Photograph Source: Robbie Morrison – CC BY 4.0
I don’t know what’s on your list of resolutions, but not getting my ass blown off in a nuclear war or meltdown is pretty high on my list of personal priorities for the coming year. It’s true there are plenty of other things I could be worrying about right now. In fact, if there were anything like truth in advertising in the U.S., we would long ago have swapped out George Washington and “e pluribus unum” on the dollar for Alfred E. Neuman and “What, me worry?”
Seeing so many Christian Zionists chomping at the bit for the End Times isn’t exactly reassuring. And it doesn’t help that neither newly elected President Scrooge McDuck nor his co-pilot Elmo Musk has demonstrated the generosity or impulse control of your average cephalopod or cuttlefish. Not that I imagined Joe “Genocide” Biden as any kind of paragon of restraint, but I can hardly have been alone in banking on “Sleepy Joe” forgetting the codes after a nice glass of warm milk. But the worm having turned and headed back to the White House, the coming year seems like a critical window to form common cause around putting the brakes on a nuclear industry that’s as eager as ever to profit from playing Russian roulette with the planet.
The good news is that anti-nuke organizing has a decades-long tradition of effective messaging and mobilizing through art, music, and storytelling. Whether they grew up against the backdrop of civil defense drills and ducking and covering under their desks in the 1950s and 60s or amid a succession of nuclear accidents, anti-nuke organizers have produced a rich art of resistance that helped galvanize and sustain the movement. The bad news is that the nuclear industry is now hellbent on selling us on “Small Modular [Nuclear] Reactors” (SMRs) and on repackaging itself as a white knight in shimmering armor, an upright corporate swain bent on rescuing us from the ravages of climate collapse.
Playing Dice with the Universe
As that venerable old Jewish peace activist and physicist Albert Einstein famously observed, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the nuclear industry, which got a big boost in 2022 with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The White House website lauded Biden’s visionary leadership in signing the act into law: “With the stroke of his pen, the President redefined American leadership in confronting the existential threat of the climate crisis.” But you’ll have to look elsewhere–to the Department of Energy (DOE) website–for mention of the IRA’s green-washing giveaway to the nuclear industry. “Inflation Reduction Act Keeps Momentum Building for Nuclear Power,” reads the near gleeful banner headline.
In an even bigger bonanza for nuclear profiteers, in 2024 Biden signed off on a 40-year extension of the Price-Anderson Act, which Public Citizen describes as a “Billion-Dollar Bailout for Nuclear Power Mishaps.” Environment America explains that the act caps the industry’s liability for a “catastrophic accident… at [any] one of the [U.S.’s] 54 nuclear plants” at $16.1 billion in damages,” leaving taxpayers to pick up the tab for the rest. For perspective, according to Reuters, the total cost of the Fukushima disaster was estimated in 2016 at $188 billion. And even at that, damages paid to individuals affected by radiation contamination would almost surely be minimal at best.
The industry’s recklessness is on full display in an April 2024 report by the Government Accounting Office (GAO) highlighted in an October Counterpunch commentary by Linda Pentz Gunter, founder and international specialist with Beyond Nuclear. The report – and Gunter’s commentary – make clear that we shouldn’t waste energy pinning our regulatory hopes on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The NRC, as the report makes clear, fails to “fully consider potential increases in risk from climate change….us[ing] historical data to identify and assess safety risks, rather than data from future climate projections.”
That’s right, the NRC’s permitting process does not consistently factor in climate projections like rising sea levels, temperatures, extreme weather events, etc. As Pentz Gunter so aptly puts it, the NRC, which “is intent on colluding with the nuclear industry to sell us nuclear power as some sort of answer to the climate crisis,” appears “entirely uninterested in how the ravages of the climate crisis might jeopardize the safety of nuclear power plants.”
In their commentary “A Nuclear Warning from Hurricane Helene,” Pentz Gunter points to the dangers the hurricane posed to the “Crystal River nuclear power plant on Florida’s Gulf Coast.” Though decommissioned, the site still stores “high-level irradiated radioactive fuel waste.” Meanwhile, as Pentz Gunter notes, “some nuclear power plants in the path of the hurricane were shut down as a preemptive precaution…mak[ing] them completely useless in the wake of the storm’s onslaught when people are desperate for electricity.”
