How Green is the Atom?
(Book Under Consideration)
Since the turn of the twenty-first century the nuclear industry has proclaimed a renaissance – a rebirth of atomic power production based on modern, inherently safe reactors including so-called small modular reactors. In the early 2000s, nearly two decades after the Three Mile Island and Chornobyl accidents, industry representatives first announced this renaissance in which the atom could mitigate climate change and be an energy alternative to dwindling supply and rising prices of fossil fuels. The Fukushima disaster in 2011 briefly dimmed this nuclear faith. But as the world cooks hotter and hotter, storms increase in intensity, and ocean levels rise the renaissance has been rekindled.
How green is the atom? Many policy makers and environmentalists claim that nuclear power is the major key to abandoning a carbon economy and slowing warming. The European Commission approved a “Green Deal” to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 with nuclear power a major component of the strategy.[1] The decision to consider nuclear power as a green investment was seen by some policy makers as a necessary compromise for climate goals, given nuclear power’s near-zero greenhouse gas emissions. Yet the classification of nuclear as “green” has faced strong opposition from countries like Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Spain, who argue it is a form of “greenwashing.”[2]
There is no doubt among industry representatives across Europe, Asia and North America that nuclear power is essential to twenty-first century energy independence, safety, and environmental security.[3] France’s EDF claims that it “goes beyond regulatory requirements” to respect and preserve biodiversity around of all of its 57 nuclear power plants.[4] Sweden, whose stormy history with nuclear power resulted in a national referendum to phase out nuclear power, has reconsidered, with the determination to add four new reactors by 2045 to six operational units as a “green investment.”[5]
Surely, nuclear energy is far cleaner than coal with its carcinogenic particulates and acid rain, no matter Donald Trump’s insistences that coal is “beautiful”; better than oil with its nitrogen and sulfur oxides and which undergird Putin’s dictatorship and authoritarian regimes throughout the Mideast; or than natural gas. Around the globe scores of reactors are under construction, arranged in gleaming parks of modern machinery. In the decades after the Chornobyl disaster, orders for new stations disappeared. But today even the 2011 Tsunami that destroyed the Fukushima NPP and spread radiation across the globe has not curtailed demand for new plants. But could these plants be built without advantage legal frameworks and statutes to speed licensing and other direct and indirect subsidies? And are they a green solution to global warming?
The sanguine claims of a glorious nuclear future do not hold up fully to scrutiny. They must be balanced against a long history of environmental impacts and costs. Historical analysis reveals a deeply troubled history of the production of vast quantities of toxic, long-lived radioactive and chemical wastes, including from nuclear fuel production, atmospheric fallout and accidents; thermal pollution and other “normal” impacts associated with power generation; and huge cost overruns and delays in construction. This book is a corrective to that problem. Its goal is better to inform decisions about the aggressive turn to nuclear energy in the early twenty-first century through a complete reckoning with nuclear legacies.
This book analyzes the evolution and impact of the nuclear enterprise on the human environment – from mining to crushing, processing and enrichment; from manufacture of low- and high-enriched nuclear fuels to the huge quantities of wastes that are produced in 100 meter long concrete chemical canyons; to peaceful and military applications; and to decommissioning and the endless reckoning with long-lived radioactive wastes including spent nuclear fuel. In the first four chapters it moves through major biomes of the world where nuclear applications have had their greatest impacts: rivers, deserts, oceans and the Arctic north. This enables a fuller understanding of the significance of hydrogen bombs tests in atolls, deserts and forests, and the crushing, incineration and irradiation of flora and fauna; the inexorable spread of radiation through rivers, oceans and groundwater; the release of heated effluents; and the immense land takings for weapons manufacture facilities and reactors. In three subsequent chapters it considers systematically how the operation of nuclear facilities influences fauna: fish, birds, small mammals, and humans.
Much of the knowledge of these influences has been developed through willful and cruel experimentation, for example, the construction of “gamma” forests to evaluate the action of radioactivity on birds, small mammals, and the trees, and the massing of soldiers to send into ground zero immediately after an atomic bomb tests. The book concludes by asking how the nuclear industry might better to deal with the millions and millions of cubic meters of solid and liquid wastes before it receives more billions and billions of yen, yuan, euros, rubles and dollars in subsidies to accelerate the construction of green reactors.
