Discussions of nuclear energy and the waste it creates usually foreground locations in the American West—the Hanford Site in Washington or Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, for example. This is unfortunate because it misses the region most implicated in the United States’ atomic century. Home to more nuclear reactors than any other part of the country, the American South is “exceptional,” historian Caroline Rose Peyton argues, for not only its long history with nuclear power (engineers enriched uranium for the Manhattan Project at the Clinton Engineer Works at Oak Ridge, Tennessee during World War II) but also its relative openness to the industry, even today (p. 3). Her history of nuclear power in the region corrects the Western bias and reveals how regional and local histories made the South unique.

Peyton first surveys the South’s romance with nuclear power from its beginnings in the 1940s to the construction of commercial reactors for electricity generation in the 1960s and 1970s. In the years following World War II, political leaders hoped to hitch the South’s fortunes to nuclear power’s rising star to attract investment, create jobs, and rid the region of its reputation for backwardness. Academic leaders joined them, hoping to improve the reputation of their universities. When North Carolina State University received approval for its teaching reactor in 1953, it set the pace for other schools in the region. The region’s electric companies, however, were slower to see the need for nuclear-powered generating stations, doing so only after the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced plans to augment its coal-powered and hydroelectric facilities. Southern state governments encouraged them, too, facilitating a building boom that lasted until the late 1970s, when high interest rates and the accident at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island reactor slowed construction nationwide.

After providing a broad overview of the region, Peyton introduces a series of local controversies about nuclear power and nuclear waste to demonstrate the implications for the region and its people. The stories she tells are idiosyncratic and selected “because those controversies generated widespread attention, possessed rich archival records, proved historically significant, and struck a lasting chord” (p. 12). Chapters two and three examine the respective histories of the Grand Gulf Nuclear Station in Mississippi and Louisiana’s Waterford Unit 3 power plant. Chapters four and five turn to the disposal of nuclear waste, first at Kentucky’s Maxey Flats Disposal Site and then at Barnwell, South Carolina. Chapter six, meanwhile, explores the meanings of canceled TVA facilities at Hartsville and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Throughout these chapters, Peyton demonstrates how political leaders followed a familiar pattern of willingness to imperil the quality of life for rural people (Black and white, usually poorer) and the natural environment in their pursuit of the promise of a nuclear future. She also shows that their decisions did not go without protest.

The strength of her approach is its ability to capture how personal these histories were to the people who lived through them. These are not white hat-black hat stories, but complex histories shaped by local experiences. However, this approach at times feels incomplete for telling the story of an entire region. Peyton’s history of the nuclear industry in the South puts the region on the map and will be of great value to scholars. That said, much of the map remains to be filled.