On May 20, 2022, operators at the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan permanently shut down its reactor. By August 2026, workers were placing fuel back into the same reactor.

The intervening four years involved changing ownership, substantial government financing, regulatory approvals, extensive equipment inspections, and an unusual reversal of a nuclear plant's retirement.

Palisades was being prepared to become the first American commercial nuclear reactor returned to service after entering decommissioning. As of October 28, 2026, the restart remains incomplete.

A valve stuck open, a light that lied, and a spokesman who could not explain himself. The true story of Three Mile Island, 1979: the meltdown that was an engineering failure, and the communication failure that froze American nuclear power for thirty years.

This episode examines a disaster that never happened: the 2024 Hong Kong film Cesium Fallout.

A recycling yard fire. A sealed cesium source. A storm carrying contamination across Hong Kong. None of it happened — but the film asks us to believe it could. So Morgan investigates it the way she investigates any other disaster: narrating the story, then fact-checking it at every point where it departs from reality. The poster fireball that physics won't allow. The magnesium. The Goiânia comparison. And a three-part verdict: was the accident plausible, were the consequences justified, and were the institutional failures credible?