Patricia “Pat” Marida – Sierra Club Stalwart and Greenpeace Fellow-Traveler

Pat Marida is a linchpin of Ohio’s anti-nuclear scene. Based in Columbus, she spent over a decade on the Ohio Sierra Club’s Executive Committee and chaired its Nuclear Free Committee. Marida has been an anti-nuclear activist since at least the 1980s, when she campaigned for a Nuclear Weapons Freeze during the Cold War. By her own account, she has “followed nuclear issues at the state, national and international level” for decades. Today she coordinates the Ohio Nuclear Free Network, serving as a go-to organizer for rallies, petitions, and testimony in the Statehouse against anything pro-nuclear.

Marida’s view of nuclear power is uniformly hostile and notably absolutist. In December 2023 testimony to the Ohio House, she declared: “There is nothing ‘green’ about nuclear power…its real product is forever-deadly radioactive waste. THIS IS NOT GREEN.” She dismissed the fact that reactors produce electricity with zero carbon emissions, retorting that the nuclear fuel cycle involves mining, enrichment, and waste storage that “disrupt the environment and spread radioactivity.” In that same testimony, Marida made some astounding claims: she argued new small modular reactors (SMRs) “don’t exist now and won’t exist for a decade or more (yet the U.S. Navy has produced Small Modular Reactors for decades to power submarines and aircraft carriers), if ever,” and asserted that “operating reactors are already as much as 10 times more expensive as wind and solar” - wich is not dealing with economic realities and comparing apples to apples. She painted nuclear energy as essentially a scam – saying Wall Street won’t fund it, taxpayers will foot the bill, and pointing to one startup’s troubles as proof that “nuclear costs are going up, while renewables are going down.” Marida even sneered that unlike nuclear plants, “no guards are needed for wind turbines and solar panels.” (True – you generally don’t need armed security to protect windmills, but that hardly makes wind and solar inherently superior forms of energy. It simply underscores nuclear materials’ sensitivity, which is part of why reactors are so secure in the first place.)

Beyond the talking points, Marida’s activism bleeds into a broader leftist agenda. She frequently appears at so-called peace and justice events – e.g. speaking at a “Central Ohioans for Peace” meeting about “nuclear threats to the Great Lakes”. Under Marida’s leadership, the Ohio Nuclear Free Network has explicitly allied itself with left-wing and anti-Israel groups, as noted earlier. She urges her supporters to follow organizations like American Muslims for Palestine and the Ohio Divest Coalition (which campaigns against investments in Israel) beyondnuclear.org. These are not tangential relationships; they illustrate the political lens through which Marida sees the anti-nuclear fight. It’s not merely about kilowatts and radiation levels – it’s about “us vs. the Jews,” with nuclear power cast as a tool of the powers she opposes (corporations, the U.S. government, Israel, etc.). Given this mindset, it’s unsurprising that Marida often downplays or ignores scientific data that contradicts her dire pronouncements, instead focusing on emotive appeals about “forever-deadly” waste and invoking Orwellian imagery of corporate malfeasance. We’ll debunk those claims later, but suffice it to say, Marida’s one-sided portrayal of nuclear energy leaves out a lot – from the extremely small carbon footprint of nuclear to the very real downsides of the renewables she champions.

Ohio’s Anti-Nuclear Personalities: Who Are They?

Let’s profile a few of the prominent Ohio voices leading this charge – and examine the claims and agendas they bring to the table:

Terry Lodge – The Anti-Nuclear Attorney and “Unsung Hero”of Anti-Semites Everywhere

If Ohio’s anti-nuclear movement has a misguided legal warrior, it’s Terry J. Lodge, a Toledo-based attorney who has made a career of fighting energy projects. Lodge has been active in anti-nuclear and peace circles since the 1970s. He received a national award in 2018 from the very dubious and misguided Alliance for Nuclear Accountability for his decades of work opposing nuclear power plants and radioactive waste sites. Indeed, Lodge serves as legal counsel for Beyond Nuclear (the national anti-nuclear organization) on multiple fronts: he has represented Beyond Nuclear in challenges to the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, fought against proposals to produce advanced reactor fuel at the Portsmouth, Ohio site, and sued to block interim spent fuel storage facilities in New Mexico and Texas. In short, if there’s a nuclear project on the horizon, Lodge is ready to file an injunction.

Lodge isn’t just a misguided environmental lawyer; he’s a veteran “peace movement” activist as well. By his own description, he’s been an “anti-war, environmental and civil rights” attorney for decades. This background shows in his anti-nuclear rhetoric, which often connects nuclear power to nuclear weapons and militarism. (Beyond Nuclear explicitly links “the connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons”, and Lodge’s work reflects that ethos.) For example, Lodge has argued that enriching uranium for fuel could lead to bomb material proliferation, warning Ohio legislators about the Portsmouth enrichment plant’s risks. It’s a classic anti-nuclear tactic: conflate nuclear energy with nuclear war, sowing fear that any reactor or fuel facility is just a hair’s breadth from an apocalyptic explosion.

