She once blockaded a nuclear submarine at a shipyard. She lived in a tree for a week to
stop a bulldozer. She covered herself in molasses and chained herself outside a bank. By
any measure, Zion Lights was a committed environmental activist, and nuclear power
was the enemy.
Today, she is one of the nuclear industry’s most compelling advocates. Her new book,
Energy Is Life: Why Environmentalism Went Nuclear, is not just a case for clean energy,
it is a manifesto for human agency, abundance, and the idea that giving people more
power, not less, is the path to a better planet.
In a wide-ranging conversation on the Nuclearn.ai podcast, Zion discussed her journey,
her philosophy, and why she believes nuclear energy is nothing less than “Fire 2.0.”
From Scarcity to Abundance
At the heart of Zion’s transformation is a rejection of what she calls “morality scarcity”,
the pervasive ideology embedded in much of the modern environmental movement.
The argument is seductive in its simplicity: humans use too much, so using less is
inherently virtuous. Zion spent years inside that worldview before she started pulling at
its threads.
“It started out with good intentions,” she explained. “But what does it really mean to be
wasteful? Is it wasteful that I have a washing machine instead of spending hours
washing clothes by hand?” The answer, she argues, depends entirely on where your
electricity comes from. If the grid is clean, the question dissolves. The problem was
never abundance, it was dirty energy.
What sharpened this realization most powerfully was not a policy paper or a data set,
but a visit to her parents’ village, four hours by car from the nearest city, down roads
too narrow for a taxi to navigate. She witnessed girls spending entire days collecting
firewood and animal dung to burn on cook stoves. Her family had funded a school
building, furnished it, and advertised for a teacher. No qualified person applied. Nobody
educated wants to live four hours from the nearest hospital.
“Throwing money at this problem doesn’t solve it,” she said. “It’s infrastructure and
development. That is what worked for us, and that is what they need.” Energy is not a
luxury amenity layered on top of civilization. It is the foundation everything else is built
on. The book’s title is not a slogan. It is a literal description.
Nuclear as Fire 2.0
The phrase “Fire 2.0” did not emerge from a marketing meeting. It came from Zion
reading a book about how early humans first encountered fire, probably running
from something struck by lightning, then slowly learning to gather it, tame it, and use it.
That mastery preserved meat, provided warmth, warded off predators, and, because
families gathered around the hearth, gave birth to language and storytelling. It is the
earliest energy technology in human history, and it changed everything.
“Nuclear does that,” Zion told us. “It’s really powerful and life-changing, and it’s clean.
It’s not going to destroy Earth’s atmosphere. It’s not going to give us all respiratory
issues.” Just as those early humans walked toward a burning bush and thrust a stick into
the flames, the scientists who split the atom did something that looked, from the
outside, like madness, and pushed civilization forward.
The analogy also captures the fear. Fire burned people. Nuclear has had accidents. But if
humanity retreated from every technology that caused harm, there would be no space
industry. Columbia and Challenger did not end rocket science. Yet with nuclear, the
stories focused so relentlessly on danger that the world flinched and reached back for
fossil fuels, technology that has caused incomparably more death and damage, just
spread out across a longer timeline and made invisible in daily air.
The Radioactive Banana
When Zion founded Emergency Reactor, the UK’s first pro-nuclear environmental
campaign group, her team took a deliberately disarming approach to public
engagement: they handed out free bananas.
“Would you like a radioactive banana?” she would ask. One man took the banana, heard
the word radioactive, and dropped it in alarm, then looked around, laughed, and asked
what he was missing. Zion’s answer: everything is radioactive. Bananas contain
potassium-40. Background radiation comes from the earth and from space. It is not a
nuclear invention; it is a feature of the universe.
After handing out thousands of bananas across British cities, her team found that
almost universally, fear of nuclear was really fear of radiation, and that fear dissolved
quickly once people understood radiation is natural, ubiquitous, and already part of
their lives. As Zion put it: “If you’re ever exposed to a high amount of radiation, the
likelihood is it’s because someone is trying to save your life.” Radiotherapy. Cancer
scans. The medicine that already saves millions.
The Power of Story
Zion is not just an advocate. She is, at her core, a communicator, a poet who earned a
master’s in science communication, co-edited a magazine, built Extinction Rebellion’s
media machine, and now commands hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok with
videos on deep geological repositories, the water cycle, and how nuclear plants actually
work.
Her most recent TikTok series, answering a list of questions an Australian woman
posted as a joke, was watched five million times in three days. The comments filled
with requests: explain how Bluetooth works, how does a CD player work, what about
DVDs? People are hungry for knowledge. They just need it delivered as a story, not a
lecture.
“I get asked to talk about reactors and kilowatts per hour,” she said. “And I think: who is
that convincing?” Her benchmark for good science communication is whether it could work
as an East Enders storyline, if a viewer couldn’t watch and think ‘yes, I get it’, the
communicator is not doing it right. She is also clear-eyed about what the industry
has missed: “I’ve never seen a positive depiction of a nuclear worker anywhere, ever.”
Not in film, not in television, not in science fiction. The only widely known cultural
portrayal is Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. That is not a communications failure. That is
decades of ceded ground.
A Movement’s Momentum
Five years ago, Zion received hate mail daily. Shill. Traitor. Industry plant. The backlash
from within the environmental movement for daring to speak positively about nuclear
was relentless. Today, the conversation has shifted faster than almost anyone predicted.
Journalists who wouldn’t touch the topic now cover it. Influencers who feared the
backlash now speak openly. She has briefed French ministers in Paris, addressed the
British Science Festival, and, in one of the more remarkable moments of recent
nuclear advocacy, staged a symbolic wedding between nuclear and renewables at
COP26.
Her closing message was a call for more storytelling, more films, more fiction, more
short-form creativity that imagines the abundant future clean energy makes possible.
“Where is the Isaac Asimov of our time? We have all the tools. The creativity has infinite
possibilities.”
It is a vision that feels entirely consistent with the woman herself: a poet and a
pragmatist, a former activist who changed her mind in public and kept going,
someone who looks at the world not just as it is, but as it could be, if only we gave it
enough energy.