When nuclear’s carbon facade hides centuries of radioactive risk, honesty in energy becomes essential.

Everything you can look at, breathe in, and touch is made up of tiny atoms. These basic units of our physical world require advanced microscopes to observe in real time, but our eyes witness what comes out of their collective amalgamation. We, too, are made of atoms—billions upon billions make up a single person. They are the building blocks of all the people and places we love. 

These microscopic particles also carry energy, which is just what the world needs these days. Nuclear energy currently derives from splitting an atom. If hit just right by another particle, an atom can release its energy. This is called nuclear fission. In water, this reaction emits a strange and entrancing blue glow called Cherenkov radiation. Around the globe, some 440 reactors can trigger this reaction and convert the energy to electricity. One nuclear reactor can produce as much power as about 3 million solar panels, but only about 9% of global electricity comes from nuclear. At last year’s climate negotiations, known as COP29, six new countries agreed to triple their nuclear energy by 2050. Now, a total of 31 countries have pledged their commitment. Under former President Joe Biden, the United States made its own pro-nuclear promises in 2024, too.

“We’re at the start of quite a large expansion for nuclear,” said Henry Preston, a spokesperson for the World Nuclear Association, which represents the industry. Indeed, the recent passage of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” enshrines nuclear as central to the future energy mix of the United States.

Unlike outdated fossil fuel-based energy sources like coal, oil, and gas, nuclear power doesn’t release greenhouse gases. That’s why many governments and the tech sector, in part spurred on by the expansion of energy-hungry AI, are looking to nuclear power as the future of clean energy. However, others believe that characterization of nuclear energy as “green” is oversimplified, saying that it ignores the dirty details of how atoms wind up in these reactors in the first place, the radioactive forever waste their reactions produce, and the military implications of advancing nuclear technologies.

“Nuclear is not clean,” said Kevin Kamps, a radioactive waste specialist for Beyond Nuclear, a nonprofit that advocates for energy alternatives like wind and solar. “It’s been called clean. It’s been called safe. It’s been called cost-effective, none of which are true… These are all Orwellian lies.”

Kamps grew up downwind of the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. He protested the plant from 1993 until its closure in 2022. Now, he’s beginning a renewed fight against the facility: A developer called Holtec plans to restart the power plant by October 2025. No decommissioned reactor has ever been reopened in the U.S. before, but the federal government has supported the project with a $1.5 billion loan and $1.3 billion in grants. (These high costs are discouraging even to climate experts who otherwise see nuclear’s value as a low-carbon source of energy.) 

“I’m not really convinced that nuclear is going to be the big savior for climate change that some people would advocate,” said Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, an organization dedicated to solutions that includes nuclear as one strategy to cut carbon emissions. “I wouldn’t completely remove it off the table, but it’s something I wouldn’t put a lot of priority on.”

Some environmental advocates are wary, but nuclear proponents are thrilled: Starting up an old plant is quicker and cheaper than building a new one. Plus, the sector is keen to redeem itself. Nuclear has a bad rep due to its history—from disastrous weapons testing across the Pacific throughout the twentieth century to the Fukushima meltdown in 2011.  

“The legacy of nuclear is not always great,” said Anna Erickson, a nuclear and radiological engineering professor at the Georgia Tech Institute of Technology. “As we go forward, those concerns have been taken seriously.”

The communities that bear the scars of the nuclear industry’s toxic past, however, doubt anything has changed. And they refuse to roll the dice to find out.

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Jesse Deer In Water was born into the anti-nuclear movement. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, he grew up attending protests and meetings with his mom. Nearby, the Sequoyah Fuels Corporation plant processed uranium, a radioactive metal that fuels nuclear reactors, and locals were worried its operations were making people sick. 

“All that stuff sticks with you,” Deer In Water explained. He remembers picking up the phone at home as a kid and hearing death threats or creepy breathing from people he believed supported the facility. 

He and his mother, Jessie Pauline Collins, eventually moved to Michigan to escape the hate in Oklahoma. The Great Lakes region is home to 23 nuclear power plants, some of which are no longer in operation. It’s also one of the world’s largest watersheds: One-fifth of all the world’s surface freshwater flows through these five lakes, which are surrounded by huge metropolises and wild ecosystems alike, replete with charismatic megafauna like moose, gray wolves, and of course plenty of Homo sapiens. The location of these nuclear sites isn’t a coincidence: These facilities need water, and lots of it. Nuclear reactors usually produce electricity by using their heat to boil water and generate steam, which moves through turbines to create electricity. Water also helps keep everything cool.