And that, kids, ought to go a long way toward explaining how Matt Groening’s Homer Simpson came to personify the reckless lack of oversight, accountability, and even common sense at the very heart of the nuclear industry. Given the many well-documented allusions in The Simpsons to Portland, OR, where Groening grew up, it’s safe to assume that the inspiration for Homer’s workplace was none other than the aptly named Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, just 42 miles from Portland. The plant, which went live in 1975, became a flashpoint for anti-nuke organizing. Jan Haaken’s 2023 documentary Atomic Bamboozle: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance, documents the organizing ferment that led to the plant beingshuttered in 1993 and demolished in 2006.
It’s no doubt a tribute to the satirical power of Groening’s brainchild that the DOE devotes a webpage to elucidating “7 Things the Simpson’s Got Wrong About Nuclear,” while acknowledging that “America’s longest-running animated series on FOX has been making nuclear workers cringe on their couches for almost 3 decades now.” But let’s be clear, the real villains in The Simpsons are not everyday workers who “work hard and play hard” and would like nothing more than to get down to “Everybody Dance Now” at the plant. The clue is in the CEO’s name: Mr. Burns.
Racist to the Root
The racist roots of the U.S. nuclear industry go back to the 1880s and the Belgian King Leopold’s brutal assault on the Congo. From the very start of King Leopold’s war, the U.S. was only too willing to collaborate in exploiting workers to death in its quest to liberate the Congo of its resources. And by the 1940s, the U.S. had grown particularly fond of Congolese uranium, which, as George Nzongola-Ntalaja noted in a 2011 commentary in The Guardian, was “used to manufacture the first atomic weapons, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.”
As Elaine Scarry points out in a 2020 essay in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Langston Hughes, a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance and pan-African organizing, “at once recognized the moral depravity of executing 100,000* people and discerned racism as the phenomenon that had licensed the depravity: ’How come we did not try them [atomic bombs] on Germany?’” asked Hughes. “’They just did not want to use them on white folks.’”
If you have a strong stomach and want a small taste of the scale of destruction and the sheer horrors that that U.S. helped Belgium unleash on the Congo in its quest to extract resources and labor, you might watch the 2021 mini-series Exterminate All the Brutes. Cutting off the hands of children was a banal, an everyday matter in what King Leopold, with a bit of bitter, Orwellian irony, titled “Congo Free State.” You might remember writer, director Raoul Peck’s 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro, exploring the life and work of poet, playwright, and essayist James Baldwin against the backdrop of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.
Part of what makes Exterminate All the Brutes both powerful and haunting is the way it weaves together accounts of centuries of colonial exploitation of workers unto death alongside the story of Peck’s childhood awakening to the brutality of U.S. imperialism. Peck’s father, an agronomist with the UN Farm and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was among the Black intellectuals recruited as intelligentsia for the newly formed Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The younger Peck, who would go on to serve as Minister of Culture in Haiti, looks back on his family’s flight in 1963 from the U.S.-supported dictatorship of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier to their arrival in the DRC, still reeling from the assassination of the first democratically elected president of the DRC Patrice Lumumba.
In August 1960, Lumumba, a leader of the Congolese independence movement, had barely been in office a month when President Dwight D. Eisenhower handed down the order to CIA Director and veteran coup-master Allen Dulles to have Lumumba “eliminated.” And it is perhaps one of the great ironies of history that the same day–January 17, 1961– that the outgoing president delivered his famous farewell address on the dangers of the “military industrial complex” – or MIC – Patrice Lumumba was killed in a hail of bullets that had Eisenhower’s bloody fingerprints all over it.
Lumumba’s crime? As Nzongola-Ntalaja wrote in The Guardian on the 50th anniversary of his assassination, it was Lumumba’s “determination to … have full control over Congo’s resources in order to utilise them to improve the living conditions of our people….” But as Ngongola-Ntalaja also observes the U.S. was not about to relinquish its “strategic stake in the enormous natural wealth of the Congo,” and certainly not its uranium.
