Nuclear Injustice: Why a Nuclear Renaissance is the Same Old Colonial Story

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In Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1970 novel Ceremony, a group of witches tell a story about people who

grow away from the earth then they grow away from the
sun then they grow away from the plants and animals. They see no
life When they look they see only objects. … They see no life.

They fear They fear the world. They destroy what they fear. 

…

Stolen rivers and mountains
the stolen land will eat their hearts
and jerk their mouths from the Mother.

…

They will take this world from ocean to ocean they will turn on each
other they will destroy each other Up here in these hills they will find
the rocks, rocks with veins of green and yellow and black. They will
lay the final pattern with these rocks they will lay it across the world
and explode everything.

The “witchery” behind this story stems from a world out of balance, it further separates people from one another and the earth, and it powers colonial violence that culminates in uranium mining and nuclear extinction. Silko warns us that stories like these have power. They dictate how we view ourselves, how we interact with one another and our surroundings, and how our futures come into being. If we are not careful with the stories we listen to, believe, and tell, we will reach a time when they “can’t be called back.” We will call into being worlds and societies that are out of balance, predicated on violence and suffering, resulting in nuclear apocalypse.

Despite Silko’s warnings, positive stories of nuclear power have reemerged. In our age of ecological crisis, one of the most repeated stories is the need for a nuclear renaissance. Nuclear advocates, often funded by the nuclear industry, argue vociferously that nuclear power is safe, clean, and affordable. Perhaps the most vocal nuclear advocates come from Berkeley, California’s Breakthrough Institute (BTI). Public relations professionals (read: propagandists) Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus cofounded BTI in 2003 and created the “ecomodernist” philosophy. Ecomodernism seeks a better environmental future through technological “progress” and environmental deregulation. Its proponents insist that nuclear power, through the extraction of those rocks with veins of green and yellow and black, is the best technology to fight climate change. The story begins there—the worst effects of climate change can only be avoided by adopting nuclear power as the alternative fuel. While Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima were spectacular disasters, the human cost was negligible. Nordhaus says nuclear is “the safest energy technology by the numbers that’s ever existed, full stop.” Opposition amounts to “Anti-Nuclear bullshit.” These stories continue from BTI to think-tanks like Environmental Progress (EP), which Shellenberger founded in 2016 after leaving BTI. While ecomodernism always played to and garnered attention from anti-environment idealogues, at EP Shellenberger began pushing far-right conspiracy theories that amplified his messages. [1] He champions campaigns against unhoused people, does PR for Elon Musk via the Twitter Files, and denies transgender people’s right to exist, all the while using his new platforms to promote nuclear power. He argues that nuclear power is “the only technology that can lift humans out of poverty, promote world peace, and protect the natural environment.” To be anti-nuclear, according to Shellenberger, is to be “anti-human,” to be pro-nuclear is to be “pro-people.”

This propaganda has found an audience. Articles in The Atlantic contend that nuclear power needs to succeed for the sake of the planet. NPR provides a platform for Shellenberger and activists he has trained, who argue that nuclear power is stigmatized due to The Simpsons. In the New York Times, Madison Hilly, also trained by Shellenberger, contends that “Nuclear Waste is Misunderstood” and even safe. New York Magazine’s Eric Levitz explains that “The World Can’t Go Green and Nuclear Free,” and elsewhere relies on statistics from Environmental Progress to repeat another propagandist argument: environmentalists work against their carbon-free goals when they oppose new nuclear plants. These stories and statistics find their way into visual media, like Oliver Stone’s 2022 documentary Nuclear Now, and another from the same year, Atomic Hope. The latter prominently features Shellenberger as an embattled nuclear stalwart who feels “like a minority, … like an outsider” for his views (views he has written about in Forbes and peddled on Fox News). Supposed grassroots organizations like Build Nuclear Now, Stand Up for Nuclear, Mothers for Nuclear, and Campaign for a Green Nuclear Deal, all associated with people trained by Nordhaus and Shellenberger, repeat these stories, and we are approaching a time when they cannot be called back. 

