Arco, Idaho is among the small towns near Idaho National Laboratory with a decades-long nuclear energy legacy.Hanna Merzbach hide caption People still smoke indoors at the bar in Atomic City, Idaho, population 52.
The walls are plastered with one dollar bills and a Don't Tread On Me flag."Where were you Monday?" bar and nearby race track owner Vickie O'Haro asks one of her regulars.O'Haro knows her customers orders without asking: cold beers or shots called atomic bombs — fitting since most of her customers work down the road at Idaho National Laboratory, or INL, America's nuclear energy testgrounds since 1949.A March Gallup poll shows a majority of Americans still oppose a nuclear energy plant in their area, but that's not the case here" I live 10 miles away, and I'm fine," O'Haro said."I'm not glowing in the dark, you know? There's nothing to be scared of." Vickie O'Haro stands behind the bar at Atomic City Bar & Store, which she owns, along with Atomic Motor Raceway, on June 8, 2026.
The businesses are located near Idaho National Laboratory.hide caption After stalling out for decades, nuclear power is having a moment.
President Donald Trump fast-tracked new projects, and now a new generation of small nuclear reactors is poised to come online in the next few years.Three companies at INL — and one in central Utah — switched on new types of reactors this summer." I think it's actually pretty cool to be happening in my backyard," O'Haro said.Zoom out and INL is a pretty big backyard.It's 900 square miles of remote, sagebrush-filled high desert, almost the size of Rhode Island.And it's in an unassuming building here that one startup, Deployable Energy, recently took its test reactor "critical." That means it had a sustained chain reaction for the first time, proving the design works an...