But that proximity presents environmental risks. In 1993, not long after Deer In Water moved to Michigan, the Fermi 2 nuclear power plant in Newport suffered a turbine incident. As a result, operator Detroit Edison released some 1.5 million gallons of radioactively contaminated water into Lake Erie. That disaster led to the birth of Citizens’ Resistance at Fermi Two, or CRAFT, an organization Deer In Water’s mother founded to challenge nuclear’s presence around the Great Lakes. 

“These issues are everywhere I go,” Deer In Water said. “Indigenous peoples everywhere are impacted by uranium mining and bomb testing and nuclear waste.”

The nuclear industry’s supply chain begins in geological deposits underground. Most of those deposits in the U.S. are found in the Southwest, on or near Native lands.

In order to engineer the splitting of an atom, you first need an atom you can confidently split to release all of its energy. Uranium is the most popular fuel source because its atoms succumb to this reaction more easily than other atoms. Historically, nuclear weapons motivated the demand for the mining of this mineral, leaving behind a legacy of pollution that still taints the land and its people. 

The uranium industry mined nearly 30 million tons of the metal from Navajo Nation lands between 1944 and 1986, leaving behind over 500 abandoned mines. Diné families worked the mines. Their sacred waterways were contaminated. The Environmental Protection Agency has acknowledged that inhaling those toxic particles has led to incidences of lung cancer and that drinking contaminated water has led to bone cancer and impaired kidney functions. 

“Today, a lot of us don’t have that kind of direct exposure since the mining stopped, but that’s why we’re still fighting it—so we don’t have to deal with that again,” said Leona Morgan, a Diné woman and cofounder of the anti-nuclear environmental organization Haul No! 

Morgan grew up seeing her relatives get sick from cancer and other health problems. Any number of factors could have made them ill, but the most worrisome possibility was their uranium exposure. Last year, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act expired, leaving vulnerable people without an avenue for financial recourse from the health impacts they’ve suffered.

A new uranium mine opened near the Grand Canyon in 2024, and Morgan has been organizing to shut it down. Her group also focuses on the hazards of transporting uranium: After they’re mined, the rock chunks containing uranium head to mills where the ore is crushed to make uranium easier to process. Then, that refined material moves again so that it can be enriched through a chemical process that concentrates the particular isotope of uranium that makes it easier to split in a reactor. That enriched uranium must be moved once more to transform it into fuel pellets that are then turned into fuel rods compatible with a reactor. Only then does the uranium finally head toward the power plant to produce electricity. 

After three to seven years, those fuel rods are spent, so they become waste—waste that is now more radioactive than before entering the reactor. They’re so charged at this point that they have to go into pools on-site for several years just to cool down. It takes at least tens of thousands of years for the radioactivity of that material to decay. 

“All along this journey of uranium for nuclear power and for nuclear bombs, they leave behind these poisoned communities,” Deer In Water said. “The moral debt that the United States owes to Indigenous people is ridiculous. It’ll probably never be met.”

Unfortunately, Indigenous people are often not in the room when it comes to conversations about advancing nuclear energy. More often, it’s giant tech company executives who are given a seat at the table. Morgan doesn’t believe that the tech companies’ proposed projects would “curb climate change.” “It’s for their own capitalistic benefit,” she said. If nuclear power is the answer for the energy-hungry AI sector, then what is the answer for the energy-poor Navajo Nation, where many families still live without electricity in lands tarnished by abandoned uranium mines? 

According to Denia Djokić, an assistant research scientist in nuclear engineering and radiological sciences with the Fastest Path to Zero Initiative at the University of Michigan, one part of the answer might come from linking reparations to new nuclear projects to hold the sector accountable for its past harms. 

“If we choose to continue on the nuclear energy path, we must do so with justice at the center of its governing policies,” she said. “If we can democratically solve the long-term nuclear waste problem, if there is a way to ensure an ethical supply chain of uranium, shared ownership, and reparations for those who have been harmed, that would be a somewhat better nuclear future than the nuclear past.”

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