These stories worm their way into policy. In 2017, former U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry called to “Make nuclear energy cool again.” The Inflation Reduction Act includes a thirty billion dollar investment in nuclear power. Ohio Congressman Bill Johnson, an insurrection supporter, homophobe, and climate change denier recently introduced a bill calling for increased nuclear power in the Buckeye State. His reasoning should sound familiar: nuclear power is “the ONLY large scale, reliable, base load carbon free electricity source” that can fight climate change. This argument leaves out the recent scandal around Ohio House Bill 6, which added a taxpayer funded bailout to the supposedly non-profitable Perry Nuclear Generating Plant near Cleveland. In reality, the plant was profitable, but its owner, Energy Harbor (formerly FirstEnergy), bribed Republican lawmakers to enact the bailout to fund coal fired power plants the company owned, and to keep wind and solar power out of the state. Shellenberger has a similar swindle: he produces “documentaries” that make fraudulent claims about offshore windmills killing whales (which the supposedly long-suffering activist gets a nice kickback for). Such dishonesty is unsurprising given that nuclear trade organizations like the Nuclear Energy Institute have been doing media outreach with publications like The New York Times and NPR, and engaging with propagandists like Shellenberger to write puff pieces since at least 2017. These stories, which create issues for renewable power and leave out nuclear power’s major stumbles, are often told at the behest of nuclear trade organizations.

There should be skepticism around adopting nuclear power wholesale given that climate change deniers/delayers like Nordhaus, and conspiracy theorists like Shellenberger and Johnson, embrace a fuel source that has been used to prop up coal, oil, and gas. However, there’s an even more important and pressing story about nuclear that needs to be told in place of the propaganda, and it is certainly not “pro-people.” From the inception of America’s obsession with the atom, nuclear mining and nuclear waste have disproportionately harmed Native American peoples while benefiting the U.S. government and private companies. They will continue to do so if a nuclear renaissance takes place.

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Nuclear power begins with uranium mining, and in the United States, uranium comes from Native American land. These mines stretch across lands inhabited by the Oglala Lakota, Navajo (Diné), Southern Ute, Ute Mountain, Hualapai, Havasupai, and Puebloan Nations like the Hopi, Zuni, Laguna, and Acoma, among other Nations. At the outset of the United States’ first uranium booms in the 1940’s, and then America’s hopeful atomic futurism of the 1950’s, companies rushed to Native lands in hopes of striking it rich. From 1944 to 1986, almost 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from mines on Diné lands alone. Through these periods, the U.S. government and companies knew that uranium mining was a deadly enterprise: uranium miners in the Erz mountains of Germany and the Czech Republic died from lung cancer at an alarming rate due to radon exposure. However, government experts told Diné miners and community members that there was nothing to worry about. They were safe because Diné people were “immune to lung cancer” and uranium did not seriously affect human environments. Scholar Traci Brynne Voyles shows that by the time mining operations halted in the 1980’s, among Diné miners, “Rates for stomach cancer were 82 times the national average. Miners were more than 200 times more likely to get liver cancer, almost 50 times more likely to get prostate cancer, and over 60 percent more likely to have cancers of the bladder or pancreas.” Diseases related to radiation exposure now affect community members who never entered a mine: “Diné children have a rate of testicular and ovarian cancer fifteen times the national average, and a fatal neurological disease called Navajo neuropathy has been closely linked to ingesting uranium contaminated water during pregnancy.” Even when mining stopped and health effects continued, mines have yet to be cleaned up and shuttered. Today, there are over 500 abandoned uranium mines just on Diné land, which still produce toxic fumes and contaminate water supplies and land. Uranium mining’s legacy persists for many Native peoples.

Nuclear violence doesn’t end with uranium extraction – once enriched uranium has produced power or weapons, the waste must be stored somewhere. Often, “somewhere” becomes Native reservations. One of the worst examples is the Hanford nuclear site in Washington State. Hanford was sited in 1943 to produce nuclear weapons, and it was located on the Wanapum, Nez Perce, Confederated Tribes of the Yakama Nation, and Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation’s land. These peoples were removed from their ancestral lands so that Hanford could be placed. By the time these Nations returned, Hanford had discharged 100 billion gallons of waste into their ancestral land, which also found its way into the nearby Columbia River. Similarly, 56 million gallons of the most dangerous nuclear waste was placed in the ground in tanks, more barrels of waste were placed in unlined trenches in the ground, and many of these tanks and trenches continue to leak. Any radioactive equipment was likewise buried in the ground, causing further contamination. For Native peoples, nuclear waste has never been “safe.”

