---
title: "Anti-nuclear movement"
chunk: 3/15
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"
---

Nuclear accidents: a safety concern that the core of a nuclear power plant could overheat and melt down, releasing radioactivity.
Nuclear Fuel Mining: mining waste of nuclear fuels like uranium and thorium, results in its radioactive decay. That causes radium pollution and radon pollution in environment and ultimately affects public health.
Radioactive waste disposal: a concern that nuclear power results in large amounts of radioactive waste, some of which remains dangerous for very long periods.
Nuclear proliferation: a concern that some types of nuclear reactor designs use and/or produce fissile material which could be used in nuclear weapons.
High cost: a concern that nuclear power plants are very expensive to build, and that clean up from nuclear accidents is highly expensive and can take decades.
Attacks on nuclear plants: a concern that terrorists or criminals could target nuclear facilities.
Curtailed civil liberties: a concern that the risk of nuclear accidents, proliferation, and terrorism may be used to justify restraints on citizen rights.
Of these concerns, nuclear accidents and disposal of long-lived radioactive waste have probably had the greatest public impact worldwide. Anti-nuclear campaigners point to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear emergency as proof that nuclear power can never be 100% safe. Costs resulting from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster are likely to exceed 12 trillion yen ($100 billion) and the clean up effort to decontaminate affected areas and decommission the plant is estimated to take 30 to 40 years. Excluding accidents, the standard amount of high-level radioactive waste is claimed to be manageable (the UK has produced just 2150 m3 during its 60-year nuclear program), with the Geological Society of London alleging that it can be effectively recycled and stored safely.

In his book Global Fission: The Battle Over Nuclear Power, Jim Falk explores connections between technological concerns and political concerns. Falk suggests that concerns of citizen groups or individuals who oppose nuclear power have often focused initially on the "range of physical hazards which accompany the technology" and lead to a "concern over the political relations of the nuclear industry". Baruch Fischhoff, a social scientist, said that many people really do not trust the nuclear industry. Wade Allison, a physicist, said "radiation is safe & all nations should embrace nuclear technology"
M.V. Ramana says that "distrust of the social institutions that manage nuclear energy is widespread", and a 2001 survey by the European Commission found that "only 10.1 percent of Europeans trusted the nuclear industry". This public distrust is periodically reinforced by nuclear safety violations or through ineffectiveness or corruption of the nuclear regulatory authorities. Once lost, says Ramana, trust is extremely difficult to regain.
Faced with public antipathy, the nuclear industry has "tried a variety of strategies to persuade the public to accept nuclear power," including publishing numerous "fact sheets" that address public concerns. M.V. Ramana says that none of these strategies has been very successful. Nuclear proponents have tried to regain public support by offering newer, purportedly safer, reactor designs. These designs include those that incorporate passive safety and small modular reactors. While these reactor designs "are intended to inspire trust, they may have an unintended effect: creating distrust of older reactors that lack the touted safety features".
Since 2000 the nuclear power was promoted as potential solution to the greenhouse effect and climate change as nuclear power emits no or negligible amounts of carbon dioxide during operations. Anti-nuclear groups highlighted that other stages of the nuclear fuel chain – mining, milling, transport, fuel fabrication, enrichment, reactor construction, decommissioning, and waste management – rely on fossil fuels and thus emit carbon dioxide. As this is the case with any energy sources, including renewable energy, IPCC analyzed total life-cycle greenhouse-gas emissions, which account for all emissions during manufacturing, installation, operations and decommissioning. With 12 gCO2eq/kWh, nuclear power remains one of the lowest-emitting energy sources available.

In 2011, a French court fined Électricité de France (EDF) €1.5m and jailed two senior employees for spying on Greenpeace, including hacking into Greenpeace's computer systems. Greenpeace was awarded €500,000 in damages.
Some energy-related studies conclude that energy efficiency programs and renewable power technologies are better energy options than nuclear power plants.