These Organizations Oppose Nuclear for Unclear Reasons

Right after Thanksgiving, mailboxes are stuffed with fund-raising letters from various charities, seeking year-end contributions. What are they raising money for?

You wouldn’t guess from their names, but some of them want to stop nuclear energy. The list includes the League of Women Voters, the American Association of Retired Persons (better known as AARP), the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and various smaller organizations.

On the flip side, the Nature Conservancy, which sends out a calendar with dazzling flora and fauna, actively favors nuclear energy.

The extent of these organizations’ influence on energy policy isn’t clear, but they can gum up the works by entering the cumbersome licensing and permitting processes at the federal and state level. And some potential builders of reactors don’t like technologies that come with opposition built in.

The League of Women Voters is an interesting case. It is better known for sending questionnaires to candidates for state and local offices and compiling the answers. It does this with scrupulous symmetry, giving equal prominence to Republicans, Democrats, minor party candidates, and independents. That is how it maintains its status as non-partisan.

But that doesn’t mean that it is neutral on issues. Some are unsurprising; it favors protecting citizens’ right to vote, fair drawing of district lines for legislative seats, and transparency in political funding. But it takes positions on a lot of other issues, including limiting access to guns, ending the death penalty, and improving childcare.

And then there is nuclear energy. The League wants to “minimize reliance on nuclear fission.” State and local chapters can oppose licensing for new plants, or, with permission from the national organization, call for closing existing plants. It refers vaguely to risk, and its policies include a lot of contradictory statements; it is concerned about climate change, air pollution, and drilling for hydrocarbons in sensitive locations. Its listed solutions are efficiency and renewable energy.

In August, 2021, the League signed on to a letter to the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate opposing provisions in the bipartisan infrastructure bill that “would provide billions of dollars in subsidies to aging and uneconomical nuclear power plants.”

“We must marshal our national resources to address structural inequities and injustices that undermine our safety, health, economic security, and sustainability,” said the letter, which called nuclear energy a “false solution.”

“Nuclear power is too dirty, too dangerous, too expensive, and too slow to solve the climate crisis, and the industry is rooted in environmental injustice and human rights violations,” the letter said. The groups called for renewable energy, batteries, and microgrids.

The letter was signed by more than 100 individuals and groups, including several anti-fracking groups, Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Gallup, New Mexico, a Methodist women’s group in New York, Physicians for Social Responsibility, a coffee house in New Orleans, and a speech therapy company in Sarasota, Florida.

Nuclear isn’t the only energy on the League’s hit list; it also dislikes fossil fuels and biomass.

The League’s policy office did not respond to an e-mail asking for details about the reasons for its opposition, or what it would take to make the group reconsider, or whether the league believes that its position is in step with the opinions of its membership.

The AARP says it has over 37 million members, which means it has more members than the Republican party, and almost as many members as the Democratic party. Like the League, it is non-partisan, but it takes positions on a variety of issues, sometimes at the national level and often at the state or local level. And like the League, it doesn’t like nuclear.

AARP worked in Columbus to oppose the 2019 legislation in Ohio to save the two nuclear power plants. It called the program, designed to let the reactors survive the very low natural gas prices of that period, “a new, unfair and unnecessary annual $300 million nuclear bailout tax” of a business that it insisted was profitable. Referring to the companies that own shares in New Jersey reactors, it also opposed legislation in Trenton to help the three reactors in New Jersey. “PSEG, Exelon, and other energy corporations are waging a campaign to increase our electric bills by forcing ratepayers to pay subsidies to increase the profitability of their aging nuclear power plants. “Lower prices are not a problem for consumers,” the group said.

In places with traditional cost-based rate setting, the expense of preliminary planning of a new plant is usually considered a cost of doing business, and thus chargeable to ratepayers, but in Iowa, AARP placed ads opposing legislation that would have let a utility there bill customers for exploring the feasibility of building a cluster of small modular reactors.

In all cases, the organization said it was acting to protect the pocketbooks of older consumers. The result is that our energy supply depends in part on hardware and technology that was new about the time that the AARP members were born. This is not a forward-looking strategy.

AARP also did not respond to an e-mail asking for details.