This contamination also has a wider impact. Nuclear companies and the U.S. government view land, water, and fauna as commodities to be bought and sold, as objects without life. However, As Colville Confederated Tribes scholar Dina Gilio-Whitaker explains, “In Indigenous value systems humans are seen as part of interrelated networks in much the same way human families are interrelated networks.” These interrelated networks include land, water, and other-than-human beings. For the Native Nations harmed by uranium mining and waste dumping, the land, water, and other-than-humans affected are part of a complex systems of relations and responsibilities that structure Native societies, governance and educational systems, and families. To ignore these complexities and destroy them is to break down Native societies. If Native systems of reciprocity and responsibility show us how to “live our lives in relation to other people and nonhuman life forms in a profoundly nonauthoritarian, nondominating, nonexploitive manner,” as Yellowknives Dene philosopher Glen Coulthard and Anishinaabe scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson tell us, then ecomodernists, or rather ecocolonialists, like Nordhaus, Shellenberger, and others come to embody those people Silko warns us about–those who see lifeless objects to be profited from and destroyed. As Voyles explains, this mentality turns Indigenous peoples and lands into “Wastelands,” sacrifice zones for the betterment of colonial society and propagandists’ wallets.  

These histories of violence, contamination, and their continued afterlives are stories that need to be told anytime propagandists tout the safety of the nuclear industry. If nuclear advocates are incapable of discussing who their chosen fuel sources have harmed and might harm, they are either ill-informed and not the experts they claim to be, or they are dishonest. These technologies are harming people at this very moment, and they will continue to do so if nuclear production begins again.

In 2020 the U.S. Department of Energy released the “Strategy to Restore American Nuclear Energy Leadership” report. According to the report, the U.S. “has lost its competitive global position as the world leader in nuclear energy to state-owned enterprises, notably Russia and China.” To regain its military footing, the report recommends “Taking immediate and bold action to strengthen the uranium mining” by opening new mines and re-opening shuttered mines. As part of this project, in 2022 the United States re-opened the Pinyon Plain mine, ten miles from the Grand Canyon—where the Havasupai people come from, lived before the National Parks Service evicted them in 1919, and still reside nearby. When the Pinyon Plain mine leaks or introduces radionuclides into land and water through normal mining processes, as other nearby mines like the Pinenut Mine and Orphan mine have done, it will contaminate the Havasupai’s water source, the Redwall-Muav aquifer, which the Havasupai have a responsibility to protect. These responsibilities matter little to nuclear advocates like Congressman Rob Bishop, who is instead focused on the need for “uranium to meet our military, as well as lifestyle needs.” Colonial lifestyles and militaries are again put before the lives of Indigenous peoples.

Additionally the problem of nuclear waste remains, although Shellenberger argues that waste can be stored in concrete cylinders at nuclear plants. This “dry cask” storage is supposedly safe and effective, and new technologies like Small Modular Reactors (SMR’s) produce less, more manageable waste. The most popular SMR development company, NuScale, planned to site its new SMR’s, among other places, in Idaho and Washington State. However, when the cost to build the reactors became too much, even with subsidies from the Department of Energy, the Idaho plan was canceled in November 2023. Nordhaus argued that part of the cost issue amounts to problems with strict Nuclear Regulatory Commission safety guidelines, which are too stringent, drive-up cost, and stand in the way of progress. Those safety guidelines are necessary for many reasons, chief among them that SMR’s still produce waste. In Washington, that waste was set to be stored along the Columbia River, in an earthquake zone, near the same Native peoples affected by the Hanford site, who have important relations with and responsibilities to the Columbia River and the other-than-human beings who inhabit it. 

These stories are inherently American. As journalist Bryan Walsh wrote glowingly of Nordhaus’s proposed environmental policy in Vox, “we would not fundamentally change America to make our climate strategy approach fit; we would change the strategy to fit America.” To find climate policy that fit America, nuclear advocates needed only to erase Native peoples, their voices, and their histories. In place of Native presence, propagandists write the story of American progress. Much like wastelanding targets Native societies and land for erasure, settler colonial narratives have been utilized to replace Native peoples’ presence throughout history. 

