The world is entering a new nuclear era, in which weapons and energy production are once again linked and justified by the worrisome notion of ‘national security.’ In her contribution to the “Pluriverse of Peace” series, Jen Richter deconstructs this justification of nuclear power, shifting the focus of the nuclear narrative to claims of intergenerational environmental justice and peace.
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I view the resurgence of nuclear ambitions as a nuclear palimpsest, employing the same rationales of security, independence, and sovereignty to justify the development of new nuclear infrastructure. Under the guise of national security, nations will invest trillions of dollars in weapons systems to safeguard their domestic interests, both at home and abroad. No nation has said they will use nuclear weapons to impose their will on others. Instead, investing in a nuclear arsenal is framed as a matter of national defense.
They will invest in energy systems like gigawatt-scale nuclear reactors, as well as novel and untested small modular reactors (SMRs), to undergird ‘energy sovereignty’ or ‘energy independence.’ Spurred by recent policies in the United States, under the second Trump administration’s sudden and rapid alienation of former allies in Canada, Mexico, Great Britain and the European Union, more nations are planning their futures around these investments into weapons and energy. Even countries that have previously rejected nuclear power, such as Germany, are now reconsidering, captivated by its potential. Meanwhile, several other nations, including Vietnam, France, the US, and Poland, are entering into agreements to build large-scale reactors.
While the specific agreements are still developing, these partnerships and discussions indicate an emerging nuclear reorganization, mixing energy and weapons into a toxic stew that hides the ways that nations will fuel their nuclear ambitions. Do nuclear technologies make a country more ‘secure’? And what does that mean specifically? Have we already forgotten the horrors of nuclear technology from the second half of the 20th century? The erasure of historical nuclear legacies is especially evident in the wake of nuclear energy disasters that continue to unfold, creating mistrust in institutions and political polarization, such as Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011. This ongoing disaster belies the ideal that risks from nuclear technologies are easily containable, while the benefits are endless. However, the paradoxes of ‘safe’ nuclear power contradict this simple dichotomy: In 2025, soil from the ruined plant will be used on flowerbeds on the Prime Minister’s estate to assure the public that there is nothing wrong with slightly radioactive soil, while the site will take until 2051 (at least) to decommission. In a more violent example, Ukraine’s dependence on nuclear power has made its energy infrastructure incredibly vulnerable after Russia’s continuing invasion. Russia’s capture of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (one of the world’s largest) in 2022, coupled with constant attacks on infrastructure throughout southern Ukraine, has created systemic instability and weakened centralized energy systems. Other countries will attempt to counter this by developing small modular reactors.
Resisting the nuclear promise
Many nations characterize nuclear arms and energy as domestic investments, citing only the missiles and reactors that will lie inside of their borders, pulsating both threat and energy. But both of these technologies are troubled by two major complications: 1) the international nuclear fuel cycle, and 2) the passage of time. On the first point, the nuclear fuel cycle is dependent on uranium extraction, milling, and conversion for nuclear fuel, for both conventional reactors and SMRs. The reactor itself is a node for multinational interventions into domestic economies, yoking smaller, vulnerable countries to exploitative contracts that may or may not result in nuclear power at some imaginary point in the future.
When states base their sovereignty and economic future on nuclear technologies, the discourse of national security collapses. Historically and continuously, anti-nuclear movements and activists have been portrayed as anti-progress and anti-state, as well as NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard)ists. However, diminishing and dismissing the groups and communities that question the totalizing nature of nuclear discourse obscures the success of many pro-justice arguments raised by anti-nuclear activism, such as demands for transparency, accountability, and intergenerational considerations. Who needs energy, and for what purposes? What kind of energy meets the needs of ecosystems and ‘everyone’? But the meaning of ‘everyone’ has already shifted. Initially, SMRs were imagined for remote Indigenous communities that are currently reliant on diesel energy. In Alaska, the state government is trying to streamline a permitting process for SMRs, mimicking the US government’s Nuclear Regulatory Committee’s fasttrack process. However, companies like Microsoft are now buying entire nuclear reactors for their data centers and AI projects. While this benefits Big Tech, it removes nuclear energy from the control of municipalities and communities that also need it.
