Nuclear Monitor #936

Jan Haverkamp reviews Linda Pentz Gunter new book

Many pleading for urgent climate action are baffled by the stream of disinformation about the role of nuclear power that disturbs the debate and the implementation of effective climate measures. Not many have an overview of the realities behind this surge in nuclear propaganda, because it requires technical as well as economic, sociological, psychological and geopolitical insights.

Based on her life-long experiences with critical nuclear activism, Linda Pentz Gunter has written this attempt to give exactly such an overview. And we need to thank the scholar M.V. Ramana for convincing her to do so.

Pentz Gunter does not write a book with scenarios, numbers and graphs. It is a rough brush overview of the dynamics that nuclear technology introduces in climate policies, human rights and the geopolitics of wars – but illustrated with pearls of personal experiences with people that face the direct consequences: indigenous people suffering under the environmental impacts of uranium mining in the US and Niger, but also the dancing protesters stopping mining on the Orkney Islands. Pentz reminds us of the uranium tailings dam breach at the Navajo territory near Church Rock just before the nuclear accident at Three Miles Island in 1979, and the consequences for those who lived around it. She links the colonialist exploitation of uranium in Congo to the nuclear weapons race of the Cold war and focuses in on the impacts for the people directly involved. She talks about the dogs left in the Chernobyl closed zone after the 1986 accident. But also about the resistance in Jobourg in Western France against the nuclear reprocessing facility in la Hague. With her, we travel the entire voyage from the first nuclear bomb test at Trinity test site in New Mexico, to the Trump administration’s active undermining of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that under the Convention on Nuclear Safety (CNS) is supposed to be an independent nuclear regulatory body overseeing nuclear safety.

The book ends with an appendix listing ten reasons to reject nuclear power.

I have to admit, that I found the preface and introduction difficult to get through. The picture painted here is so bleak and hopeless. That does not match with my 45 years of experiences in the same field, where I have seen that the nuclear industry is its own worst enemy and where many people prevent it from taking the position it wants to take with its repeated attempts to a “nuclear renaissance”. But once the reader gets to chapter 1, the speed picks up.

Now, this is not a book for those already into the depth of nuclear policies. For them, the brush strokes may feel too rough – although it contains many moments of recognition and reminders of issues that sometimes have moved a bit beyond sight.

But this is exactly the book for those that encounter the nuclear industry entering their personal space, but who are not so familiar with all the dynamics of nuclear technology. For municipal councillors that are confronted with aggressive plans for SMRs, for farmers that see plans for new nuclear power stations threatening to evict them, for those who live around proposed nuclear waste sites, for voters who think “hang on, this all sounds interesting, but what was the history?”.

While reading, you will inevitably encounter some less strong stories. Diving into references will enable you to clear that up. Stories around the health effects of Chernobyl would need a lot more

detail to convince those submitted to industry propaganda. Reading the referenced Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future by Kate Brown will repair that for you.

What misses is maybe a bit more insight into the nuclear propaganda and trolling machine that was built up over the last decade by the likes of Patrick Moore, Michael Shellenberger, Bjorn Lomborg and their offspring, which is where much of the disinformation from the industry got a form that sounds convincing to a more populist oriented public.

And, as a European, I was reminded many times of parallel developments, like those around uranium mining at Jachymov in the Czech Republic, at Wismut in East Germany, the steppes of Kazakhstan and many others. This is a book written in the US, and readers from elsewhere may have to link it to parallel experiences in their part of the world to use it to enter their debates. Linda Pentz Gunter is one of the longer serving experts in the anti-nuclear movement – and an incredible source of experience, knowledge and wisdom. I hope this book may motivate others that have spent their lives struggling with the nuclear Moloch to share their experiences as well, before this wisdom disappears into oblivion.

If you want to be reminded what this nuclear stuff was all about, pick up this book and read it.

https://www.plutobooks.com/product/no-to-nuclear/