Within living memory, the most powerful and organized environmentalists in America advocated for coal plants and nuclear power in order to save wild landscapes from hydroelectric dams. Then environmentalists turned against coal and nuclear, and although nuclear development slowed to a crawl, coal power expanded deep into the new millennium. But with the boom in unconventional natural gas production and restructured electricity markets, coal power plants have seen their market share halved.

Now, carbon emissions have become the biggest concern for policymakers and institutional investors. In an ironic twist, today’s powerful and organized environmentalists see wild spaces as energy development opportunities to be exploited. The rise of wind and solar, combined with steady output from existing nuclear plants and a decade of cheap natural gas, have led the country’s coal power fleet to the edge of closure.

This leads to a serious problem for communities dependent on coal power plants or the mines that feed them. Wind, solar, and gas plants provide almost no jobs once completed, and the construction jobs that wind and solar provide are transient in both time and geography. Communities are built around stable employment and tax revenues, and as coal plants have closed, no other power sources have been able to come in and replace these losses.

Fortunately, the jobs and tax revenues that communities have gotten from hosting coal plants can be provided by nuclear energy. Better yet, many of the disadvantages of coal, like coal ash ponds and local air quality impacts — well-known and more-or-less tolerated by host communities — are solved. As many American towns have come to understand in the last half-century, there are rich advantages gained by being near a nuclear plant. In fact, surveys have shown that the strongest support for nuclear comes from those who live closest to nuclear power plants.

The purpose of this report is to describe the opportunities and challenges in nuclear energy for coal communities facing plant closure. Section One outlines the losses facing coal communities. Section Two explains how nuclear may be able to address some or all of these needs. Section Three characterizes the U.S. coal power plant fleet by location, size, age, and utilization rates. Section Four discusses the implications for communities of hosting nuclear plants. Section Five discusses the implications for state-level policy-makers of a potential coal-to-nuclear transition. The report concludes with practical next steps for interested parties.