Over 40 states now have proposals that would undermine existing protections against new nuclear projects.  Here are some resources you can use to design a strategy to stop this coordinated pronuclear push in your state.

1. Nuclear power isn’t zero emissions and isn’t carbon free. It is NOT a climate solution.Nuclear power reactors emit huge amounts of global warming heat directly to our air and water, and the mining, pellet fabrication, and other processes are usually powered by fossil fuels.
2. Nuclear is the most expensive form of energy. As of 2023, it was already twice the cost of solar and nearly 3x the cost of wind.^[vi] Solar and wind costs have continued to drop, while nuclear plants face constant cost overruns and delays. If the referendum is repealed in Massachusetts, energy bills and taxpayer bailouts will increase drastically – even if everything works properly.
3. And that’s a BIG if. Nuclear power risks major accidents. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are only three of more than 100 potentially catastrophic nuclear incidents, many of them in the US, and we know from Ukraine that they are vulnerable to enemy or terrorist attack—and the land around Chernobyl will still be uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years.
4. Don’t expect any meaningful accident compensation from your insurance. We taxpayers subsidize nuclear power plant insurance, but the payouts max out at $15.5 billion per accident, while the costs are much higher. The 2011 Fukushima meltdown cost $200 billion.
5. Nuclear reactors release radiation, which causes cancer, increases health risks and raises health care costs.
6. Nuclear power is unreliable. During storms and droughts, reactors are often forced to shut down.
7. SMRs won’t save us. No small modular reactors (SMR) designs are in commercial production yet. They will take years to deploy, haven’t been tested in real life, could be sited dangerously close to big cities, and might be ganged up in reactor farms, with the same problems but without the advantages of scale, so their electricity will be even more expensive than today’s nukes.
8. Nuclear diverts funding away from real clean energy and deep conservation.
9. AI, data centers, and crypto are all huge energy and water hogs. Setting efficiency standards for them would slash electricity demand.

Consider that even if there isn’t a law prohibiting nuclear power plants, there should be a law that protects the public, including:

1. Safe and permanent radioactive waste storage (some has to be stored for more than 100,000 years).
2. An evacuation plan for accidents.
3. A decommissioning plan to deal with the highly radioactive plant once it’s no longer producing power.