NPT News in Review, Vol. 20, No. 5

Editorial: Atoms for Propaganda
8 May 2025

By Ray Acheson

Throughout cluster three discussions, many delegations once again espoused the alleged values of nuclear energy, including its purported ability to solve the climate crisis and achieve sustainable development. Several governments expressed their interest in developing or expanding their nuclear power production, including as a way to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. But as outlined in last year’s editorial in response to cluster three, nuclear power is not the solution to meeting energy needs or lowering costs or mitigating climate change. Instead, it generates grave harm and serious risks for people and for the planet.

Radioactive racism

Nuclear power is not green, emission free, or environmentally friendly. Its use can result in catastrophic accidents, as seen with Chernobyl and Fukushima, and its every day operation results in environmental contamination and extreme water consumption. Additionally, nuclear power requires uranium mining, fuel processing, and radioactive waste storage—each of which brings its own harms to local communities and the planet. Uranium mining and waste storage are usually imposed upon Indigenous Peoples, often without their knowledge or consent, leading to contamination of traditional food, water sources, and impacting culture, land use, and the health of humans and animals.

As communities affected by various aspects of the nuclear industry said in a joint statement to the Second Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in November 2023, “From the mining of uranium to the creation of the bomb to the everlasting radioactive waste, our planet carries the scars of so many nuclear sacrifice zones. Nuclear colonialism has disproportionately impacted Indigenous Peoples and marginalised communities.”

None of this is mentioned during the cluster three propaganda for nuclear power. And neither are the harms generated by spreading all of this nuclear material and technology around the world. One such potential harm, of course, is the risk of nuclear weapon proliferation. India and Israel, for example, used nuclear power programmes to develop nuclear weapons. But even less visible or talked about are the deals made for nuclear cooperation: what do the countries with the technical capacity and materials to build nuclear reactors get in return for their nuclear cooperation, and/or what do countries offer in exchange nuclear partnerships?

An extremely insidious example is the new nuclear cooperation agreement between El Salvador and the United States. In its cluster three statement, the US delegation proudly announced that in February 2025 it lauched a bilateral nuclear energy partnership with El Salvador for the deployment of small modular reactors. What the US didn’t mention in its statement is that in exchange, El Salvador agreed to incarcerate people of any nationality of whom the US regime wants to dispose.

The United States has already begun to unlawfully, without due process and in defiance of court orders, put human beings in chains and ship them off to the notoriously horrific mega-prison in El Salvador. This prison is a human rights nightmare, where those incarcerated are tortured, subject to inhumane conditions, denied due process, and never allowed to leave. So far, the US has sent Venezuelan men; the majority of people to be sent here by the US will likely be marginalised and racialised people, thus uniquely contributing to the other forms of radioactive racism noted above.

The fact that nuclear power has become part of an unconsiconable arrangement that dehumanises and disposes of human beings warrants investigation by the international community, including those who promote nuclear energy as a “good” for humanity. It also raises the question of what other arrangements or deals have been made between states for nuclear cooperation, and what harms have such deals produced.

Climate deceits

Beyond the harms generated by nuclear power, it is also not a “green” solution to climate change. First, nuclear energy is not carbon-neutral—all the processes to generate nuclear power use other sources of energy and consume vast amounts of water. Emissions from nuclear are lower than fossil fuels but much higher than renewables when life cycle and opportunity cost emissions are considered. In addition, nuclear reactors frequently face shutdowns, meaning they are not always producing the promised amount of energy, and other energy sources end up being used instead.

Second, the timelines for building and bringing nuclear power reactors online (more than a decade) are beyond the timelines for addressing climate change. This has led to collusion between the nuclear and fossil fuel industries—promising to bring nuclear power online as the solution to the climate crisis buys coal and gas power plants extra years of operation, as it will be at least a decade before any new nuclear reactor can begin generating electricity. As hundreds of civil society groups said to the UN Climate Conference (COP26), “Every dollar invested in nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse by diverting investment from renewable energy technology.” Thus, nuclear power is “a dangerous distraction from the real movement on the climate policies and actions that we urgently need.”

Don’t beleve the hype

Despite these inherent problems, delegations every year wax poetic about the alleged virtues of nuclear power. This year there was a lot of hype about small modular reactors (SMRs). Argentina, Canada, Czechia, Estonia, Finland, France, Poland, the Republic of Korea, Romania, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States all expressed excitement about the potential of SMRs during the cluster three discussions. Others, including Belgium, Egypt, Italy, and Zimbabwe, said they are following SMR developments with interest. But as M.V. Ramana of the University of British Columbia notes, “hype, advertisement, and belief in impossible promises” is “very much the norm” when it comes to nuclear power. He explains:

In 2003, an important study produced by nuclear advocates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology identified costs, safety, proliferation and waste as the four “unresolved problems” with nuclear power. Not surprisingly, then, companies trying to sell new reactor designs claim that their product will be cheaper, will produce less—or no—radioactive waste, be immune to accidents, and not contribute to nuclear proliferation.

