The offer came out of the blue. In 2021, Katy Huff was just 34 and only five years into her faculty career at the University of Illinois when she received what looked like a standard government email. She assumed its senders wanted recommendations of more experienced scientists for a vacant post. Instead, they asked her to lead the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy.

Huff took a leave from Illinois to take on the highstakes role — one that managed billions of dollars in national research programs to keep aging nuclear plants operational, push new reactors toward launch, and accelerate innovations from the lab to reality. Just as essential was communicating the mission to the public.

The perception of nuclear energy has shifted over the decades. In 2024, the Pew Research Center found that 56% of American adults support building more nuclear power plants to generate electricity. They now see nuclear power not as a threat but as a clean, safe solution in the fight against climate change.

“We are facing this incredible existential challenge of the climate crisis,” she said. “The need to build clean energy is so urgent that people who may have previously been wary about nuclear energy have begun to embrace it as a needed source of carbon-free electricity.”

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Powered by questions

It’s a puzzle Huff has been wrestling with since childhood, growing up in a highly intellectual and curious environment where energy topics — like solar and nuclear power — were regular dinner table conversations. Huff and her identical twin sister, Allison Gouch, remember their home in rural Cat Spring, Texas — about an hour from Houston — as being filled with books that opened the world to them.

Their parents, both engineers in Texas’ flourishing energy industry, were always working on mechanical, electrical, and construction projects, often involving the girls from a young age. The family’s 11-acre property was a playground, where they fished, shot clay targets, and encountered wildlife.

“They didn’t shy away from teaching us about solar power, nuclear fusion, or how to fix things with our hands,” Gouch recalled. “There was always something going on — fixing cars, building things, tinkering. Katy had a real aptitude for it.” When Huff and Gouch exhausted the math curriculum at their local high school, they transferred together to the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science for their junior and senior years. There, Huff finally found her intellectual home, surrounded by like-minded peers.

That’s also when she picked up “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes — a sweeping history of nuclear science and its devastating transformation into a weapon of war. She was hooked. That fascination led to an internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the Manhattan Project. But rather than dwell on its destructive legacy, Huff saw something else: the potential for nuclear science to build a cleaner, more sustainable world. She began envisioning a future where she could be part of the solution. For college, she chose the University of Chicago — a legendary hub for nuclear research and a universe away from Cat Spring.

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Second life

By the time Washington called, Huff, her husband, Strom Borman, and their black mutt, Nyx, were settling into the strange new rhythms of pandemic life. After completing her Ph.D. at Wisconsin and a postdoc at Berkeley, she had put down roots at Illinois and was deep into her research, writing software to model and simulate advanced nuclear reactor multiphysics and their fuel cycles. One area of research in her group addresses recycling spent fuel in new nuclear reactors.

“France has done this for almost 40 years now. I stood on top of some of their vitrified waste, which is currently stored in a pristine room the size of a basket- ball court,” Huff said. “Unfortunately, we don’t do it in the United States both because of cost and due to policy concerns about proliferation, meaning the potential for the material to be used in weapons. But I believe those concerns can be addressed.”

Nuclear waste recycling — or reprocessing — is exactly what it sounds like: turning what is considered waste into additional power. Even after fuel rods are deemed “spent,” they still hold valuable energy. Instead of locking that potential away in long-term storage, scientists are working on separating usable materials like uranium from the used rods. These recovered elements can be recycled and reused in next-generation reactors, extracting more energy from the same source.

The benefits are twofold. Recycling reduces the volume and timeline on which the spent fuel rods remain radiotoxic and lessens the demand for freshly mined uranium — a win for sustainability and security in the energy landscape. While in Washington, Huff helped revive a “consent-based” approach to managing spent nuclear fuel, inviting communities into the decision-making process and laying the groundwork for trust and transparency.

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The work comes home

Huff, an optimistic nuclear energy advocate, conveyed these ideas throughout her three years in D.C. Her easygoing, clear communication style made her a relatable messenger. “I think you have to meet people where they are, and the communication strategy leveraged by a lot of the industry in the past missed the mark,” Huff said.

“If the public comes to officials for answers and explanations, they deserve a public official who will answer those questions.” The U.S. Senate had confirmed her with the distinguished title of “The Honorable,” but reclaiming the title of professor, Huff returned to campus without missing a beat. A year after stepping back into academia, she remains fiercely committed to using and expanding nuclear energy and bringing others along with her.