(Click here to download a PDF of the article.)

As part of reporting called “Pay Dirt,” The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay released some exclusive research entitled “Inside the Gas Industry’s Plan to Sink Nuclear Power,” about the corporate front groups that arose to do political battle over proposals by a number of states to prop up nuclear power plants struggling in the wake of dirt-cheap natural gas.  In particular, he delved deep into the American Petroleum Institute’s organization of opposition to Bill 11, Pennsylvania’s proposed legislation to stave off financial ruin for Pennsylvania’s  nuclear power plants through an initiative called No Nuclear Bailouts. Markay was able to access the API’s Power point plan detailing a host of activities, including “grassroots” activism, legislator “intercepts, and the engagement of third-party groups and “key influencers” in its attempt to sway policymakers.  This is just one example of how the API has sought to bolster its own market share by working to undermine nuclear energy.

MAJOR FOSSIL FUEL COMPANIES, but most prominently ExxonMobil, have known the truth for nearly 50 years: that their oil, gas, and coal products create greenhouse gas pollution that warms the planet and changes our climate. They’ve known for decades that the consequences could be catastrophic and that only a narrow window of time existed to take action before the damage might not be reversible. They have nevertheless engaged in a coordinated, multi-front effort to conceal and contradict their own knowledge of these threats, discredit the growing body of publicly available scientific evidence, and persistently create doubt in the minds of customers, consumers, regulators, the media, journalists, teachers, and the general public about the reality and consequences of climate change. The sole reason: to extend their ability to profit from the sales of dirty energy known to cause illness and climate change. We have posted a much longer exposition of the data showing knowledge by ExxonMobil as early as 1968 in our #KnowNukes portal: Oil Company Knowledge.

This is a quote from an article posted at EcoCentric in 2012: “Now the biggest and oldest environmental group in the U.S. finds itself caught on the horns of that dilemma. TIME has learned that between 2007 and 2010 the Sierra Club accepted over $25 million in donations from the gas industry, mostly from Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy—one of the biggest gas drilling companies in the U.S. and a firm heavily involved in fracking—to help fund the Club’s Beyond Coal campaign. Though the group ended its relationship with Chesapeake in 2010—and the Club says it turned its back on an additional $30 million in promised donations—the news raises concerns about influence industry may have had on the Sierra Club’s independence and its support of natural gas in the past. It’s also sure to anger ordinary members who’ve been uneasy about the Club’s relationship with corporations. “The chapter groups and volunteers depend on the Club to have their back as they fight pollution from any industry, and we need to be unrestrained in our advocacy,” Michael Brune, the Sierra Club’s executive director since 2010, told me. “The first rule of advocacy is that you shouldn’t take money from industries and companies you’re trying to change.”

Mark Z Jacobson is best known as the Stanford academic who ideologically insists that we can solve climate change with just renewables. In this respect, he’s one of the most influential voices that seeks to deny a role for nuclear power and, as a result, is putting our entire world at risk. This fact does not deter him. He is highly prolific and has written papers, “roadmaps,” and computer simulation models that are widely shared with his graduate students. Having written 85% of the code, his models replicate his underlying assumptions about how energy systems operate. When a large group of climate scientists published a peer-reviewed study refuting and challenging some of Jacobson’s many erroneous assumptions (such as that humanity can reduce energy demand by 40%, despite growing population and billions under-served by energy, as well as errors in the model he used), Jacobson did not publish a peer-reviewed paper in defense of his work, rather he sued the lead scientists on the paper that shot down his work and the National Academy of Sciences. Of course, this was not how science works but rather a tactic to try to intimidate his detractors.  However, Jacobson lost that law suit badly and was forced to pay the legal costs of the scientists. Nevertheless, Jacobson, though more widely reviled than almost anyone else because of his refusal to deal with real world facts, is a consummate self-promoter. He has launched fundraising organizations and what he calls the “!00% Clean, Renewable Energy Movement.”  He has managed to recruit a number of high-profile personalities, such as Mark Ruffalo, to fund his various initiatives and help raise other funding. Jacobson is widely known to block any person who dares to raise the issue of nuclear energy with him on social media.

Ed Lyman is the sole voice at Union of Concerned Scientists opposing nuclear, even though the group has officially recognized that we only hurt our chances of limiting carbon emissions if we close nuclear power plants. Lyman doesn’t care.  He has built his reputation and, most likely, his primary sources of revenue from opposing nuclear. Thus, like many of the aging anti-nuclear activists, Lyman persists in hyping risks that have never panned out, while steadfastly ignoring the fact that climate change is a tsunami of disaster barrelling down on humanity. The Union of Concerned Scientists may have recognized that there’s indeed new data to be factored in but Ed Lyman has too much at stake and refuses to acknowledge the prevailing wisdom regarding the importance of nuclear to our success decarbonizing our grids.  He has long ago staked his reputation and most of his professional speaking appearances on maintaining his staunch opposition to nuclear energy, he cannot admit how safe nuclear actually is and how threatening climate change is. So much for being a “concerned scientist.”

Lyman is an internationally recognized opponent and outspoken skeptic about nuclear power who widely exaggerates the risks of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism as a way to maintain his marketability as an “expert” on nuclear power safety and security. Since joining UCS in 2003, Lyman has published non-stop  in a wide range of anti-nuclear journals, including the “dubious” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Science and Global Security, and Arms Control Today, and he has been a one-man wrecking ball for the truth and accurate risk assessments of nuclear safety and its reliability.  His exaggerations of the risk posed by nuclear energy and radiation have been cited in hundreds of news stories, as he appears to know exactly the click-bait needed to appeal to the media, to boost consumption. Lyman’s book, Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster, published in February 2014 failed to recognize that, although more than 20,000 people were washed away by the tsunami, the Fukushima Daiichi melt-down itself that occurred in the subsequent days, proves its safety case, since only one death was ever attributed to the actual plant melt-down. This fact is now widely understood by experts to reflect just how safe nuclear power really is, even when the plant itself gets destoryed. Relative to the human death and destruction being wrought every day by fossil fuels, now seen as the cause of almost 9 million premature deaths globally every year, and their impacts on our climate, which now threaten billions around the world with rising temperatures and the collapse of life-sustaining ecosystems, even the worst nuclear melt-downs are essentially a non-event for human safety. Which makes one wonder how Lyman’s “the sky is falling” anti-nuclear career has been sustained all this time.

Helen Caldicott started her career is as a nutritionist and pediatric physician in Adelaide, where she established the first Australian Clinic for cystic fibrosis at the Adelaide Chidrens Hospital.  In the 1970s, she gained prominence in Australia, New Zealand and North America, speaking on the health hazards of radiation from the perspective of paediatrics. She convinced Australia to sue France over its atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific in 1971 and 1972, which brought the practice to an end. She also informed Australian trade unions about the medical and military dangers of uranium mining, which led to the three-year banning of the mining and export of uranium.  Caldicott left her medical career to concentrate on calling the world’s attention to what she referred to as the “insanity” of the nuclear arms race and the growing reliance on nuclear power. She influenced Physicians for Social Responsibility to work to educate the US public about the “dire medical implications” of both nuclear war and nuclear power and she began publishing her own books that were influential but regarded as highly alarmist.  In 2002. Caldicott’s The New Nuclear Danger, made what one reviewer called “many cogent criticisms” about the excesses of the military-industrial complex but valid points were “undermined by other far-fetched or alarmist arguments, sloppy research, and haphazard footnoting.” This habit has plagued Caldicott’s entire career. In 2011, Caldicott was involved in a public argument in The Guardian with British journalist George Monbiot, who expressed great concern at Caldicott’s failue to provide adequate justification for any of her arguments. Critiquing Caldicott’s book, Nuclear Power is Not The Answer, he wrote: “The scarcity of references to scientific papers and the abundance of unsourced claims it contains amaze me.” Ultimately, what began as a sincere and beneficial effot to raise awareness of and reel in excesses of the military use of atomic warfare was used to spread non-fact based and unrealistic alarmism about nuclear energy, where such dangers were not present.  While Caldicott’s tactics have been called out by many experts, nevertheless she and her publications and messages have had considerable influence.

Dan Kammen is a professor at UC Berkeley, currently in the Energy and Resources Group (ERG) with an additional appointment to the Goldman School of Public Policy.  He has marvelous speaking credentials, having served as an advisor and expert, giving testimony to Congress and various governmental committees, as well as serving as a commentator and speaker at many area conferences.  Kammen was educated in physics at Cornell and Harvard, and held postdoc postitions at CALTech and Harvard.  He was also an Assistant Professor at Princeton University before moving to Berkeley.  Kammen claims to have contributed to various reports of the IPCC and is serving as an advisor for the X-Prize Foundation. In all respects, Kammen is clearly extremely smart and one could expect, given his work in physics, that he’d be unbiased towards nuclear energy.  In fact, quite the opposite.  Kammen nearly always describes his openness towards nuclear energy at the beginning of his comments but invariably, Kammen resorts to the use of a remarkably smooth review of doubts about nuclear technology and its deployment potential to minimize and reject its use as a climate solution. He does this with great finesse and subtlety but it becomes quite obvious that Kammen has a strong bias against nuclear power and towards renewable technologies, such that he ends up dismissing nuclear energy as if irrelevant. In this respect, he is much more coy about his bias than Mark Jacobson but he is clearly every bit as ideologic in his support for renewables. When Kammen is on the podium, you know you get a powerful argument from him against counting on nuclear to perform on behalf of climate solutions. Kammen, on the other hand, always talks as if all of the technical issues of renewables being able to power energy 24×7 have been solved.

Harvey Wasserman, now age 75, started life as an elementary school teacher and made it up the career ladder all the way to “adjunct instructor” at a community college in Ohio, where he also sold uniforms on the side. Despite this modest degree of professional success, Mr. Wasserman has not let that dim his enthusiastic self-promotion. He launched “Solartopia” as a revenue-generating activity and hopes to get consulting and speaking gigs. His website “Bios” page hosts three bios for himself. These three distinct bios are not enough, however, so he supplements with an “Etc.” section, which combined exceed 200 lines.

Mr. Wasserman personifies the worst of today’s self-proclaimed environmental spokesperson, who ignore any facts which conflict with their world view or threaten their self-image.  In 1962, as a junior in high school, Wasserman apparently received such positive feedback from participating in a protest at a segregated roller rink in Columbus, that it set his life’s course. There, he gleefully chanted “Don’t Skate, Integrate!” and got town-wide press. This so enchanted him, Wasserman has  since endeavored to replicate that success with virtually any issue whatsoever. Now, sixty years later, Wasserman’s primary claim to fame is his assertion (unconfirmed) that he coined the term “No Nukes.” While the phrase was used primarily to protect atomic bombs, we have leveraged its familiarity for our “KnowNukes” portal.

Otherwise, most of what fills Wasserman’s bloated bios consists of “I was there with so and so,” and then talking about it with any media outlets as he could possibly find. Then, Wasserman would write about having talked about having protested with so and so, and further pad the bio. Even the tweet that Wasserman has pinned to his Twitter feed attempts to cozy up to David Crosby, while making completely non-sensical claims about nuclear power.

Despite the fact that Wasserman’s long history as protestor, speaker and school instructor might have embued him with some semblance of responsibility to know the facts, Wasserman clings to his 1960s vision of a “solartopia” in which we’ve banned waste and war, banned fossil fuels and nuclear, transformed the corporation, restored the matriarchy, raised organic food, achieved “total efficiency,” revived mass transit and achieved social justice and true democracy, having converted to renewables.  No update there for carbon emissions or climate change. In other words, like many of the aging environmental leaders who launched their protest careers in the 1960s and 1970s, Wasserman’s world view has calcified to the point that he has utterly failed to recognize that climate change is universally acknowledged by scientists as our #1 threat and that nuclear power is required to address it.

Bill McKibben is a powerful writer, teacher and a committed environmental leader. He founded his organization, 350.org, back in 2007 with a group of students from Middlebury College in Vermont with the idea that the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere should not exceed 350 parts per millions (ppm). This was because NASA climate scientist James Hansen contended that any atmospheric concentration of CO₂ above 350 parts per million was unsafe. 350.org has built a “global movement for climate solutions.”  For a very long time, despite apparently recognizing that nuclear should be part of the solution, McKibben was unwilling to stick his neck out and show support for nuclear power, recognizing that the fierce differences in views about nuclear energy among supporters of 350.org could “split the movement.”

More recently, McKibben has softened his stance. We received a report of a Zoom presentation on January 9, 2021, in which Bill McKibben spoke to a virtual audience of over 400 people at an Ashby Village Arts and Culture Series event on the topic of  Engaging Elders in Climate Action.  Fortunately, it was recorded. During the Q&A (min. 1:18:51) Roger Newman asked Bill the question: Do you think there’s a place for nuclear energy in a sustainable power supply? He answered:

Four former US, German and French nuclear officials, none of whom ever supported nuclear energy, have co-authored a statement to reiterate their antinuclear views. Dr. Gregory Jaczko, widely recognized as the most damaging, antinuclear appointee to the U.S. NRC, whose statements and actions undermined confidence in nuclear energy and increased fear, even while he was supposedly working to improve the safety of the industry, is joined by Professor Wolfgang Renneberg, Dr. Bernard Laponche and Dr. Paul Dorfman in arguing against the use of the technology. In their opinion piece, Nuclear is not a practicable means to combat climate change, we see the types of arguments which antinuclear advocates use to try to rationalize their own preference to support renewables, and suppress support for nuclear. They assert not that nuclear is unsafe, but rather that renewables are a better alternative to nuclear for two main reasons: “cost and speed of deployment.”  They argue that “while the costs of renewables are plummeting, nuclear costs have steadily been on the rise.” Ironically, during his tenure, Jaczko did more to cause the regulatory burden on the industry to increase, which increased nuclear’s costs, and to have the NRC refuse to approve new power plants, causing great delays and even cancellations of nuclear projects.  Nevertheless, these “experts” are perpetuating the great myth about renewable costs that ignores the system costs. LCOE, the cost metric most commonly used and quoted, misleadingly compares baseload power and needs, with intermittent point sources, that produce power for no more than 1/3rd of the time. Add in backup by natural gas and utility scale batteries and it’s a whole different story.  The truth is that renewables increase the costs to ratepayers for their reliable energy and nuclear power reduces total electric grid costs, reduces emissions, and increases reliability.

Peninsula Clean ENergy is one of many new Community Choice Aggregation organizations in California.  Under the leadership and because of the direct anti-nuclear lobbying of board members by Jan Pepper, Peninsula Clean Energy, refused to accept an allocation of more than $5 million dollars of free clean nuclear power. This allocation could have allowed the organization to have an extra $5 million to use to lower rates for customers, run special energy savings programs or even educate their customers about clean energy. Despite knowing that nuclear power is carbon free, nevertheless, Ms. Pepper’s fear of possible anti-nuclear flak made her push individual board members to change their votes against getting $5 million for free, a move that was an enormous loss for them and their customers.