By all accounts, Lodge is relentless and sincere – he truly believes he’s preventing catastrophe and corporate wrongdoing. He has likened some of his legal fights to “guerrilla” tactics in defense of the environment. In tone, Lodge tends to be less bombastic than Marida or Maupin; instead, he fights in courtrooms and regulatory hearings, often on wonky issues like environmental impact statements and safety hearings. Yet his underlying ideology matches the others’. In a recent webinar organized by Ohio Nuclear-Free Network, Lodge shared the stage with activists from groups like Veterans for Peace and, tellingly, American Muslims for Palestine. The event wasn’t just about technical nuclear waste issues – it veered into critiques of U.S. military projects (like Anduril’s AI drones) and calls to divest from “war” industries. This exemplifies how Lodge and his peers see nuclear through a political-ideological prism. To them, opposing nuclear power is part of a seamless tapestry of opposing war, opposing Israel, opposing capitalist industry – in short, opposing “the system.” While Lodge’s courtroom maneuvers focus on procedural and safety claims, the bigger picture is that he, like Marida, ultimately wants to rid the world of nuclear technology entirely, no matter what the data says about its benefits.

Caleb Maupin – From Ohio Communist to Russian TV Propagandist

A more controversial (and colorful) character in this orbit is Caleb Maupin. Maupin, now in his 30s, grew up in rural Ohio and made a name for himself as a “loud and proud” communist activist in Cleveland. In his early twenties, he led a small Marxist youth group (Cleveland FIST – Fight Imperialism, Stand Together) and was noted as “the forefront of the local far-left” scene. Maupin immersed himself in socialist theory from a young age (famously reading The Communist Manifesto in fifth grade) and joined the Workers World Party as a teenager. He championed every leftist cause around, from union pickets to anti-war rallies, quickly gaining a reputation as Cleveland’s resident young radical. The Cleveland Scene profiled him in 2010, half-admiringly, as the kid who would show up with a bullhorn at any protest and wax poetic about Marx and Mao.

Maupin’s trajectory took a sharp turn when he became a contributor to Russia’s RT network in the 2010s. RT (formerly Russia Today) is a state-controlled outlet that eagerly employs Westerners to critique their own governments. Maupin fit the bill perfectly – he was fiercely anti-American foreign policy and willing to defend authoritarian regimes so long as they opposed the U.S. (He’s been known to praise or excuse Russia, Syria’s Assad, and others loathed by the West – a so-called “tankie” stance.) Maupin styled himself as a political analyst and “anti-imperialist journalist.” In practice, he became a megaphone for Kremlin talking points, including those on energy. During the Fukushima nuclear accident, RT gave extensive airtime to anti-nuclear activists, and Maupin was part of that milieu. He and his colleagues pushed the narrative that Fukushima was an unmitigated planetary catastrophe, implying that “any notion that nuclear power is clean is now dispelled” – as one RT segment with Beyond Nuclear’s Kevin Kamps put it. The goal was clear: amplify fear to pressure Western countries (especially U.S. allies like Japan and Germany) to abandon nuclear energy. Maupin, with his ingrained mistrust of the U.S. government and corporations, had no qualms parroting this line. After all, it served both his ideological mission and his employer’s geopolitical interests.

It’s worth noting that Maupin’s positions often slide into outright hypocrisy and extremism. Here’s a self-proclaimed champion of the working class advocating against one of the highest-paying, zero-carbon industries (nuclear power) that could secure reliable energy for those very workers. He rails against U.S. “imperialism” but gladly cashes a check from an actual imperialist regime (Putin’s Russia) to spread propaganda. Maupin has also aligned with fringe causes like defending North Korea and promoting bizarre “tankie” economics – the sort of positions that would make even many leftists cringe. In Ohio, he’s less directly involved now (having moved to New York), but he remains a folk hero to the far-left anti-nuclear crowd. His career is a case study in how easily ostensible idealists can become mouthpieces for illiberal regimes, so long as it scratches their anti-American itch. The next time you see an RT article or YouTube video slamming a U.S. nuclear plant or hyping a minor leak into an existential crisis, check the byline – you might just find an Ohio-born “comrade” grinning back at you.

Kevin Kamps – Fearmonger-in-Chief on Radioactive Waste

Kevin Kamps is the radioactive waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear, and he has made a career out of scaring the public about anything nuclear. Kamps is a familiar face at hearings and on activist media, always ready with a grave warning about spent fuel pools or waste transport. For example, in the wake of Fukushima, Kamps repeatedly stoked fears that U.S. reactor spent fuel pools could catch fire and release apocalyptic amounts of radioactivity. In one media blast, he asserted that the oldest U.S. reactor (Oyster Creek) had a full fuel pool holding “125 million curies of cesium-137” and that “up to 100 percent of the hazardous material could be released from a pool fire.” He went on to claim that several U.S. reactors have spent fuel inventories exceeding those of Fukushima’s pools, implying America is a ticking time bomb.

These statements are technically cherry-picked and designed to terrify. Yes, spent fuel pools hold a lot of radioactivity – but Kamps omits that they are built with multiple redundant cooling systems and thick concrete/steel barriers, and that even in Fukushima’s beyond-design-basis accident, the feared pool fire never occurred. In fact, a video inspection confirmed Fukushima’s spent fuel pools remained intact with water covering the fuel assemblies. As one nuclear engineer quipped in response to Kamps’ rhetoric: “NOTHING happened to the fuel in the pools at Fukushima… the fuel didn’t move an inch.” Kamps and his fellow travelers nonetheless spread the myth that Fukushima’s pools burned, ejected fuel “pieces” miles away, etc., long after it was disproven. This is a pattern: cite a theoretical worst-case and insinuate it’s imminent. Kamps has done similarly with nuclear waste transport (talking about “mobile Chernobyls” on our highways) and proposed waste repositories (claiming any site will inevitably leak poison into drinking water for millennia). The nuance he leaves out is that engineers and regulators have addressed these scenarios extensively. The “125 million curies” in a pool is irrelevant if it stays contained – which multiple analyses show it will under almost all circumstances. But fear sells, and Kamps is one of the salesmen.

Notably, Kamps also pops up regularly on platforms like RT to decry nuclear developments. In a 2015 interview on RT International, Kamps ominously described Fukushima cleanup efforts – complete with footage of “large mounds of radioactive waste” and declarations that entire towns are now “Dead Zones, indefinitely uninhabitable”. While Fukushima did displace residents, phrases like “indefinitely uninhabitable” are hyperbolic – areas around the plant have been decontaminated and many evacuees have returned over the past decade. But Kamps consistently exaggerates the lasting harm, as it bolsters the anti-nuclear narrative. He and Beyond Nuclear push a policy of absolute stasis on nuclear waste: “We do not consent” to any centralized storage or repository, they proclaim, effectively preferring to leave the waste where it is (at dozens of reactor sites) and block any solution that might make nuclear energy more palatable. It’s a classic catch-22 strategy: prevent the resolution of the waste issue, then use the unresolved status as a reason to ban nuclear power. In sum, Kevin Kamps exemplifies the dishonest alarmism of the anti-nuclear movement – always predicting disaster, never acknowledging when his predictions don’t materialize, and never crediting the industry’s strong safety record.

National Anti-Nuclear Figures and Misguided Arguments

Ohio’s activists don’t operate in a vacuum; they draw inspiration and often misinformation from prominent national (and international) anti-nuclear figures. Let’s examine a few of these influencers – Kevin Kamps, Dr. Helen Caldicott, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – and shine a light on the shaky foundations of their anti-nuclear claims.

Dr. Helen Caldicott – Patron Saint of Nuclear Alarmism

No pantheon of anti-nuclear activists is complete without Dr. Helen Caldicott. An Australian pediatrician by training, Caldicott became the face of the anti-nuclear movement in the late 1970s and 1980s with her impassioned pleas against nuclear weapons and nuclear power. To her credit, she raised awareness about the horrific potential of nuclear war. But Caldicott’s claims about nuclear power and radiation often veer into gross exaggeration and pseudoscience, earning rebukes even from fellow environmentalists. For decades, she has traveled the world giving lectures that effectively equate nuclear energy with doom. She famously stated that “radioactive emissions from nuclear plants will give you cancer” and that living near a reactor is tantamount to a health crisis – claims not supported by epidemiological studies (which generally find no meaningful health impact from normal reactor operations).

Caldicott’s most infamous claim is her insistence that the 1986 Chernobyl accident caused nearly 1 million deaths. She frequently cited a 2010 book by several Russian authors (published by the New York Academy of Sciences) that estimated 985,000 deaths from Chernobyl. This figure is exponentially higher than any mainstream scientific estimates (the UN WHO report estimated a few thousand eventual cancer deaths). Caldicott’s promotion of the “nearly one million” figure drew sharp criticism. British environmental journalist George Monbiot – initially an anti-nuclear sympathizer – publicly challenged Caldicott on this point. Monbiot wrote in The Guardian in 2011 that “the anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health.”theguardian.com He specifically called out Caldicott for pointing him to that dubious study, noting that its methodology was deeply flawed and that Caldicott “at best misinforms and at worst distorts evidence”theguardian.com. In their very testy public exchanges, Caldicott asserted that Monbiot was lying and that in fact “the real death toll [of Chernobyl] is more than 4 million” – doubling and quadrupling down on an assertion that virtually no credible scientific body validates. This tendency – to make outrageously large claims about nuclear disasters – has led even sympathetic skeptics to distance themselves from her.