Today, the bloody conflicts the U.S. helped King Leopold and Belgium unleash on the Congo continue, with mass rape and slavery–including of children–used as weapons in the scramble for coltan and other “conflict minerals” for our precious cell phones and laptops. Especially If you’re a teacher, you might check out the Zinn Education Project’s curriculum on “Congo, Coltan, and Cell Phones: A People’s History” – along with their broader work on nuclear energy, weapons, and war.
Racism was hard baked into the arms race. If Eisenhower was concerned about the impact of the MIC in the U.S., that concern clearly didn’t extend to Indigenous communities. Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) writer and activist Winona LaDuke’s book The Militarization of Indian Country provides an important overview of the U.S. government’s treatment of Indigenous lands, waterways, cultures, and bodies as acceptable sacrifices in the arms race.
Marshallese poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s work illuminates the human cost of the Pacific Islands being similarly relegated to nuclear testing grounds. Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, American G.I.’s, and all manner of assorted “downwinders” were not only exposed to repeated nuclear blasts but also enlisted as involuntary test subjects in mass experiments on the effects of radiation exposure on human health. Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove hardly scratched the surface of the sheer industrial-strength madness and cruelty of it all.
Indigenous uranium miners on the Navajo and other reservations were given no protective gear or warning of the dangers they faced. And though the Navajo Nation officially pulled the plug on uranium mining in 2005, it will be dealing far into the future with the toxic legacy of “over 500 abandoned uranium mines.”Today the Navajo contend with high rates of ”lung cancer from inhalation of radioactive particles, as well as bone cancer and impaired kidney function,” and the Navajo, Laguna Pueblo, Acoma Pueblo, Hopi and Zuni are all pressing Congress to reauthorize the “Radiation Exposure Compensation Act” (RECA).
And if you want to get a sense of the longer term impact of the nuclear industry on tribes and other communities in the Pacific Northwest, and the ongoing struggle for environmental justice, you might check out Joshua Frank’s 2022 book Atomic Days, The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America. As Frank notes, “the War Powers Act of 1941 allowed the federal government to take the land and homes from residents” (16), including “peasant farmers,” along with “Wanapum, Yakama, Umatilla, and Nez Perce [or Nimiipuu] people, tribes that still fished for Columbia River salmon as their ancestors had for thousands of years” (15).
Frank also illuminates the critical role that tribal leaders – including Yakama Elder Russell Jim (Kii’ahł) – have played in holding the line against the nuclear industry. Still, today, Frank notes, Hanford is both the “most toxic place in [the] Western Hemisphere,” and the site of the “most expensive clean up in world history,” one that has locked the region into a seemingly “Permanent Disaster Economy” (71). Meanwhile, workers sickened on the job by radiation exposure face interminable struggles for compensation.
In the wake of Hurricane Helene, which killed an estimated 100 people in North Carolina alone and caused some $53 billion in damages to N.C. alone, I checked in with a dear friend who’s lived there for decades, and I was relieved to hear her house and town had gone relatively unscathed. And when I offered some “helpful” observation about the catastrophic impacts yet to come from climate change, my friend was suddenly uncharacteristically cheerful. Nuclear energy, she advised me, would save us from our planetary pickle.
My surprise was greater for the fact that my friend and I came of age together in the 1970s and 80s, driving the serpentine back roads of Maryland, smoking weed, and listening to the legendary 1979 No Nukes: The MUSE Concerts for a Non-Nuclear Future. Looking back, it seems telling that, as two white women, we might have worried about getting busted for the weed, but the possibility of death by cop never even occurred to us.
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The MUSE Concerts: Remembering Enrico Fermi and Karen Silkwood
The MUSE collective–Musicians for Safe Energy–formed close on the heels of the March 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania. If you want a quick primer on the Three Mile Island meltdown, the ongoing fallout from it, and the organizing that helped shut the plant down, you might check out Heidi Hutner’s 2022 documentary Radioactive: The Women of Three Mile Island. Weirdly, the meltdown was pre-figured by the blockbuster film The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Douglas, which premiered twelve days before the meltdown.