Many of these environmental and public health costs and impacts were established at the dawn of the nuclear age. The are related to increasing quantities of radioactive waste, fallout from weapons tastes, ever larger nuclear power plants, and the likelihood of accidents. At every step of the way, engineers and policy makers failed to deliver on promises to solve these problems. Unfortunately, the nuclear age has been founded upon hubristic depictions of clean energy that do not hold. First of all, nuclear power is not carbon neutral, but produces greenhouse gases all along, from the preparation of sites, to the pouring of concrete, to the operation of stations. Second, land takings are extensive – entire atolls, vast desert territories, forested sites for NPPs that are cleared of vegetation. Third, reactors pollute. There is extensive thermal pollution of rivers, lakes and oceans. On top of this, the significant cost overruns and delays in construction add additional environmental costs connected with the use of machinery and labor that continue years beyond forecasts. The US, whose nuclear boom had been buffeted by the growing costs for all ongoing projects and ended with the Three Mile Island accident (“TMI,” 1986), has been struggling to re-enter world industry’s nuclear renaissance of inherently safe, and realistically priced, reactors as the answer to fossil fuels. Yet the first US project completed since the twentieth century, the Vogtle Plant, Georgia NPP, was eleven years late, $17 billion over budget, and the utility has forced Georgia electric customers to pay billions of dollars before receiving any electricity. Total cost is around $35 billion.[6] At the very least, the fact that the cost of a single 1,000 MW reactor has skyrocketed in the last decades to $20 to $30 billion should give great pause to any decision build reactors rather than turn more fully to wind and solar power.
The Nuclear Enterprise by the Numbers
The building, operation, and cleanup of the world’s nuclear enterprises, by my estimate, has cost $15 trillion. The nuclear enterprise extends to virtually all biomes and consists of a series of interconnected technological systems: electrical, explosive, transportation, construction, excavation, mining, metallurgical, military and so on. It is hard to estimate its size and total cost. But if, in the US, the cost of the military nuclear enterprise and its delivery systems was $5.5 trillion by 1995, then assume that all of the rest of the world’s military programs together were an additional $5.5 trillion.[7] The costs since 1995, judging by published Defense and Energy department budgets, is another $2 trillion. And if reactors have cost more than $1 billion each since the 1980s, and significantly more since the 2000s, and the total number of NPPs is approaching 500 NPPs, we may safely add another $1 trillion (500 reactors x $2 billion). For cleanup from accidents and wastes (see below, chapter 8), add at least another $1 trillion from TMI to Chornobyl to Fukushima.
The environmental impacts from 2,121 nuclear tests totaling 541 MT in yield have been studied in depth. Militaries conducted the tests to determine not only their impacts, but how they might rebuild from an attack. The public health and cleanup costs from fallout and venting are great and continuing (see chapter 8). At the peak of the Cold War the nuclear nations maintained 64,000 nuclear warheads to be delivered by submarine, jet or ICBM, with a maximum in the 1980s in US of 24,000 and in the USSR 39,000 – and likely 1,410 in Kazakhstan, 2,321 in Ukraine, in Belarus 81 and perhaps 60 in Lithuania, and currently 12,000 between the US and Russia. The production of weapons grade material and its residues will be discussed.
On the peaceful side of the nuclear ledger, there are approximately five hundred reactors as of mid-2025, some 440 operable commercial nuclear power reactors in the world and approximately 60 more under construction. The mix of these 440 reactors is: 310 PWRs, 60 BWRs, 47 PHWRs, RBMKs 10, AGRs 8, 2 LMFBRs, and HTGC 1. These reactors are located in over 30 countries and provide about 10% of the world’s electricity. Fourteen countries in 2024 produced at least one-quarter of their electricity from nuclear. France gets up to around 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy, while Ukraine, Slovakia and Hungary get about half of theirs. Before Fukushima, Japan generated more than one-quarter of its electricity from nuclear power. Its leaders and utilities hope to return to that level.[8]
A Global History of Ionizing Radiation
This book, a comparative environmental history of the nuclear age, makes historical sense of the penetration of nuclear technologies into desert, Arctic, tropical, limnological and oceanic ecosystems for the entire nuclear enterprise from mining to enrichment to fission; and among promoters, industrialists, financiers, and policy makers, engineers and laypeople, protestors, downwinders and indigenes. It focuses on military and peaceful nuclear programs in the northern hemisphere – from Canada and the United States to Sweden, Finland, France, Spain and the Baltic states; from the former Soviet Union, Ukraine and Russia, and such formerly socialist nuclear nations as Lithuania and the Czech Republic, to Korea, Japan and China; and from India to the African continent. It considers accidents, incidents and catastrophes. And most of all, it considers the interactions between the atom, nature, and the lives of mammals. In the end, this analysis shows that the atom is not green, and that the argument that nuclear power is a solution to global warming ignores the troubled relationship between the natural environment and peaceful and military technologies.
Normally, environmental concerns are central to scientific analyses of habitat loss, the simplification of ecosystems through monocultures and invasion, the modification of organisms including through biotechnology, overexploitation of resources, profligate use and pollution. Specialists in environmental history, while having written extensively about the nuclear enterprise, have focused on such issues as anti-nuclear protest, impacts of nuclear weapons tests on local people including downwinders and indigenes, the nuclear fuel cycle and regulation, and such major accidents as Chornobyl and Fukushima. But there is no global history of the nuclear age and nature’s response to human-made ionizing radiation.
