This article originally appeared in the Financial Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Philip Cross, September 2, 2025
In her new book, Atomic Dreams, freelance journalist Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow explores the growing popularity of nuclear power as a source of clean electricity, which its advocates tout as “split, don’t emit.” Along the way, she exposes some of the broader problems undermining the environmental movement’s approach to climate change.
Opposition to nuclear power was foundational to groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. According to Tuhus-Dubrow, in the 1960s they had “an anti-nuclear ideology at their core; being an environmentalist became synonymous with being anti-nuclear.” Before climate change became an issue, atomic power was associated with meltdowns and nuclear war. Because cheap energy was abundant and greenhouse gases were not yet a concern, activists had the luxury of opposing nuclear power without identifying alternative energy sources.
Once greenhouses gases did become a thing, in the 1980s and 1990s, environmentalists began arguing that renewable energy from wind and solar should replace fossil fuels and nuclear power. But fundamental questions have arisen about renewables’ capacity to provide large amounts of reliable power. Renewable energy does not scale up easily, it is inherently intermittent, and its environmental impact includes using up large tracts of land, extensive mining and piling up hazardous waste in the form of used solar panels, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
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Philip Cross is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