On the other side, The Nature Conservancy is calling for raising nuclear’s share of total world energy generation to 33 percent by 2050, as opposed to about 7.8 percent that it projects in a “business as usual” case. TNC’s overall goal is climate stability, but it favors a bigger nuclear share partly to avoid watching nature be swallowed by renewable sprawl.

The state of Georgia, it points out, gets 2 percent of its electricity from solar, but expanding that to 20 percent would require 75,000 acres of land.

One of TNC’s board members, Shirley Ann Jackson, is a former chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. TNC supported the ADVANCE Act (Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear For Clean Energy), which Congress passed in July.

Two organizations whose names might hint at support are actually opposed, but do not say so explicitly. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describes itself as “the authoritative guide to ensuring science and technology make life on Earth better, not worse.” It is mostly concerned with weapons proliferation, but it intermittently publishes articles that are highly critical of nuclear energy. Most recently, it published a piece by Victor Gilinsky, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, complaining about Congress’ instructions to the NRC, in the ADVANCE Act, to change its mission statement so that it does “not unnecessarily limit the benefits of nuclear energy to society.”

He writes, “Congress wants the commissioners to make clear to safety reviewers that every hour they will take is an hour that society will be deprived of nuclear energy (and someone’s grandmother will sit in the dark).” Another article on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist’s website decries nuclear energy as “a distraction on the road to climate solutions”

The Union of Concerned Scientists also opposes nuclear energy, but never explicitly makes a blanket statement in that direction. It is a vigorous participant in NRC hearings, and its comments on safety, current reactors, and advanced models, range from critical to dyspeptic.

It has shown some signs of internal strain, though. In a blogpost in 2018 titled “Why We’re Taking a Hard Look at Nuclear Power Plant Closures,” Ken Kimmell, former president of the organization, wrote that “we keep an open mind about all the tools in the emissions reduction toolbox—even ones that are not our personal favorites.” But the Union’s policy remains undeclared war.

In an ambiguous spot is the Audubon Society, which worked hard to try to close down the Indian Point reactors thirty years ago, and opposed nuclear energy for years afterwards. Audubon attributed damage to birds from the radiation releases at Chernobyl and Fukushima. But it now notes, without comment for or against, that various clean energy bills in Congress contain provisions to help nuclear.

In 2021, the Audubon Senior Vice President for conservation policy appeared at a nuclear industry convention. Audubon has opposed some wind development as a threat to endangered birds, but still supports wind and solar. Its transition towards a neutral stance is a step in the right direction.

As with other old-line environmental groups, opinion in the membership may be softening. In September, an attorney for the Orlando Utilities Commission, who identified himself as a 'card-carrying member of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society,' told the Public Service Commission in Tallahassee that he supported small modular reactors, according to a local news site.

Audubon has opposed some wind development as a threat to endangered birds. Audubon’s transition towards a neutral stance is a step in the right direction.

Is the position of these organizations important?

It’s not the first consideration for a company contemplating building a reactor. At the top of this list is probably the estimates of cost and schedule, and the confidence that is possible in those estimates.

But for utility companies, which are the traditional buyers of reactors, public attitudes probably play a role, and especially the attitudes of vocal, activist groups. Utilities are probably the category that first comes to mind when thinking of the market for new reactors, but, at the moment, they don’t’ seem to be on board. They worry about commitments to novel projects. The over-budget, long-delayed Vogtle project did not help in that regard.

And in the first round of nuclear construction, hundreds of small utilities thought they should invest, to be part of a bold new era of technology. In the 90s and the 00s, though, lots of those companies got out of the business, ceding it to a handful of operators who had accumulated the expertise to operate reactors effectively. It’s not clear how many small companies will jump back in, despite being able to choose from a menu that includes small reactors.

But other parties, less subject to public opinion, can build. Dow is the sponsor of the first Xe-100 high-temperature gas-graphite reactor, at a chemical plant in Texas. Amazon wants energy from that model reactor and is taking an equity position in the builder. Oklo plans to build and own its reactors, so the NRC will have input, but no public service commission will pass judgment on the prudence of the investment.

But to the extent that lobbying, testifying, and writing letters to the editor set the atmosphere in which companies decide about nuclear energy, these organizations aren’t helpful. And if you and your checkbook want to give year-end support to voting rights, issues that affect the elderly, and nuclear non-proliferation, there are plenty of places without this additional baggage.