Recorded live over the course of five concerts in Madison Square Garden, the MUSE Concerts, organized by Harvey Wasserman, an activist with the Clamshell Alliance, “a coalition of New England antinuclear groups,” the concert featured a host of musical luminaries too many to name: Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Gil Scott-Heron, Bruce Springsteen, Chaka Khan, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Tom Petty, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and on and on. And if the album helped fast-track “Three Mile Island” in the lexicon of American disasters, the song “We almost Lost Detroit” by Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson highlighted a lesser known 1966 partial meltdown at the Enrico Fermi nuclear power plant:
Just 30 miles from Detroit
Stands a giant power station
It ticks each night as the city sleeps
Seconds from annihilationBut no one stopped to think about the people
Or how they would survive
And we’ve almost lost Detroit
This time
How would we ever get over
Over losing our minds?The sheriff of Monroe County had
Sure enough, disasters on his mind
And what would Karen Silkwood say to you
If she was still alive?That, when it comes to people’s safety
Money wins out every time
And we’ve almost lost Detroit
This time, this time
How would we ever get over
Over losing our minds?
The title of the song was inspired by a 1975 book by John G. Fuller about the meltdown. In their song, Scott-Heron and Jackson capture the fundamental irrationality and craven financial interests of an industry that poses an existential threat not just to nuclear workers and Monroe County, but to Detroit – in neighboring Wayne County – and presumably well beyond. References to the 1974 death of labor organizer-nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood highlight the corruption of the industry and its treatment of workers as disposable commodities, pawns for sacrifice to the god of profit.
You can find a quick primer on Silkwood’s organizing, and its long afterlife, in a November 2024 edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists marking the 50th anniversary of Silkwood’s death. After her death at the age of 28, Silkwood became the focus of the eponymously titled 1984 film starring Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell, and Cher. But before you watch the film, you might first check out the PBS Frontline documentary on Silkwood. A white chemical technician from Texas, Silkwood produced nuclear pellets at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron plant in Oklahoma. But she was also a labor organizer with the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers’ Union (OCAW), a health and safety inspector at the plant, and the first woman to serve on OCAW’s bargaining committee.
When Silkwood detected a laundry list of safety violations, she testified before the Atomic Energy Commission about safety concerns at the plant. Shortly before her death, Silkwood – and her apartment – were both contaminated with plutonium. But plutonium was not what killed Silkwood.
The 28-year-old union organizer was killed in a fatal car accident on her way to handoff critical documents about the goings on at Kerr-McGee to a New York Times reporter. There were indications she’d been run off the road, and by the time Silkwood’s body was recovered from the car, the documents were nowhere to be found. While no criminal charges were filed in the case, Kerr-McGee ultimately settled a $1.3 million civil suit brought by Silkwood’s family.
In 2014, Kerr-McGee agreed to pay a $5.15 billion settlement, including “for environmental clean-up at contaminated sites around the country,” with Corporate Crime Reporter describing the settlement as “the largest environmental enforcement recovery ever by the Department of Justice.” But the settlement likely barely scratched the surface of damages that Deputy Attorney General James Cole laid out, including to the Navajo Nation. “For 85 years, Kerr-McGee operated numerous hazardous businesses, and those businesses caused significant damage to the environment and to communities exposed to contamination,” Cole said.
In Scott-Heron and Jackson’s pithy critique, the same nuclear industry that killed Karen Silkwood played dice with the City of Detroit. Scott-Heron and Jackson’s song is a dirge and a warning: treating the nuclear industry as anything but a menace, a threat to workers and public safety is itself a form of madness. But now my dear friend, suddenly buoyed, offers me some version of: “Today’s nuclear industry is not like it was back in the day.” And in my friend’s words, I hear echoes of the nuke industry’s propaganda machine illuminated in Jan Haaken’s 2023 documentary Atomic Bamboozle: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance.
“Atomic Bamboozle”
It’s a given that the Madmen (and women) of Madison Avenue cranking out nuke industry PR these days must have taken inspiration from Philip Morris’ s infamous “Virginia Slims” cigarette campaign, which sold women on smoking as a weight-loss tool. Given how cancer ravages the body, there might be some truth in advertising there. “You’ve come a long way, Baby,” intoned leggy models in the Virginia Slims ad, capturing the Madison Avenue zeitgeist of the period between puffs of smoke and egging women on to boldly break barriers to ensure their equal right to die young.