Companies producing SMR technolgy, and countries investing in it, have claimed that these reactors are the answer to all of nuclear energy’s problems and the solution to the climate crisis. So far, all of the claims have been proven false. Everywhere they have been tried, SMRs have resulted in unplanned shutdowns or reduced power outputs, or have used chemically corrosive materials leading to other environmental harms. As Ramana notes, SMRs cannot compete with solar and wind economically, will not be able to contribute to reducing reliance on fossil fuels on any timeframe useful for mitigating the climate crisis, and pose the same proliferation and safey risks and radioactive waste as large-scale reactors. A 2014 article in Energy Research & Social Science concluded that the nuclear industry is building support for SMRs by putting forward “rhetorical visions imbued with elements of fantasy.”

But the fawning attention given to SMRs during cluster three discussions suggests the industry’s propaganda has worked for some countries. Canada delivered a sales pitch for SMRs, espousing its climate benefits and claiming that Canada is “on track to be one of the first countries to deploy a grid-scale SMR.” Companies building SMRs in Canada have received millions of dollars in federal and provincial funding, and thus the government has a vested interest in seeing the technology succeed. But reality offers a different story, to the point where Joseph Romm of the University of Pennyslvania has described SMRs as a “false promise” and a “dead end” in a recent report. In relation to Canada specificially, Ramana has pointed out that SMRs will be far too expensive to serve remote communities.

Even still, Big Tech has also been taken in by the SMR hype. The enormous consumption of energy by tech companies that are building and operating more and more data centres for cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) has led some companies—including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon—to proclaim they will invest in nuclear energy. The more data centres they build, the more energy these centres will require for construction and operation, the more water they will consume, the more nuclear reactors they will require, and the more harm they will cause to the planet and local communities. As activist Koohan Paik-Mander writes, “It’s Manifest Destiny for data.”

Ramana points out that announcements by these companies about their investments in nuclear power “serve as a flashy distraction to focus public attention on” while these companies continue to expand their use of water and draw on coal and gas for their electricity. “This is the magician’s strategy: misdirecting the audience’s attention while the real trick happens elsewhere. Their talk about investing in nuclear power also distracts from the conversations we should be having about whether these data centers and generative AI are socially desirable in the first place.”

The future is renewable, not radioactive

Not every country is charmed by the nuclear industy’s propoganda and fantasies, however. In May 2011, after the catastrophe at Fukushima, the governments of Austria, Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, and Portugal declared that “the risks of nuclear power outweigh the benefits.” Among other things, these governments argued that nuclear power is not compatible with the concept of sustainable development and called for energy conservation and a switch to renewable sources of energy world-wide.

During cluster three discussions, Austria emphasised that nuclear power is not compatible with the concept of sustainable development, nor is it a viable or cost effective option to combat climate change. It noted:

The comparatively low CO2 emissions of nuclear power do not compensate for disadvantages inevitably connected to nuclear power. For example, first, the safe and permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel remains unresolved. To date, not a single repository for such waste is in operation. Even if such repositories would become operational in the foreseeable future, today’s knowledge can hardly guarantee the safe enclosure required for hundred thousands of years. Second, we cannot completely exclude severe accidents from nuclear power plants involving large and early releases of radionuclides with significant adverse consequences, including contamination even on the territory of other countries. These are important concerns in relation to cross-border and long-term environmental and health impacts of nuclear accidents. Third, there is only a limited supply of uranium and plutonium available worldwide and a nuclear “fuel cycle” does not exist so far. If there would be such a cycle, it would trigger additional challenges regarding safety, security, and safeguards.

Other countries have also rejected nuclear power. Ireland reiterated that it “has chosen not to include nuclear power in its energy mix,” while Australia noted that its domestic laws do not permit nuclear power generation. Interestingly, this played a major role in the recent election in Australia, where the people firmly rejected the opposition party’s attempt to change this law to build nuclear power plants across the country. Fierce resistance was mounted against this plan, with organisations mobilising to raise awareness and point out the inherent risks and harm caused by nuclear power and the fallacy of its contributions to mitigating the climate crisis. The Juice Media, a satirical Australian news organisation that makes “honest government ads,” excoriated nuclear power in a video comparing costs and timelines of nuclear power to renewables and highlighting industry propaganda.

Work continues in Australia to end uranium mining and prevent the imposition of radioactive waste storage sites, including as part of the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine deal, which many Indigenous, antinuclear, labour, and environmental groups are also actively opposing. And of course, Australia also needs to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, in line with the current government’s own party platform, as Gem Romuld of ICAN Australia writes in an article in this edition of the NPT News in Review.

But the coordinated, compelling, and successful resistence to nuclear power in Australia shows it is possible to protect people and the planet from these dangerous technologies. Phasing out nuclear power and pursuing ecologically protective and justice-oriented renewable energy projects—coupled with degrowth policies to reduce the consumption of energy, particularly in the Global North—is the only way to adequately address the climate crisis and provide for the well-being of people and planet.

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