The 4th of July, a time when many Americans celebrate the founding of their country. This year is particularly momentous this year, as it is the 250th year since this country’s founding. Our president wants to celebrate this momentous occasion by starting up (or “going critical”) three untested, unlicensed, unregulated reactors—of course, creating more nuclear waste. To be noted, this order to the DOE would extend far beyond these three “gone critical” nuclear reactors. But as anyone who has taken a history class knows, there is plenty in the USA’s history that is dark, dirty, and dangerous—much the same as its history with nuclear colonialism. As the newest “boom” of the nuclear industrial complex (tries) to rise, lobbyists line pockets to push bailouts, nuclear bigwigs are still getting prison sentences and being fined (Ohio, I’m looking at you), and tritiated water is still being dumped into our waterways with little to no restriction. Operating and abandoned uranium mines still operate and pollute Indigenous lands well beyond the “promises” made to shut them down after just a few years, and who can forget: there’s still no permanent repository for the nuclear waste that will remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years. 900 years ago, we spoke Old English, and unless you’re a scholar specialized in the field, you’d be hard-pressed to even understand the basest of sentences in the language. How are we going to protect generations upon generations of humans from a deadly substance that, presumably, we won’t even be able to label for as long as it remains deadly? But I get ahead of myself.
The 4th of July is a time to look back on our history as a country, and when we speak of our nuclear history, the book gets a lot darker. Just a short time after we were done celebrating our Independence Day celebrations in 1945, the Trinity Test took place in New Mexico (in a place they called Ground Zero) on July 16th, marking the very first nuclear explosion. The area was “remote” and “desolate,” they said. No harm to the human population. The Indigenous and Hispanic communities of New Mexico downwind of the nuclear fallout, of course, beg to differ. This is not to mention the flora and fauna that were blown to oblivion in the “desolate” area, and that would also remain affected for years and years to come. In a sick coincidence, on the same day in 1979, the Church Rock uranium mill spill sent more radioactive materials into our environment than even the Three Mile Island disaster (more on that later) and devastated nearby Navajo lands with deadly radioactive substances that continue to harm the area to this day. According to environmentandsociety.org, “Waste from the mining process was disposed of in three lined lagoons fortified by a man-made dam built on geologically unsound land—of which both the United Nuclear Corporation and state and federal agencies were aware. [Italics added for emphasis.] On 16 July, 1979, the dam breached and 1100 tons of uranium waste and 94 million gallons of radioactive water seeped into the Puerco River.” To put into perspective, these events occurred in 1945 and 1979, and we haven’t even begun to speak of the meltdowns, the corruption, the bailouts, and the false promises for the future that continue today. To keep up with the timeline and to make the Church Rock incident and the nuclear situation of the 1970s that much sweeter (read: absolutely horrific), earlier, in March of that year, the Three Mile Island disaster resulted in a partial meltdown of the reactor unit 2 in Pennsylvania. Still, America trudged on with its vision of a nuclear powered US.
The nuclear industrial complex creation catastrophe didn’t stop after these major incidents of destruction—though they should have been metaphoric (and physical) red flags. No lessons were learned, no communities were given reparations or protected for the future, and no 1970s Erin Brockovich came to save the day or hold these companies accountable. (But seriously, girl, if you want to team up, my email is listed on our website—plus, I also hate PG&E—and nuclear-affected communities could use you.) Instead, we got lobbyists who line pockets and lie to minority, frontline, and poor communities in desperate need of well-paying jobs. But hey, sometimes they throw a big BBQ for the communities in question.
The US nuclear industrial complex spreads far and wide outside the continental US, from the Bikini Atoll and Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands, Johnston Atoll, and Amchitka Island in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. And we aren’t the only countries that have access to nuclear technology. Most of us remember the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown and Chornobyl—horror stories that have literally been fodder for horror films and television series, PBS documentaries, and more. And yet, still, according to Bisconti Research, “77% favor nuclear energy vs. 23% who are opposed.” Have there not been enough accidents? Enough environmental impact? Enough communities devastated by higher than average cancer rates? Is it not in enough people’s backyards?
