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Mikie Sherrill and nuclear energy

Scene Through the Lens with photographer Tom Gralish.
Workers set up the stage - with a cooling tower backdrop - for a Gov. Mikie Sherrill event at the PSEG Salem and Hope Creek Nuclear Generating Station in Lower Alloways Creek, N.J. She later signed legislation (S3870/A4528) intended to make way for new nuclear energy projects in the Garden State by removing a key permitting hurdle that has created a de facto moratorium on new nuclear power for decades. Read moreTom Gralish / Staff Photographer

I try not to go back to the same well or revisit the same theme or idea when I pick a photo to feature in this column. But it doesn’t always work out that way (See the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the President’s House.)

However, even though I had a gubernatorial photo here just two weeks ago, seeing those plumes billowing from the cooling tower as I drove to cover the governor again this week, I thought about being in elementary school in Mississippi in the 1960s, close enough to Cuba that we practiced hiding under our desks. We watched films like “Atoms for Peace” with a narrator intoning, “The peaceful atom is here now to serve what President Eisenhower has termed the needs rather than the fears of mankind. Nuclear energy isn’t waiting to help people everywhere in some brave new world of the future…”

How could I resist such bright white against a beautiful blue spring sky? Same reason the governor’s people used it as their backdrop.

I did try to make a cloud photo (it’s water vapor — not steam) that wasn’t about the governor. Then, while writing this I went down a nuclear rabbit hole online, reading papers like one by U.S. Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.), on the public relations efforts that was designed to win and maintain popular support for the arms race with positive information on nuclear energy.

Speaking of governors and revisiting, I passed this sign on the Pennsylvania Turnpike while driving to Harrisburg to make pictures for an upcoming story on the anniversary of last year’s arsonist attack at Gov. Josh Shapiro’s mansion.

Looks like I could be going to Virginia for pictures later this month.

Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color: