---
title: "Anti-nuclear movement"
chunk: 15/15
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:22:20.182369+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Attempts to reach political agreement on effective  climate change policies continue, and pro-nuclear environmentalists seek to reverse the traditionally anti-nuclear attitudes among environmentalists. Filmmaker Rob Stone's Pandora's Promise (2013) is a good example of this trend.
Some environmentalists criticise the anti-nuclear movement for understating the environmental costs of fossil fuels and non-nuclear alternatives, and overstating the environmental costs of nuclear energy.
Anti-nuclear activists are accused of encouraging radiophobic emotions among the public. In The War Against the Atom (Basic Books, 1982), Samuel MacCracken of Boston University argued that in 1982, 50,000 deaths per year could be attributed directly to non-nuclear power plants, if fuel production and transportation, as well as pollution, were taken into account. He argued that if non-nuclear plants were judged by the same standards as nuclear ones, each US non-nuclear power plant could be held responsible for about 100 deaths per year.
The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) is the main lobby group for companies doing nuclear work in the United States, while most countries that employ nuclear energy have a national industry group. The World Nuclear Association is the only global trade body. In seeking to counter the arguments of nuclear opponents, it cites independent studies that quantify the costs and benefits of nuclear energy and compares them with those of alternatives. NEI sponsors studies of its own, but it also references studies performed for the World Health Organization, for the International Energy Agency, and by university researchers.
Critics of the anti-nuclear movement point to independent studies showing that the capital resources required for renewable energy sources are often prohibitively higher than those for nuclear power.
Some people, including former opponents of nuclear energy, criticize the movement, arguing that nuclear power is necessary to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. These individuals include James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, Patrick Moore, an early member of Greenpeace and former director of Greenpeace International, George Monbiot and Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog. Lovelock goes further to refute claims about the danger of nuclear energy and its waste products. In a January 2008 interview, Moore said that "It wasn't until after I'd left Greenpeace and the climate change issue started coming to the forefront that I started rethinking energy policy in general and realised that I had been incorrect in my analysis of nuclear as being some kind of evil plot." Stewart Brand has apologized for his past anti-nuclear stance in the 2010 book Whole Earth Discipline, saying that "Greens caused gigatons of carbon dioxide to enter the atmosphere from the coal and gas burning that went ahead instead of nuclear".
Some anti-nuclear organisations have acknowledged that their positions are subject to review.
In April 2007, Dan Becker, Director of Global Warming for the Sierra Club, declared, "Switching from dirty coal plants to dangerous nuclear power is like giving up smoking cigarettes and taking up crack." James Lovelock criticizes holders of such a view: "Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media." ". . . I am a Green and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy."
George Monbiot, an English writer known for his environmental and political activism, once expressed deep antipathy to the nuclear industry. He finally rejected his later neutral position regarding nuclear power in March 2011. Monbiot now advocates its use, having been convinced of its relative safety by what he considers the limited effects of the 2011 Japan tsunami on nuclear reactors in the region. Subsequently, he has harshly condemned the anti-nuclear movement, writing that it "has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health ... made [claims] ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged and wildly wrong." He singled out Helen Caldicott for, he wrote, making unsourced and inaccurate claims, dismissing contrary evidence as part of a cover-up, and overstating the death toll from the Chernobyl disaster by a factor of more than 140.

== See also ==

== Notes and references ==
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== Bibliography ==

== External links ==

The M and S Collection at the Library of Congress contains anti-nuclear movement materials.
Jennifer Fay Gow photographs of Brisbane anti-nuclear and civil liberties demonstrations October 1977, State Library of Queensland