A PUSH FROM Gov. Maura Healey to expand nuclear power in the state is taking nascent steps forward and stirring debate around how Massachusetts should contend with the Trump administration’s opposition to wind power, which not long ago was the pillar of the state’s clean energy transition.

But, as the courts sort through the federal government’s rollback of wind permits along the eastern seaboard, the governor’s embrace of nuclear has resurfaced the fraught political and policy calculus surrounding this contentious energy source that is now seeing a resurgence of bipartisan support across the country.

And new findings released last week from Healey’s nuclear roadmap working group are giving officials reason to believe that there could be budding buy-in from the public, too, said Sukesh Aghara, director for UMass-Lowell’s nuclear engineering and science program who is leading the roadmap initiative.

“I thought there was going to be a big, giant valley in the middle,” Aghara said following four months of stakeholder meetings with more than 1,000 people. “There’s all these pro nuclear guys, and there’s going to be all of these anti-nuclear people. And honestly, it’s like 50 shades of gray. There are a lot of curious people who genuinely want to have a conversation.”

In the hunt for the right mix of power sources that can both quell soaring electricity prices and meet rising demand, Healey is looking to squeeze out every last electron possible. Part of the push to lay the groundwork for a rebound of nuclear power in the future — after the energy source declined in the US following a wave of plant retirements — is about planning now to avoid getting stuck with stagnant energy supply and surge pricing in a decade.

The governor filed a proposal last May that’s now moving through the Legislature to get a 44-year-old state law off the books that makes it harder for new nuclear projects to break ground. Her administration is also looking into procuring nuclear energy, which already contributes about 20 percent of the region’s power supply, from a large facility in Connecticut. And her nuclear roadmap initiative is planning to release a full report in the coming months examining the possibilities for a nuclear renaissance in the Bay State.

“I’m a kid who grew up in the shadow of Seabrook nuclear power plant,” Healey told lawmakers last month at her budget proposal, referencing the New Hampshire nuclear power plant, one of two in the region. “In the aftermath of Three Mile Island, I understand people’s visceral response and concern about nuclear power. I also know that technologies evolve,” adding that new nuclear generation could both cut emissions and produce more energy. “We should be exploring all of these things and supporting all of these things.”

The argument for nuclear is, in some ways, simple. Fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas pollute the atmosphere, drive climate change, and are subject to volatile pricing, while solar and wind power are intermittent sources when not backed by battery storage. Nuclear energy takes the best of both: It doesn’t generate greenhouse gas emissions and reliably produces power.

But it’s no slam dunk either. Building new nuclear facilities is notoriously expensive and time-consuming. New technologies are unproven at scale. And questions still linger about the public’s appetite to accept more nuclear power, since disasters like Three Mile Island remain seared in some Americans’ minds, and the US still has not figured out a coordinated system for dealing with the radioactive waste that’s produced.

The costs and timelines involved in building a new nuclear generation facility suggest that any expansion is more of a longer term play than one meant to quickly alleviate short-term supply pressures.

Pursuing new nuclear projects that run over budget risks sticking ratepayers with an even bigger bill. Energy watchers point to the Vogtle nuclear plant expansion in Georgia, which started operating in 2023 as the first new reactors built in the US in decades — and it came seven years late and $17 billion over budget, driving up consumers’ utility bills.

“Nuclear is a critical component of the grid overall, but a resource that, going back 10 years, faced real economic challenges, and certainly as we look forward, there’s real uncertainty about expanding and growing that large baseload carbon-free power,” said Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association.

Because new nuclear plants are so expensive and would have been politically unpalatable in the past, policymakers have largely focused on keeping existing nuclear facilities open, including the two currently operating in New England — Millstone in Connecticut and Seabrook in New Hampshire. Hopes of new so-called small modular nuclear reactors, which could be built quicker and produce roughly one-third the power of a traditional plant, are seen as a potential solution because they need less land and can be prefabricated, but they remain untested.

“We have to be clear eyed on the costs and timelines for new nuclear,” Dolan said. “When it comes to small modular reactors or other smaller distributed advanced nuclear technologies, those are first of its kind technologies we have not seen built at any meaningful number in the world. I don’t see them coming in anytime in the next decade.”

But while concerns about the price tag are real, Ben Downing, the incoming head of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, said in an interview that they shouldn’t outweigh the potential energy supply, economic, and climate benefits that new nuclear technologies can offer.

“Timelines and cost is a universal thing when it comes to energy infrastructure, and in particular in renewables,” said Downing, who currently serves as chief growth officer at MIT’s The Engine, a hub for climate tech companies. “The biggest impediment to getting more clean energy developed on the grid in Massachusetts is interconnection. I’m excited to be a part of [working to] expedite those processes internally so we can get more of those technologies out there.”

Some environmental groups are fighting an expansion of nuclear power and the underlying argument that it’s a climate-friendly source of energy given the radioactive waste that’s created as a byproduct.

