Challenging the narrative has become a habit for Diana Michaelson ’27.

A family member who works in education advised her that giving up fossil fuels would be too complex for a large school district to sign onto. 

Still, Michaelson lobbied, organized and negotiated, and eventually her district – Long Beach Unified School District in California – agreed to a plan to transition off of fossil fuels by 2030. 

A high school environmental science teacher skipped a lesson on nuclear energy, dismissing it as “bad.”

But now Michaelson is a founding member of Cornell Nuclear is Clean Energy (NiCE), a student organization that drew 200 attendees and 15 speakers to an on-campus event in December, with support from Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.

“Nuclear is something that I’m very passionate about because we have such a growing energy demand,” Michaelson said, “and I genuinely think it’s the only way to meet our energy goals.”

Nuclear energy is having a moment, according to Shaun Doherty, energy transition and carbon management partnerships lead at Cornell Atkinson. In June 2025, Gov. Kathy Hochul committed to building a new, zero-emission nuclear power plant in Upstate New York, along with other projects designed to catalyze nuclear energy development. The plans are not without controversy, however, and groups like NiCE are working to address public concerns around safety, environmental impact and nuclear waste. 

Renewable energy sources like wind, solar and geothermal are part of the transition away from fossil fuels, Doherty said, but those sources are intermittently available and not dispatchable any time.

“Renewables like wind and solar are essential, but they’re variable,” he said.  “Firm, carbon-free power like nuclear can reduce the amount of excess renewable capacity, storage and transmission needed in a clean grid. Many studies show that including nuclear can lower overall system costs while improving reliability.”

Industry professionals have embraced the Cornell group. 

Grace Stanke, Miss America 2023 and a nuclear engineer at Constellation Energy, gave the keynote at the December symposium. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and Nuclear New York invited the group to symposia in Syracuse and New York City. This semester, a representative of the U.S. Department of Energy, an environmental transaction lawyer from Pillsbury and a nuclear physician have spoken to the group on a wide range of topics as part of its virtual biweekly speaker series.

“These are busy, important people who have decided that it’s worth their time to talk to Cornell students,” said the group’s faculty adviser Jack Hare, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in Cornell Duffield Engineering, “which I think shows how important the next generation is to the nuclear industry.”

Michaelson’s childhood in Long Beach inspired her environmental activism. She said that for those who live along the heavily trafficked Interstate 710, which runs to and from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, life expectancy drops 10 years. “Rates of asthma, diabetes and heart disease soared, simply because of the ZIP codes of these individuals,” she said.

As she came to see the connection between environmental health and human health, she turned to her school district, one of the largest in California, as a place where she might be able to make a difference.

“I definitely had no clue what I was doing going in,” she said. “I genuinely thought, oh, we’ll just present the school board this piece of paper, and they’ll sign on. They’ll say, ‘Yay, go green. This is awesome.’”

The process took two years. She attended every school board meeting, organized petitions, and held a climate rally and a town hall event.

Working with the school board and the district, she helped craft a carefully worded transition plan. Now with NiCE, she is bringing the lessons she learned about the persistence needed to inch policy change forward to nuclear energy. 

She came to Cornell to study health care policy in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, but she still wanted to pursue environmental advocacy. A friend who was part of the University of California, Berkeley’s NiCE organization told her about nuclear energy over lunch.

“It was really interesting because I had never heard positive things about nuclear energy,” she said.

Back at Cornell, she connected with Carson Appel ’27, a public policy major in the Brooks School and Juliette Tonnel ’28, a materials science engineering major in the Cornell David A. Duffield College of Engineering. Together, they founded Cornell’s NiCE chapter. Forty students attended their first meeting in August.

 “It was incredible,” Michaelson said. “There’s a huge generation gap. I mean, my mom, when I was telling her about this, was pretty skeptical. My grandmother was skeptical. My grandparents grew up in the Soviet Union. Chernobyl was a big deal for them.”

The students see opportunity in nuclear, though. The present-day safety record of nuclear is good when compared with coal power plants and the risks of climate change, Michaelson said.

The group advocates for nuclear energy generation, as well as nuclear applications in other industries, including medicine and aerospace. Tonnel is interested in pursuing a career in nuclear technology, possibly in its applications in space.

“All I know is that nuclear energy is going to be really important, whether it’s for the environment or whether it’s for space exploration,” she said. “Nuclear energy is either going to save our planet or it’s going to help us to escape it.”

The group has attracted members from multiple schools, reflecting nuclear’s broad application and impact.

“Nuclear power is a multidisciplinary issue,” Tonnel said. “We don’t just need engineering designs. We need the policies to go along with them.”