As Haaken’s film makes clear, ageism would seem to be a central tactic of today’s nuke boosters, with well-informed critiques of the industry denigrated as out of touch relics of the past. “Not your grandmother’s nuclear power,” chirps a nuke booster in one ad. In another clip, Rick Perry, Secretary of Energy under Trump, vaunts “this bright, good looking group of young men and women” as the “Millennials in Nuclear Group [who are] going to make nuclear energy cool again.”
Never mind that according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Chernobyl, the site of–to date at least–the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 1986, made a nuclear hotspot out of some 150 square kilometers – or 93,205 square miles – across Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. And I think it’s fair to say that Perry’s campaign would be a hard sell to a lot of young people in Japan who’ve grown up against the backdrop of the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which is now in the process of being decommissioned. In 2023, the Japanese government resorted to discharging radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean, resulting in a serious financial hit to both Japanese agriculture and fisheries.
But if selling the nuclear renaissance this time around hinges heavily on the distinction the industry claims between SMRs and the massive plants of yesteryears, physicist M.V. Ramana, Ph.D., Professor of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, methodically blows holes in the propaganda. The technology, he notes, remains largely unchanged since the first reactors were built. Ed Lyman, Director of Nuclear Power Safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists seems to echo Ramana’s critiques of the industry’s high tech snake oil. Both suggest that the nuke industry is no better positioned today to meet the country’s energy needs than it was when Forbes ran a 1985 cover story that described the nuke industry in the U.S. as presiding over “the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale.”
But the biggest issue then and now is the question of what to do with the waste. Speaking in Bamboozle, Greg Kafoury, an attorney who was centrally involved in the fight to shut down Oregon’s Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, observes that “The question…has been one forever characterized by deceit. They’re going to pretend to have solutions, and then their solution is to give it to our grandchildren.”
Rob Nixon, Professor in Humanities and the Environment at Princeton, and author of Slow Violence: The Environmentalism of the Poor has described climate change as “a kind of intergenerational theft of the conditions of life itself.” Far from posing an answer to the climate crisis, whether by waste or weapons, the nuclear industry, which is inextricably linked to the fossil fuel industry, is poised to compound that original sin.
An ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) principle asks us to measure the impact of our actions today seven generations into the future. The full — not the “half” – life of plutonium-239 means and we’re looking at waste that will need careful tending for an estimated 48,200 years. Locking in nuclear today means saddling literally thousands of future generations with our waste.
“It’s a very thin green line that we’re standing on. We in the Northwest understand that,” observes Cathy Sampson-Kruse in Atomic Bamboozle. A member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, Sampson-Kruse, who has repeatedly put her body on the line to stop fossil fuel infrastructure, sees obvious links to the anti-nuke struggle. In many cases, the companies are one and the same.
Between 2012 and 2021, anti-nuke organizing succeeded in shuttering 12 U.S. nuclear plants. With artificial intelligence ramping up energy use at data centers, Amazon announced plans to build a series of SMRs in Washington. Reporting in October for Oregon Public Broadcasting, Antonio Sierra observed that, “The move helps Amazon work around Oregon’s long-standing ban on new nuclear reactors and feed its energy-intensive data business.” But as Sierra also notes, the move “could also reignite debates over nuclear energy’s role in decarbonizing the energy grid.”
There are powerful organizing lessons to be learned from the David and Goliath struggles documented in both Haaken and Hutner’s documentaries. And one lesson we can definitively draw from the decades old struggle for real climate justice is the critical, often unacknowledged role that art, music, and storytelling play in providing roadmaps of the past and future, and in fueling and sustaining us for the long fight ahead. We need to speak – and teach – about these struggles like our lives, and the lives of future generations, depend on them. As the indomitable Cathy Sampson-Kruse observes in Atomic Bamboozle:
If we don’t continue to rise up against false solutions that our government is almost codifying into law…then we don’t have any hope. And I’m going to stick with the hope that we can rise up. Every seed we plant is a green seed toward the future for our children’s children. Because they will still be dealing with part of this legacy when we’re gone.
* For an overview of estimates, variables, etc., see Alex Wellerstein, “Counting the Dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Some estimates place the deaths in the immediate wake of the bombings at closer to 200,000.
Many thanks to Linda Cargill, Frann Michel, Cathryn Chudy, and Mikel Clayhold for reading and commenting on drafts.