Yet, Caldicott remains a hero to anti-nuclear activists, who pack auditoriums to hear her speak in quasi-religious terms about the evils of radiation. After the Fukushima accident, she predicted “Japan will be uninhabitable” and that countless Japanese would die of cancer or have deformed babies. Over ten years later, those dire prophecies have not come to pass – Fukushima’s health impacts have been minimal (no radiation deaths, and studies project at most a tiny statistical uptick in cancer that may not even be detectable) mackinac.org. Caldicott’s response? She largely ignores contrary evidence and continues to issue dire warnings. It’s textbook confirmation bias, bolstered by her status as an elder stateswoman of the movement whom supporters are loath to question. Caldicott also frequently links nuclear power with nuclear weapons proliferation (she claims any reactor is a bomb factory in disguise) and with genetic harm (invoking debunked ideas about low-dose radiation causing multigenerational mutations). The bottom line is that Dr. Helen Caldicott, for all her heartfelt activism, has done enormous harm by misleading the public about actual radiation risks. Her hyperbole (“millions killed” when reality was far different) undermines rational policy discussion. Unfortunately, her emotional appeal still acts as a rallying cry for anti-nuclear groups in Ohio and beyond, who repeat her talking points even when they’ve been resoundingly debunked by scientific authorities.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is not an activist individual, but rather a publication and organization that looms large in nuclear discourse. Famous for its “Doomsday Clock,” the Bulletin has warned of impending catastrophe (first nuclear Armageddon, now also climate change) since the 1940s. While the Bulletin’s original mission was to caution against nuclear weapons proliferation, in recent decades its scope expanded – and it often publishes pieces deeply skeptical of nuclear power as well. Many of the Bulletin’s contributors come from the same school of thought as Caldicott and Kamps. For example, the Bulletin ran a piece titled “The false promise of nuclear power in an age of climate change” by anti-nuclear academics that argued nuclear is simply too slow, too expensive, and too dangerous to help with climate change. Another Bulletin article enumerated “a dozen factors” that supposedly render nuclear power “too expensive to compete” in energy markets. The consistent tone is one of highlighting every downside of nuclear energy – cost overruns, waste issues, accident potentials – while downplaying the severity of climate change or the challenges of scaling renewables.

This approach has drawn criticism for its one-sided pessimism. Even when climate scientists like James Hansen (former NASA scientist) or environmental scholars urge that “climate activists should be demanding a faster rollout of nuclear” rather than opposing it, the Bulletin tends to give more voice to the anti-nuclear rebuttals. It’s as if in the Bulletin’s view, nuclear war and nuclear energy are two faces of the same existential evil – a stance many experts find illogical. The Bulletin’s famed Doomsday Clock now counts climate change as a driver of existential risk, yet paradoxically the organization and its writers often cast doubt on one of the largest sources of zero-carbon energy available. This has not gone unnoticed. The American Nuclear Society and other experts have pushed back on Bulletin articles, noting that their analysis of nuclear waste and advanced reactors is often shallow and rooted in outdated fears.

To be fair, the Bulletin isn’t simply a propaganda rag; it includes thoughtful voices and genuine nuclear scientists. But its editorial slant remains colored by its anti-nuclear weapons heritage, leading it to scrutinize nuclear energy with an exceptionally harsh lens. From the Ohio anti-nuclear movement’s perspective, the Bulletin provides intellectual heft to their arguments. If a prestigious journal founded by Manhattan Project scientists is publishing pieces that say nuclear power has “false promises” and enumerating its economic failures, that lends credence to what activists like Marida or Lodge are saying at the local level. Of course, prestige is not proof – and in this case, the Bulletin’s and its contributors’ track record of doomsaying has often been proven wrong. (They have been inching the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight every year lately, as nuclear tensions and climate issues continue – but their implied prescription, which certainly includes eschewing nuclear power, is questionable at best.) The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists acts as a kind of high-brow amplifier of anti-nuclear sentiment. Its brand of perpetual alarm dovetails perfectly with the activist narrative, even if it neglects the pragmatic reality that nuclear technology, managed responsibly, can actually reduce the threats it frets over (by providing abundant clean energy and even by burning up nuclear weapon material in reactors).

Debunking Anti-Nuclear Myths and the “Green Energy” Illusion

Caption: The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, whose 2011 accident sparked global anti-nuclear furor. Despite frightening narratives, experts found it caused no radiation-related deathsmackinac.org. Anti-nuclear activists exploited the accident to stoke fear and push for shutting down reactors in the U.S. and Europe, even though Fukushima’s actual public health impact was minimal.

The time has come to address head-on the myths and inconsistencies propagated by Ohio’s anti-nuclear movement and their fellow travelers. These activists cloak themselves in “green” rhetoric, but a closer look reveals a pattern of misleading claims, cherry-picked data, and outright hypocrisy. Let’s break down their core arguments and see how they hold up against facts and logic:

