushed out other clean energy projects in the area. 

Daniel said he signed a five-year contract in 2021 to lease a portion of his land for a $100 million battery storage operation crucial to making solar and wind energy available when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing—the very “reliability” factor both Republicans and Democrats have pointed at to revive the nuclear industry. But once the Calhoun County reactor plans became known, local electric utilities began restricting other energy projects that would place additional burdens on the local grid, and Daniel lost a project that would have earned him and his family $150,000 a year. “They’re just punting green energy down the road,” he told the Observer.

At the June conference in Seadrift, Joseph Napolitano stood to share his thoughts about local residents’ struggle against another nuclear reactor project, planned roughly 20 miles north at the Port of Victoria—this one linked directly to a local data center development. 

“This is a real tipping point time in America, right? Because people are fed up with what’s going on. The AI data centers are galvanizing bipartisan [opposition],” he told Wilson and four others on a panel.

As of late September, Victoria County commissioners were weighing whether to grant Maryland-based startup Blue Energy a tax abatement for its $6.5 billion nuclear power plant. The 2.5-gigawatt plant, which will sell power to the Denver-based firm Crusoe’s 1,600-acre AI data center in neighboring Calhoun County, plans to use desalinated water from a deepwater aquifer and send whatever power may be left over back to the grid. 

Napolitano is working with Wilson to slow a governmental permit application to the Army Corps of Engineers for dredging a section of the Victoria Barge Canal, which would benefit the Blue Energy project by allowing more and larger vessels to transport materials the project needs directly to its shipyard.

He’s banded together with other locals to canvass neighborhoods close to the reactor development in the 1,900-person town of Bloomington, created email lists, and held meetings to urge residents to pressure their commissioners to reject Blue Energy’s bid for a tax break.

While the company’s design isn’t novel, the startup is touting a fast-paced gas-to-nuclear approach consisting of a fracked gas power plant that the firm hopes to replace with five nuclear microreactors built in subsequent phases. 

Despite its plans to transition, Blue Energy’s abatement application notes that its gas turbine will “continue to operate” after its first nuclear reactor comes online, and its gas supplier’s contracts run through 2031—locking in those greenhouse gas emissions for at least another five years.

Blue Energy spokesperson Eben Burnham-Snyder told the Observer that while the NRC has granted the project a partial license for its non-nuclear components, the firm is still in the pre-application phase. He noted that a local emergency preparedness and response plan will be required under the process and the company planned to hold an “open house” where local residents could ask questions.

Speaking to an audience of industry insiders at a Houston summit in March, Blue Energy CEO Jake Jurewicz stressed that his goal is a carbon-free source of energy. “There’s probably nothing more existential right now to the [AI] hyperscalers and to our global economy than finding a way to provide a firm-capacity, long-term, zero-carbon resource that can meet our growing energy demands as an economy,” he said. 

Oklo also has at least two contracts with fracked gas companies. Both Oklo and Blue Energy’s gas contracts show how the ostensibly clean nuclear energy industry is, in practice, still relying on fossil fuels. Judson of the NIRS criticized that practice as “greenwashing.” 

He and other critics say that by rushing to power the AI hyperscalers’ data center build-out, the industry is forsaking the chance to develop cleaner models that might compete with fracked gas as an alternative bridge to a carbon-free future and win over an already-skeptical public.

Napolitano’s opposition to Blue Energy’s project is emblematic of how next-generation nuclear startups are squandering trust, in part by tying themselves so closely to the data center boom. After all, it’s Crusoe’s data center, not Blue Energy’s nuclear plant, that Napolitano says he’s focused on defeating—not just because of concerns about its water and energy consumption but also about the kinds of mass surveillance tools the data center might enable. (Data centers empower tools such as controversial Flock license plate readers.)

“We don’t have a stance on being for or against this form of energy,” he told the Observer. “Our strategy is to slow down the Blue Energy development or stop it, because without Blue Energy and the power they provide, they’re not going to be able to build the AI data center.”

Back in Caldwell County, Marshall’s push for a community town hall with Oklo officials was just ramping up when she was blindsided by the discovery of a second nuclear energy-related site nearby. 

Austin-based Aalo Atomic’s testing site, just 11 miles northeast of Oklo’s Groves reactor, required no federal approval from the DOE or NRC, since the firm wasn’t building a reactor there. It just planned to test a reactor coolant—liquid sodium metal—for use at its microreactor pilot site at Texas A&M University’s campus in Bryan. 

Marshall soon linked up with nearby residents, including Mary Lynn Seay and Stephanie Johnson, who, after learning that liquid sodium metal explodes on contact with air or water, similarly wanted Aalo to host a town hall with the community about the potential dangers. 

In late July, I met Aalo spokesperson Jared Hoffman for a walk-through of the firm’s separate Austin factory site, where he explained that a “closed-loop system” would keep the coolant testing process safe. 

During the tour, I asked him to respond to critics concerned about the Trump administration’s rapid rewrite of NRC rules. In his view, the former NRC process was onerously slow and burdensome for the industry—perhaps the main reason, in addition to the public’s memory of decades-old disasters, that the development of nuclear reactors stalled out for so many years. 

“The nuclear industry’s been regulated at 5 miles per hour,” he said. “They’re raising it to, like, 8 miles per hour, and people are like, ‘How dare you guys?’” 

Down in Caldwell, Seay discovered Aalo lacked permits for a commercial well and septic system at its testing site. She called code enforcement, but when I visited on July 10, weeks after the county ordered Aalo to halt construction, workers were still boring a water well.

But that soon changed. In August, Hoffman confirmed to the Observer that the company had abandoned the testing site altogether following the resistance from residents. 

Johnson holds one of her chickens on her farm in July. (Jordan Vonderhaar/Texas Observer)

This pattern of pushback appears to be repeating itself across the state, delaying or imperiling projects the world may very well need. As long as firms like Aalo and Oklo remain more committed to their data center buyers than to directly addressing the concerns of the rural communities they’re moving into, the data center backlash could become the nuclear industry’s twin fate.

Present-day Texas is far from a clean energy future, and solar and wind alone might not be enough to get us there. After half a century of stigma, the nuclear industry has a newfound opportunity to help, but will it sacrifice its chance at the altar of a climate-warming AI revolution that Texans have largely rejected?

Editor’s Note: This story was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. 

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