Dancing with an Oppenheimer at the Nuclear Rave

Dressed in their rave finest – a striped Bebe dress, a matching bra and pants, and black fluffy boots – Lydia Fife, 21, a movie theater employee, and her friend Maya Williams, a 19-year-old jobseeker, said they came for the dance, not the agenda. They heard about it through Instagram, said Williams, who thought it sounded random. “I honestly know nothing about nuclear power. I’m completely uneducated,” she said. 

But Fife has concerns. She said she’d seen the film “Oppenheimer,” and it gave her chills. “I’m definitely scared that someone could do irreversible damage,” she said, noting J. Robert Oppenheimer, grandfather of the event’s organizer. “Nuclear shouldn’t exist. … Like, it’s too powerful.”

That wasn’t exactly the takeaway Pickering was aiming for. His goal is to get California to overturn its 1976 moratorium on building new nuclear power plants until a permanent waste solution is approved. 

“[There] is a conspiracy against nuclear,” he said. “The adults have blown it, [and] the kids deserve to know.”

A rave probably won’t change policy, nor will it remove nuclear power as the “black sheep” of the energy world, as one Climate Week panel referred to it. 

But it might change the vibe. “Kids like to rave,” said Oppenheimer. “Will it change how they feel about nuclear energy? I don’t know.”