• Myth #1: “Nuclear power isn’t really clean or low-carbon.” Activists like Pat Marida love to assert that nuclear energy is not green – pointing to uranium mining, enrichment, and plant construction as evidence that nuclear has a big carbon footprint. This is enormously misleading. All energy technologies have some lifecycle emissions, but nuclear’s are among the lowest of any source. (including the IPCC’s assessment) show that nuclear power’s lifecycle CO₂ emissions are on par with wind energy and about an order of magnitude lower than natural gas. Additionally when you consider the incorporation of wind and solar on to the grid - we must consider their complementary power generation (typically a Simple Cycle Gas Turbine) - That makes wind and solar much more dirtier than nuclear and dirtier than natural gas alone. A typical figure: around 12 grams of CO₂ per kWh for nuclear, versus 11 g for onshore wind, 48 g for solar PV, 490 g for gas, and 820 g for coal. This greatly expands when we consider the complementary energy supply for wind and solar. In other words, nuclear is much cleaner than wind and solar in carbon terms. Activists conveniently ignore such data. Marida, for instance, cites all the diesel trucks and industrial activity in the uranium fuel cycle, but fails to mention that renewables have their own significant upstream impacts (mining of rare earth metals for wind turbines, energy-intensive manufacture of solar panels often powered by coal in China, etc.). A leading climate scientist, Dr. Kerry Emanuel of MIT, put it succinctly: “Those who claim nuclear isn’t low-carbon are misinformed – per unit of energy, nuclear’s carbon emissions are effectively zero, comparable to renewables. But when their complementary sources of energy are considered for renewables - they fail miserably!” The anti-nuclear crowd’s insistence that nuclear is “not green” is flat-out false according to every major scientific review. It’s an example of how political ideology (nuclear = bad) drives them to deny even basic climate science findings.

• Myth #2: “Nuclear energy is uniquely dangerous – remember Chernobyl, Fukushima!” There’s no denying that nuclear accidents can be scary. But activists grossly exaggerate their consequences and frequency. Let’s start with safety statistics: nuclear power is the safest per unit of energy produced among all major sources when you tally deaths (from accidents or air pollution) mackinac.org mackinac.org. Yes, you read that right. Coal kills hundreds of thousands annually via air pollution; natural gas, oil, even biomass and hydropower have all caused far more fatalities than nuclear energy. The Fukushima accident in 2011, despite the media hysteria, caused zero deaths from radiation. The World Health Organization confirmed “no acute radiation injuries or deaths among the public” from Fukushima. The evacuation itself (which was arguably overzealous) did cause stress-related and indirect deaths, and that’s a lesson in not letting “radiophobia” trump a more measured response. But the activists spin Fukushima as if it were an apocalyptic event on par with, say, the Bhopal chemical disaster or the tsunami that triggered it. Similarly, Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident, killed fewer than 50 people outright and will likely lead to some thousands of premature deaths over decades – a serious impact, but orders of magnitude less than the million or more deaths some anti-nuclear folks irresponsibly claim. Modern reactors have far safer designs than Chernobyl’s, and Western reactors have multiple containment systems that prevented any public harm at Three Mile Island and Fukushima. The narrative of nuclear’s “inherent danger” is largely a triumph of fear over fact. As the Mackinac Center reported, Fukushima’s worst exposures to locals were on the order of a CT scan or two, and global fallout was minuscule – yet governments (prodded by activists) panicked and shut down reactors, causing a turn back to coal. Ironically, the panic itself (closing nuclear plants) has done far more harm – in carbon emissions, in higher energy costs, even in Germany’s case forcing greater dependence on Russian fossil fuels. The lesson: anti-nuclear activists got the risk calculus completely backward. Nuclear power’s safety record, especially in the U.S., is exceptional. The “worst-case scenarios” they love to invoke are extraordinarily unlikely, and even when accidents happen, the health consequences have been much smaller than their horror stories would have you believe.

• Myth #3: “Nuclear waste will be deadly for millions of years with no solution.” Ah, the forever-deadly waste argument – a staple of every anti-nuclear pamphlet (and Pat Marida’s testimony). Let’s unpack it. Yes, high-level nuclear waste (used fuel) remains radioactive for thousands of years. But that doesn’t mean it cannot be safely managed. For decades, all U.S. used fuel has been stored securely on-site at reactor facilities – first in pools, then in robust dry casks. These steel and concrete casks are so secure that during 9/11, even after analyzing scenarios of a jumbo jet crashing into one, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission concluded the fuel would remain intact. The volume of waste is small – all the used nuclear fuel ever produced by America’s reactors since the 1950s would fit in a single football field to a depth of less than 10 yards. Compare that to the millions of tons of CO₂ coal plants spew into the sky annually, or the toxic heavy metal ash they leave behind. Nuclear waste is contained and managed; fossil fuel waste is dumped into everyone’s air and water. Anti-nuclear activists never seem to acknowledge that contrast. As for long-term solutions, they actively thwart them. The U.S. had a plan for a deep geologic repository at Yucca Mountain – a scientifically sound approach used now in Finland (Onkalo repository) and being developed elsewhere – but activists and politics derailed it. Groups like Beyond Nuclear and the Sierra Club reflexively oppose any repository or centralized storage, crying “not in our backyard” no matter the site. This obstructionism creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: waste stays at reactor sites longer, giving activists something to point to as an “unsolved problem.” The truth is, technology and geology exist today to store nuclear waste in a way that it poses negligible risk to humans or ecosystems - but better yet, next generation reactors can safely consume over 90% of this high-level waste and what is left over only needs to be sequestered for 300 years. The anti-nuclear crowd doesn’t want to hear that. They’d rather scare people with tales of glowing green goo and ionizing radiation poisoning our great-great-great-grandchildren. It’s pure emotion over evidence. Our responsibility is to manage waste wisely – something the nuclear industry has done well so far (with no one harmed by commercial nuclear waste in storage) – and to deploy permanent solutions that science has given us. Don’t let the activists’ “nuclear waste = endless doom” mantra fool you; it’s a problem with solutions, being made out to be an intractable crisis.

