Story Ideas

Samuel Laurence Foundation Story Ideas shares compelling, evidence-based stories on nuclear safety and environmental health, designed to spark ideas, support reporting, and inform public dialogue.

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Heatwaves and the Energy Crunch: A Dangerous Feedback Loop

California’s summers are getting hotter, and heatwaves are now longer, stronger, and deadlier. As temperatures soar, the demand for electricity spikes, straining the grid and triggering rolling blackouts. This cycle creates a dangerous feedback loop: burning more fossil fuels to stay cool drives the very warming that fuels future heatwaves.

Youth Powering Change: Inside the Climate Tech Classrooms of Tomorrow

In California, where climate change collides daily with droughts, wildfires, and rising seas, a new generation is stepping forward with innovation in hand. Across the state, classrooms are evolving into climate tech incubators, equipping young people not just to understand the crisis, but to engineer solutions.

Sound the Alarm: What Your City Isn’t Telling You About Disaster Risk

We hear of natural disasters in other countries that take more lives because warnings systems don’t exist. We expect better across the United States. But many communities have public alert systems that are often flawed, outdated, and untested.

Mental Health in the Shadow of Disaster

For communities living near high-risk industrial or environmental sites, the threat of disaster is not a distant possibility but a daily reality. The psychological toll of this proximity, a constant, low-grade fear that simmers beneath the surface, is often a forgotten consequence of environmental injustice.

The Price of Living Near Progress: Health Costs of Industry on Marginalized Neighborhood’s

From Protests to Policy: The Environmental Justice Movement Goes Mainstream

For decades, the fight for environmental justice has been waged on a local level, in community centers, at city council meetings, and on the front lines of protests against toxic facilities. This grassroots activism, born from the simple truth that all people deserve a clean and healthy environment, has historically been a ground-up movement. Now, we are witnessing a pivotal and powerful shift: the environmental justice movement is going mainstream, influencing state and federal policy in unprecedented ways.