Massachusetts is already seeing how contentious that end of life process can be as it decommissions the Pilgrim nuclear facility in Plymouth, which closed in 2019. As attorney general, Healey raised serious safety concerns about the Pilgrim facility and challenged Holtec’s bid to lead the decommissioning process.

State regulators have been locked in a battle with Holtec, the company that did ultimately take charge of the decommissioning, over its plan to dispose of more than a million gallons of wastewater. Holtec applied for a permit to dump the water into Cape Cod Bay, but that request was denied in 2024 and the company’s subsequent appeal was unsuccessful. (Roughly 200,000 gallons of the wastewater stored at the Pilgrim facility have now evaporated into the atmosphere.)

Patrick O’Brien, a spokesperson for Holtec, said it will take the company until 2035 to complete the decommissioning — eight years longer than planned. Debate over how Holtec has handled the wastewater issue has sunk the state’s Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel into deep division, said Andrew Gottlieb, who sits on the panel and serves as executive director of the Association to Preserve Cape Cod.

“It’s really not going well,” Gottlieb said. “This is the singular most unpleasant public process I’ve ever been involved in. The panel is hopelessly divided among people for whom Holtec can do no wrong, and those of us who view their activities with, I think, a healthy degree of skepticism. There’s just no bridge.”

Meanwhile, the radioactive fuel that powered the nuclear facility is currently being stored in large steel and concrete containers, which reflects the reality that there is “no functioning, long-term strategy for nuclear waste disposal in the US,” said Jim Hamilton, executive director of the nonprofit The Nuclear Decommissioning Collaborative.

The struggle over how to handle the waste at the Pilgrim site is exposing the tradeoffs of any future that portends a larger role for nuclear power, particularly for the communities living near reactors.

“There’s no free lunch anywhere,” Hamilton said.

Mass Power Forward, a large coalition of environmental groups including Acadia Center, Conservation Law Foundation, and Sierra Club Massachusetts, argues in its platform that the state needs to reduce “our dependence on polluting energy sources such as coal, oil, gas, large hydroelectric generation, and nuclear power.”

That’s at odds with a change lawmakers made in the 2024 climate law, which classified nuclear energy as a clean source of power.

Claire Karl Muller, a co-facilitator at Mass Power Forward who grew up in Duxbury near the Pilgrim plant, said their skepticism over nuclear power is rooted in concern over the lack of a plan for how to handle the waste that’s produced, the mining of the uranium to generate the energy in the first place, and the radioactive leaks that have occurred in the past. (An investigation from the Associated Press found that such leaks have occurred at three-quarters of commercial nuclear power sites in the US.)

“We’re still barking up that tree when we haven’t yet put a solar panel on every eligible roof in Massachusetts. We haven’t pulled out all the stops on energy efficiency,” Muller said. “Why are you spending time and energy going there when the stuff we already know how to do is far from being exhausted?”

But as states like Massachusetts grapple with high energy prices, the Trump administration’s crackdown on offshore wind, and ambitious climate commitments creeping closer, nuclear as a zero-carbon baseload source of power is falling more into favor. The region’s grid operator projects a roughly 2 percent annual increase in net electricity use over the next decade, and the Trump administration wants to quadruple US nuclear capacity by 2050.

Healey’s search for energy answers comes as residents are reeling from spiking utility bills. Energy affordability has emerged as the leading household concern in Massachusetts, outranking housing, health care, transportation, and groceries, according to a new survey from the Massachusetts Chambers Policy Network.

That survey shows a majority of the 500 respondents support an “all of the above” approach to energy and only support climate goals if it leads to minimal increases in electric and gas bills.

Healey, in her energy affordability legislative package, proposed repealing a 1982 law that requires voters to approve any new nuclear plants through a ballot initiative. The House’s version of the bill, which it passed last month, backed that proposal.

But, Massachusetts may not need to build any new plants to bring more nuclear power into its energy mix. The state’s 2024 climate law, which classified nuclear power as clean, also authorized the Department of Energy Resources to procure nuclear energy through competitive bids in New England.

The Bay State may be gearing up to do exactly that. Susan Adams, a spokesperson for Dominion, which owns the Millstone nuclear plant in Connecticut, confirmed that the company is looking to expand the number of utilities throughout New England that purchase power from Millstone through a procurement process that Connecticut launched in January.

Lauren Diggin, a spokesperson for the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources, said in a statement that Massachusetts will be working with the utilities to review those proposals, which are due by March 17 and “could bring more affordable, clean energy into our state and add reliability to our electric grid in the winter months.”

Still, moves to shore up the region’s existing nuclear power is one thing. Expanding beyond that is quite another — and the jury is still out.

“We’ve got to be looking at everything. That’s not misguided,” Francis Pullaro, president of RENEW Northeast, a nonprofit that advocates for renewable energy, said of the push for nuclear power. “But we should not be giving consumers any idea that somehow this is going to come online in a couple years and reduce rates by anything.”