• Myth #4: “Nuclear power is exorbitantly expensive, while wind and solar are cheap and benign.” This claim has gained traction in recent years, as a few high-profile nuclear projects (like the Vogtle plant in Georgia) ran over budget, and solar/wind costs fell. Anti-nuclear witnesses in Ohio have told legislators that “nuclear costs are going up, while renewables are going down,” citing figures that nuclear is supposedly 10× the cost of wind or solar. But these comparisons are often apples-to-oranges and omit the crucial issue of reliability. Yes, per-kilowatt-hour, intermittent renewables can appear cheaper – when the wind blows or sun shines. But as many regions are learning, once you try to rely heavily on wind and solar, you encounter massive hidden costs: energy storage, grid upgrades, backup power plants, and inefficiencies that aren’t reflected in the sticker price of a solar farm. In places with aggressive renewable adoption, electricity prices have tended to rise, not fall, and reliability issues (grid instability, risk of blackouts) have grown. As John Stossel tartly observed, “when we look at solar and wind around the world, it always correlates to rising prices and declining reliability.”reason.com Germany is a poster child: it spent hundreds of billions on renewables (the Energiewende), yet after shutting down nuclear, it found itself burning more coal and importing gas, with electricity costs among the highest in Europe and carbon emissions stubbornly high. Meanwhile, France, with ~70% nuclear power, enjoys cleaner power and lower consumer prices. The reality is, nuclear’s cost problem is largely political, not technological. In countries like South Korea and China, reactors are built on time and at reasonable cost. In the U.S., burdensome regulations, litigation (often driven by activist interventions), and stop-start policy have inflated costs. The anti-nuclear movement, ironically, helps create the very costliness it then criticizes – by lobbying for onerous rules and filing lawsuits that cause delays (time is money in construction). As a matter of physics and fuel, nuclear plants produce incredibly cheap energy once running (uranium is so energy-dense that fuel costs are minimal). It’s upfront capital and paperwork where costs balloon. Smarter regulatory reform and streamlining – which Reason Magazine and other pro-market voices often champion – could dramatically lower nuclear costs without sacrificing safetyreason.comreason.com. And unlike renewables, nuclear provides steady 24/7 power, avoiding the huge costs of battery storage and duplicate capacity to cover lulls.

• Myth #5: “Wind turbines and solar panels are purely benevolent for the environment.” Listen to anti-nuclear “green” advocates, and you’d think wind and solar are an environmentalist’s dream with virtually no downsides. Pat Marida even waxed poetic that “environmentalists want truly green, clean, safe jobs… like wind and solar fields. Not dangerous and radioactive jobs”. She cites that “no guards are needed” for renewables and implies wind/solar have no toxic legacy. This is a rose-tinted fantasy. In truth, renewables have significant environmental footprints. Land use is a major issue: a new study in Scientific Reports found that trying to go 100% renewable by mid-century would mean covering an area the size of the European Union with wind turbines and solar panels. Nuclear power, by contrast, could supply all the world’s energy needs on a footprint smaller than the state of Vermont. Wind and solar are energy dilute – you need vast land and materials to harvest dispersed energy. This leads to habitat loss, deforestation (for biomass or to clear land for solar farms), and ugly fights with local communities. Indeed, in the U.S. alone, nearly 500 renewable energy projects have been rejected or restricted by local communities in the past decade. People don’t want thousands of acres of their countryside blanketed with turbines or glinting panels, especially when they realize the benefit (climate-wise) is negated if those renewables just replace zero-carbon nuclear instead of fossil fuels (as happened in Vermont and New York, where nuclear plant closures erased emissions gains). Wildlife impacts are also non-trivial: wind turbines kill migratory birds and bats by the hundreds of thousands annually; solar farms can fry birds and disturb fragile desert ecosystems. The manufacturing of renewables involves hazardous materials – polysilicon for solar can produce toxic silicon tetrachloride waste, and solar panels at end of life are full of lead and cadmium that can leach if not properly recycled. Wind turbine blades are giant fiberglass composites that often end up in landfills (they’re hard to recycle). And of course, there’s the human rights angle: much of the world’s rare earth mining (for wind turbine magnets) and solar-grade silicon production is done in China under poor environmental and labor conditions (including regions like Xinjiang, where forced labor has been reported in the solar supply chain). The utopian halo around wind and solar is undeserved. They have significant environmental and social costs that anti-nuclear activists conveniently ignore while magnifying every minor issue with nuclear. The truth is a smart energy mix that includes nuclear and Combined Cycle Natural Gas electricity generation will always be much greener and more sustainable than trying to do everything with renewables and Simple Cycle Gas Turbines. Those who demonize nuclear while sanctifying renewables are engaging in a form of “doublethink,” to borrow Orwell. They’ll rail against a regulated, well-contained nuclear waste cask, but shrug at a sprawling solar dump or the destruction of mountaintops for wind installations. It’s rank hypocrisy born of ideology, not genuine environmental analysis.