Native peoples have been erased and replaced by narratives that celebrate colonialism, militarism, and the U.S. economy since the Nation’s founding. This is how settler colonialism operates—it erases Native histories, presence, and voices, and the settler colonial nation aims to replace them, writing its own history in their place to claim indigeneity, superiority, and rightful ownership of land. Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, born in 1743 in what is today known as Akron, Ohio and a key figure in the Revolutionary war, is rarely discussed, taught, or thought about in popular narratives of the period around Ohio. Instead, Bill Johnson fights to have National Forests named after U.S. Army General Anthony Wayne, who stole what is now Eastern and Southern Ohio from Native peoples by burning Native towns and crops at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Not to be outdone, Bishop has sought to erase Native history in favor of the United States economy by eliminating the Antiquities Act to open protected areas for oil drilling. When asked about Native rock art protected by the Act, Bishop responded, “Ah, bullcrap. That’s not an antiquity.” These philosophies are ubiquitous across the United States from its founding to the present, in schools and on landmarks. So goes nuclear power’s story—Native peoples, and their histories, are erased in favor of the United States economy and military prowess. Nordhaus’s strategy does indeed “fit America.”

Of course, it would be unfair to tell this story without mentioning that renewable energy has its own environmental justice issues. When I say this, I’m not talking about Shellenberger’s windmills-killing-whales schtick. I’m talking about real issues like the ones scholar Nate Otjen and his colleagues have been shining a light on with their project, “Mining for the Climate.” Native peoples like Klamath, Modoc artist Ka’ila Farrell-Smith have told numerous stories of the harm that lithium mining in Thacker Pass, Nevada and at Disaster Peak in Oregon has and will cause, and how such mining operations continue the histories of violence against Fort McDermitt Northern Paiute and Western Shoshone, Burns Paiute, and the Klamath Tribes in the regions. These are the kinds of nuanced, justice-oriented conversations we need to have if we are going to create a future outside of climate catastrophe. Alternative energy sources are indeed necessary to combat climate change, but we needto be honest about the harm they cause if they’re ever going to be viable solutions. Equitable, environmentally just futures are dependent on creating better relations with the world around us. To work toward healthy relations, we have to tell honest stories about the past, the present, and our possible futures. We owe it to ourselves and those we share the world with to have these honest conversations, and those who are incapable of having them, like Nordhaus, Shellenberger, Johnson, and their allies, do not deserve a platform.

If any energy, if any policy, is to truly make a difference in the world we inhabit, we must be aware of the stories that surround these fuel sources and the policies that make their use into reality, lest we repeat histories of colonial violence. Climate change is indeed an existential threat, and it presents colossal challenges. However, solving these challenges with the same unjust, colonial, militaristic “solutions” that got us here places us back where we began: with the violent status quo, reinforcing the same colonial structures that caused climate change. 

In order to refuse that status quo, it is necessary to look to stories, and storytellers, who have resisted what Ojibwe scholar Winona LaDuke calls “nuclear colonialism.” Native peoples have called attention to nuclear violence through story, art, protest, and legal challenges from its beginnings. These stories must be told in place of nuclear propaganda. Silko has written about revising those stories for a future centered on balance and healing. In 1995 Paiute Judge Ron Eagleye Johnny traveled across the United States for the documentary Radioactive Reservations, speaking to Native peoples affected by nuclear and asking U.S. senators why waste repositories weren’t sited in Washington, D.C. In 1996, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Sac and Fox, and Menominee activist Grace Thorpe wrote, “Our homes are not dumps.” Diné artist Will Wilson creates projects that call attention to “uranium extraction that has poisoned the land and impoverished the people,” and imagines new stories around alternative energies on Diné land. Only when stories like these take precedence over nuclear propagandists, “the destroyers, thieves, liars, exploiters who profit handsomely off the land and people,” writes Pueblo of Acoma poet Simon Ortiz, “will we know what love and compassion are. Only when the people of this nation, not just the Indian people, fight for what is just and good for all life, will we know life and its continuance. And when we fight, and fight back against those who are bent on destruction of land and people, we will win. We will win.”

1. For example, the Heartland Institute, a think-tank known for denying climate change and the health risks of tobacco use, promotes Shellenberger and ecomodernism.