The passage of time also makes any nuclear dreaming suspect. For all the promises of ‘clean, unlimited’ energy, the purported need for more nuclear energy is repeatedly connected to the development of large-scale data centers, to power the growth of AI, cryptocurrency, and other energy intensive innovations. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has licensed two SMR designs currently, both from NuScale, but expects to receive 25 more applications in the next year for new designs by other companies. Combined with the deregulatory fervor of the current administration in the US, these fast-tracked designs should inspire deep skepticism among the public, especially as many of the data centers they will purportedly support will never get built.
Building future economies and societies around two untested and unproven technologies is a huge gamble that follows the classic capitalist pattern of privatizing profits while socializing risks. This approach is exemplified by the fact that no SMR is expected to produce commercial energy before 2035. Under current U.S. policies aimed at eliminating wind and solar energy, only fossil fuel-based sources will be able to power new innovations, which will effectively ramp up climate change within the next ten years.
None of these institutions or companies promoting nuclear technologies recognize past harms or effects beyond current political timelines; only potential future benefits are discussed. For SMR developers, concerns about nuclear waste are as shortsighted and limited as they were in the 1950s. Of the developers I questioned, one echoed the sentiments of many in the SMR design space: concerns about waste risks are overblown, and it is the federal government’s responsibility to deal with waste, not private companies. This is despite the fact that one of the major investors and fuel suppliers for this particular SMR is the US Department of Defense. SMRs’ unique waste streams follow the same distressing pattern as commercial waste reactors, where waste is seen as a problem for future generations while energy is needed today to fuel private investment growth.
Intergenerational solidarity
Nuclear waste is already an intergenerational problem, one that reveals the systemic and structural inequalities throughout the nuclear waste fuel cycle. These are not ‘externalities’ to nuclear technologies, as economics would frame them; they are inherencies. And they are currently rippling through the neatly framed rationales of energy sovereignty and national security. One prevalent example is communities already struggling to make the long-term effects of radiation contamination evident and actionable through activism and policy. The Navajo Nation in the Four Corners region of the US is one such community. It is the largest tribal nation by land and population. For over 70 years, or several generations, the Navajo have been plagued by the legacies of irresponsible and unethical uranium mining. The traces of nuclear ‘development’ remain in the landscape and on the bodies of those who continue to fight against the erasure of this past. This creates a multilayered nuclear history and future.
The struggles of the Navajo, and others affected by the uranium fuel cycle and weapons testing in the West of the US were finally (and only partially) recognized in the passage of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) in 1990, which was one of the first comprehensive bills passed by Congress to address the health concerns of different affected communities in the Southwest of the US, including Navajo Miners and downwinders from atomic testing sites. RECA was exceptionally difficult to access due to bureaucratic complications, and its amendment in 2000 made it easier for claims to be made, and has paid out over USD$2.6b to over 41,000 claimants. But RECA was sunset in 2024, despite bipartisan support from legislators in affected states, presenting a huge setback for environmental and intergenerational justice for tribal and other affected communities. This occurred even as the complicating effects of radiation across generations is becoming more evident. The ending of RECA was a blow to these communities, that the federal government was finished with these conversations and wanted to put them in the past, even as more environmental and health concerns are emerging.
For anti-war/environmental justice activists, it is imperative to locate and support policies like RECA, that recognize and materially address the lingering and harmful effects of reckless nuclear development. Currently, legislators in states that continue to be affected, like New Mexico, are pushing for more policies like RECA for their constituents, and support these efforts by making them visible is critical for battling erasure. Linking these efforts together in an age of information across space and time is crucial, though so hard to do in a world awash in so much violence and injustice. Support for communities like the Navajo, the Marshall Islands, and Eastern Europeans suffering from cancer and other health effects after Chernobyl will be necessary for future communities who are being enmeshed into new nuclear experiments by their national leaders. Global nuclear resistance and justice for past, present, and future generations is inextricably interlinked. The need to make these palimpsestic intergenerational connections visible, politically-relevant, and modern for generations new to nuclear disaster is the continuing project for all of us.