• Ideological Inconsistencies and Public Deception: Perhaps the greatest hypocrisy is how these activists present themselves versus what they actually accomplish. They claim the mantle of “environmental justice” and protecting the public, yet their successes (closing nuclear plants, blocking new ones) have tended to harm the environment by prolonging reliance on coal and gas. They loudly oppose “Big Oil” and “Big Coal,” yet by knocking out nuclear (oil’s and coal’s biggest competitor in electricity generation), they did those very industries a favor. For instance, when California’s anti-nuclear lobby pushed the closure of San Onofre and Diablo Canyon plants, the immediate result was more electricity from natural gas – fossil fuel usage went up, and so did emissions. Some green activists privately acknowledge this trade-off but say it’s temporary until renewables fill the gap. However, in practice, as Germany shows, that gap persists far longer and more expensively than planners hoped. There is a deception at play: groups like Sierra Club and Greenpeace fundraise on promises of 100% renewable nirvana, while glossing over the fact that their anti-nuclear lobbying is partly why grids are struggling to decarbonize now. This is a disservice to the public. Another inconsistency lies in their attitude toward science and expertise. These activists often venerate “science” when it comes to climate change (rightly urging the public to trust climate scientists about the need to cut CO₂), yet, they abandon that deference when it comes to radiation science or energy analysis. The consensus of bodies like the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation is that low-dose radiation from nuclear plants has not been shown to cause significant health effects – but anti-nuclear zealots insist any radiation is deadly. They will accept climate models projecting temperature rise in 2100, but reject epidemiological models that show minimal cancer uptick from Fukushima. This selective acceptance of science erodes their credibility. It’s reminiscent of how anti-vaccine activists operate – cherry-picking data, using anecdotes over statistics – except here it’s anti-nuke. The public has been misled and frightened by this rhetoric for too long, resulting in policies that actually set back the causes of clean air and carbon reduction.

In debunking these myths, one must state emphatically: supporting nuclear power is fully compatible with being pro-environment, pro-humanitarian, and progressive. In fact, many progressive thinkers have come around to seeing nuclear as essential for climate action and energy equity (providing abundant power to lift people out of poverty without emissions). The anti-nuclear movement’s refusal to update its beliefs in light of new evidence (safer reactor designs, the climate crisis urgency, the demonstrated pitfalls of all-renewable attempts) shows that it has become more of an ideological crusade than a fact-based endeavor.

The Russia Factor: Propaganda and Geopolitical Undercurrents

No analysis of the anti-nuclear movement’s harm would be complete without examining how external propaganda has poured fuel on the fire. It’s an open secret that Russian state media and operatives have sought to amplify anti-nuclear and anti-fracking sentiments in the West to protect their own energy interests. During and after Fukushima, outlets like RT (Russia Today) ran wall-to-wall sensational coverage highlighting every leak, every scary soundbite, often featuring Western anti-nuclear activists to give it credibility. Kevin Kamps, for one, became a regular on RT, painting Fukushima in the most catastrophic light possible (as discussed earlier). The intent was clear: scare countries like Germany, Japan, and the U.S. into abandoning nuclear power. As Rep. Nunes pointed out, Russia benefits immensely if nuclear plants shut down – it creates a void typically filled by natural gas, much of which in Europe comes from Gazprom (Russia) eenews.net. In Germany’s case, this strategy worked like a charm: post-Fukushima, Germany did shutter its nukes, making itself more dependent on Russian gas until the Ukraine invasion forced a rude awakening.

It’s darkly ironic that an environmental movement priding itself on being “peace” oriented and anti-authoritarian has unwittingly become a pawn for one of the world’s most polluting petro-states. By parroting exaggerated narratives seeded by RT and its ilk, anti-nuclear activists helped do what Moscow could never do militarily: hobble the West’s energy future from within. Even today, one can see social media propaganda (some likely bot-driven) trumpeting any minor incident at a U.S. nuclear plant while ignoring massive coal mine disasters or gas pipeline explosions. During Ohio’s debates on subsidizing nuclear plants (to prevent their premature closure), it’s worth asking: who would benefit if those plants shut down? Follow the money – fossil fuel generators (often natural gas) stood to gain market share. Russia, as a global gas player, cheers on anything that constrains U.S. nuclear advancements, including next-generation reactors that might compete with gas in foreign markets.

