New season of Closing the Gap podcast explores the history and future of nuclear energy
August 27, 2026
The podcast returns this fall with a special 10-part series exploring the history, science and future of nuclear energy — one of the world’s most promising, controversial and misunderstood technologies.
The series premiers in late September. Check out the for the series, where host Gwen Holdmann and producers Jennifer Pemberton and Tony Williams spent the past several months reporting across North America and Europe to trace the story of the atom — from ancient uranium deposits buried deep within the Earth to the newest generation of reactor designs.
The series will take listeners to Marie Curie’s perfectly preserved laboratory in France, to a new nuclear waste repository in Finland designed to withstand an ice age and to a uranium boomtown in Utah that never quite went bust.
“The development of nuclear energy has had a lot of peaks and valleys,” said Holdmann. “It seems like we’re headed into an upswing, and if we’re going to get it right this time, we need to understand the history and learn from the lessons this powerful technology has already taught us.”
to Closing the Gap with Gwen Holdmann so the special nuclear series appears in your podcast feed when it launches this fall.
Contact Pemberton at jcpemberton@alaska.edu with any questions.