Further, nuclear historians generally focus on one country, or on the military or the peaceful atom, not both. Similarly, the recently articulated concept of envirotechnical systems that reflects an explicit conceptualization of the relationship between the environment and technology, and that adds to the well-studied social, political and cultural factors that shape technological change, has not integrated ecosystems fully, let alone considered nuclear history. Granted, analysts of the Cold War have increasingly considered the despoliation of landscapes, the human costs of weapons tests and the intractability of cleanup of vast quantities of radioactive waste. And yet, somehow, ore, water, and animals are often seen as outside of the nuclear enterprise, even as hundreds of millions of tons of rip rap from mines has been strewn along Navaho, Inuit and Kazakh lands, and billions of cubic meters of water every day are sucked into enrichment plants and nuclear reactors for cooling and dilution, and in the process those technologies kill fish, shellfish, seals, otters.[9]
Not only technological systems, reservations, test sites and reactors are nuclear. Many of the objects and features of this world – humans, fish, birds, uranium and concrete, power lines, construction machinery, rebuilt waterways and so on – become nuclear. Hecht names this phenomenon “nuclearity.”[10] One way to examine nuclearity in greater depth is to consider how environmental aspects of nuclear applications share features with other industrial activities. Profligate water use, erosion, ground water pollution, discarded materials considered unimportant or worthless – all of these things occur in other spheres of industry. Similarly, nuclear projects involve terracing, excavating, mining, clearing of forest, draining of wetlands, modification of lakes and rivers, digging, construction, the use of explosives, and shipments of vast quantities of ore and other materials.
One last point is the common assertion that military nuclear programs significantly differed from civilian ones by virtue of their vast scale, end (explosive versus peaceful fission), kinds of toxic wastes produced, and the employment of tens of thousands of employees in research institutes, production plants and bomb making facilities. But the placing of military and civilian nuclear applications in separate boxes is intended to disarm critics of the dangers and hidden costs of the enterprise.[11] This book shows that the highly complex military and civilian nuclear systems are of the same piece with overlapping fuels, institutions, technologies, components, personnel, and with impacts on people and the environment that cannot be treated separately except precisely for rhetorical purposes.
[1] European Commission, “The Green Deal,” at https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/european-green-deal_en#:~:text=European%20Green%20Deal-,The%20European%20Green%20Deal,2050%20climate%20neutrality%20commitment%20binding
[2] Ezio Baldari, “Nuclear and fossil gas can be labeled Green; EU Court rejects Austria’s appeal,” EUNews, September 10, 2025, at https://www.eunews.it/en/2025/09/10/nuclear-and-fossil-gas-can-be-labeled-green-eu-court-rejects-austrias-appeal/#:~:text=Brussels%20%E2%80%93%20Nuclear%20and%20fossil%20gas,energy%20demand%20continuously%20and%20reliably
[3] EDF, “Le nucléaire, partenaire incontournable pour une société bas carbone,” athttps://www.edf.fr/groupe-edf/produire-une-energie-respectueuse-du-climat/l-energie-nucleaire/notre-vision
[4] EDF, “La maîtrise de l’impact environnemental des centrales,” at https://www.edf.fr/groupe-edf/produire-une-energie-respectueuse-du-climat/lenergie-nucleaire/nous-preparons-le-nucleaire-de-demain/la-maitrise-de-limpact-environnemental-des-centrales
[5] Arne Kaijser, “Redirecting Power: Swedish Nuclear Power Policies in Historical Perspective,” Annual Review of Energy and the Environment, vol. 17, no. 1 (2003), 437-462; Julius Andersson, “Nuclear Energy Renaissance: Powering Sweden’s Climate Policy,” Free Policy Briefs, April 15, 2024, at https://freepolicybriefs.org/2024/04/15/sweden-nuclear-energy/
[6] Jeff Amy, “Georgia nuclear rebirth arrives 7 years late, $17B over cost,” AP, May 25, 2023, at https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtle-rates-costs-75c7a413cda3935dd551be9115e88a64
[7] Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 edited by Stephen I. Schwartz.
[8] World Nuclear Association, “Nuclear Power in the World Today,” October 2025 at https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/nuclear-power-in-the-world-today#:~:text=The%20first%20commercial%20nuclear%20power,as%20well%20as%20for%20training.
[9] Sara Pritchard, “An Envirotechnical Disaster: Nature, Technology, and Politics at Fukushima,” Environmental History 17 (April 2012), 219–243.
[10] Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Nuclear Trade (Cambridge: MIT, 2011). On nuclear waters, see Per Högselius, Achim Klüppelberg, The Soviet Nuclear Archipelago: A Historical Geography of Atomic-Powered Communism (Budapest: CEU Press, 2024).
[11] Andy Stirling and Phil Johnstone, A Global Picture of Industrial Interdependencies Between
Civil and Military, Nuclear Infrastructures, SWPS 2018-13 (Sussex: University of Sussex, August 2018).