We should be clear: I’m not suggesting every anti-nuclear advocate is a conscious agent of Moscow or acts in bad faith due to foreign influence. Many are earnest if misguided. But the alignment of their agenda with America’s adversaries’ interests is chilling. And it should give pause to any young idealist in Ohio who thinks they’re striking a blow against the “evil nuclear industry” – in reality, you might be helping oil and gas barons (at home and abroad) or furthering the propaganda aims of a regime that jails environmental dissidents within its own borders. The case of RT’s Fukushima coverage is a study in how disinformation spreads fear: RT relentlessly hyped speculative worst-case scenarios (e.g. claiming the Pacific Ocean was being poisoned, U.S. west coast at grave risk, etc.), some of which bordered on conspiracy theories. Those narratives jumped from fringe media to mainstream consciousness, amplified by green groups, until even officials felt pressure to overreact. This resulted in policy outcomes (like scrapping nuclear projects) that left countries more vulnerable and arguably the planet worse off (due to higher carbon emissions). It’s a stark reminder that not all “information” in the public sphere is honest or benign – and the anti-nuclear movement has been far too susceptible to peddling sensationalist or outright false information that originates from dubious sources.

The High Cost of Fear and Misinformation

The anti-nuclear movement in Ohio – and its ties to extremist politics and distorted “green” ideology – has done tangible harm to the American public interest. By spreading fear and falsehoods, these activists have helped delay or derail a rational transition to a cleaner energy mix. They have sowed doubt about one of our most powerful tools to combat climate change, leaving the field tilted toward intermittent renewables and natural gas, which has meant more pollution and higher costs. They have piggybacked on unrelated agendas (from anti-Israel activism to socialist economics) that alienate many reasonable people who might otherwise support environmental causes, thereby undermining the credibility of environmentalism as a whole. While railing against alleged corporate evils, they have perversely strengthened the hand of certain corporations – specifically fossil fuel interests – who are all too happy to see nuclear energy handicapped.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is the opportunity cost. The years spent fighting phantom risks of nuclear power could have been spent productively on ensuring all low-carbon technologies (including nuclear) are deployed to mitigate climate change, or on real environmental problems like plastic pollution, deforestation, or biodiversity loss. Instead, enormous activist energy (and donor money) has been wasted tilting at nuclear windmills – a sort of “Great Green Distraction” that has only delayed emissions reductions. In Ohio, for instance, had anti-nuclear voices not been so obstinate, the state might have by now a new generation of advanced reactors or at least have kept its existing ones running without scandal or bailouts, providing emission-free electricity and high-tech jobs. Instead, what did we get? Protracted legislative battles, corruption scandals around nuclear subsidies (as in the HB6 fiasco), and public confusion – all of which tarnish the cause of clean energy in the eyes of many citizens.

Environmentalists champion central planning (insisting we can remake the grid purely with certain politically favored technologies) and fear-based regulation (demanding ever more stringent rules on radiation that are not grounded in scientific consensus, like the obsolete linear no-threshold model applied in absurd extremes). They exhibit a sort of technophobic conservatism under the guise of progressivism – opposing novel solutions (whether it’s nuclear power, genetically modified crops, or what have you) in favor of an unrealistic vision of a pre-industrial harmony with nature. The cost of this technophobia is borne by everyday people: in higher electricity bills, in manufacturing jobs lost due to energy prices, in continued climate damages. Meanwhile, countries like China forge ahead, building dozens of new reactors, pairing them with renewables in a pragmatic bid to both grow and decarbonize. If we allow the anti-nuclear fringe to continue dictating America’s energy choices, we risk falling behind scientifically and economically, and we will almost certainly fail to meet climate goals.

In closing, it’s time to call out Ohio’s (and America’s) anti-nuclear activists for what they have become: obstacles to environmental progress, not champions of it. Their arguments have been debunked by science and experience – from the exaggerated dangers, to the denial of nuclear’s clear climate benefits, to the romanticizing of renewables’ impacts. Their alliances with anti-Israel and anti-American ideologues, and the overlap with pro-Russian propaganda, cast a further shadow on their credibility. Of course, we must continue to scrutinize and improve nuclear safety, manage waste responsibly, and diversify our energy portfolio. But doing so is made harder, not easier, by the polarizing, fact-optional approach of these activists. The American public deserves better than fear-mongering and hypocritical “green” posturing.

It’s high time we relegate the anti-nuclear movement to the political margins where it belongs – alongside other movements that let dogma trump reality – and get on with building an energy future that is actually sustainable, scientifically sound, and in the true public interest. That means embracing nuclear power and renewables, guided by facts, not scare tactics. The stakes are too high to do otherwise. As the data shows, nuclear energy saves lives and helps the environment; the same cannot be said of the anti-nuclear ideology, which, if anything, has set back environmental progress and played into the hands of the very forces it claims to oppose. In the final analysis, the anti-nuclear movement’s legacy in Ohio and beyond may well be one of profoundly wasted time – and a cautionary tale of how good intentions and bad information can lead a movement astray, to the detriment of society and the planet.

DEBUNKING ANTI-NUCLEAR PROPAGANDA