Today, Silicon Valley tech bros, with their zip up Patagonia windbreakers and their wireless earbuds and self-driving cars, and billionaires with money to burn see nuclear as the next big leap into the future—never mind its failed, dirty, dangerous, and expensive past. Talks of small modular nuclear reactors (or SMRs, for short) sound like flip-phones sounded in the early 2000s. New, shiny, exciting—the Jetsons are here! Where are our robot maids? But what these billionaire, Tesla drivers fail to recognize is that not only are nuclear reactors not the cash grab they think they’ll be, they’re also at least a decade off from coming to fruition. Not to mention the cost overruns they, presumably, are not worried about, nor the storage of the waste, nor the environmental impacts of the uranium fuel chain, nor the potential for a disaster, nor, god-willing that doesn’t happen, what happens when these reactors are inevitably needed to be decommissioned—forever leaving that space unusable and toxic.
There’s no denying: the climate crisis is here NOW. It’s been here. It’s getting markedly worse day by day, triple digit summer by summer, snowless winter by winter. It makes sense that folks, especially young activists who have grown up in a world that knows nothing else would be experiencing climate anxiety—something that makes you want to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks just to have a snowball’s chance in hell to make it out of global warming alive. I get it. I’ve been wearing tee shirts with slogans on them that got me called a “tree-hugging hippie” since I was in the 7th grade. I got in fights with my father about whether global warming was real or not (“The earth has always gone through temperature changes!”). I’m exhausted. You’re exhausted. Activists from the 1970s to the 2020s are exhausted. But a “nuclear renaissance” is not the future America needs. This country needs to look back at its dark past with nuclear technologies and realize that consistent and all-in-support of renewables is the only answer to our climate problem. They’re ready, they’re on grid, they’re proving themselves year after year. In Texas, renewables now supply over ⅓ of all their electricity(EIA.gov) and the numbers are growing at voracious speeds across the entire US. My own home in California is run entirely on solar from a very modest set of panels on my roof and there’s not even an ounce of gas on my property save for the tank of propane attached to my grill outside and the less than a quarter tank of gas in my car (hello, $6.00/gal gas!).
Continued uranium mining, frontline community devastating, meltdown prone plants, tax payer supported subsidies, 10 year building times, crooked CEOs, and the lined pockets of government officials won’t be the energy future that saves America. This 4th of July we ought to really think about where our country has been with nuclear and where we want it to go. Do we hedge our bets on dirty, dangerous, and slow nuclear—that has proven time and again to be a force of destruction, not clean energy—or do we invest in what’s already propelling us into the future of a sustainable, clean, green, renewable energy grid. A future that’s livable for ourselves and our kids, a future where Indigenous communities can start to heal from the damage of uranium mining, where downwinders can not worry about generations after them suffering their same fate. An energy future the earth can count on, from its people, to its rivers, to its oceans. Install a solar panel or two on your home, eat vegan, recycle, buy a reusable water bottle, switch to an EV, take public transit, compost your food, shut the tap off when you brush your teeth, listen to your mom when she tells you to turn off the lights when you leave the room—but don’t think a new nuclear power plant a decade from now is going to save the world.
Works Cited:
“The Church Rock Uranium Mill Spill | Environment & Society Portal.” U.S. Energy Information Administration, www.environmentandsociety.org/tools/keywords/church-rock-uranium-mill-spill. Accessed 30 June 2026.
“2026 National Nuclear Energy Public Opinion Survey: How to Strengthen Record-High Favorability to Nuclear Energy: Latest Survey Offers Tips — Bisconti Research, Inc..” Bisconti Research, Inc., www.bisconti.com/blog/public-opinion-2026. Accessed 30 June 2026.