Environmentalism Should be Empirical - by June Kur

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Environmentalism Should be Empirical<br>Review: No to Nuclear: Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress and Provokes War, by Linda Pentz Gunter. Pluto Press, 2026.

June Kur<br>Aug 18, 2026

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Though sections of the environmental movement have recently shied away from their historic anti-nuclearism, the position retains a small legion of adherents, with Linda Pentz Gunter—founder and international specialist of Beyond Nuclear, and author of the recently released No to Nuclear—among the most prominent in the United States. Her book “does not try to offer all the solutions,” instead opting to put “a human face on the nuclear story.” This is a fine and acceptable thing for a person to write. I see nothing wrong with cataloguing the human-level impact of nuclear power, or of any technological development, for that matter. I do, however, take issue with what follows: “It is hoped that this book will inspire a strong resolve in its readers to refuse to accept nuclear power as a climate solution,” a sweeping position that Gunter’s argument completely lacks the thrust to justify. Her disclaimer, that the book is not meant to be a technical policy work, reads like a cop-out when its thesis is an extremely bold policy claim: that we ought to completely abolish nuclear energy as a source of electricity. With apologies to Gunter, I must confess that I was not persuaded. Though I finished the book with, if nothing else, a better sense of the injustices faced by marginalized communities during nuclear energy’s complex history, the skipped logical steps and shoddy evidence throughout No to Nuclear left me far from convinced of its titular prescription.<br>No to Nuclear and books like it often find a small but influential audience among the activist left, and this one arrives with cover endorsements from Ralph Nader and Jeremy Corbyn. Given Nader’s and Corbyn’s political commitments, I’m hardly surprised by their positions on nuclear power, but that books like this circulate as widely as they do in the left-wing activist media diet feels like a problem. The book is not good. It preaches to the choir, cherry-picks evidence, and repeatedly and baselessly alleges ulterior motives among its ideological opponents. Left-wing political literature deserves better than this. If the only positive notices on the back of the book are from Ralph Nader, Kate Hudson (the former general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, not the actress), and Jeremy Corbyn, then it probably hasn’t brought in anyone new, and that’s the best-case scenario. At worst, it has contributed to a culture of anti-intellectualism and bad faith among the people who ought to be as sharp and skilled at coalition-building as possible. In reviewing No to Nuclear, I hope to, in some small way, contribute to the opposite.<br>At its best, No to Nuclear serves as a thorough catalogue of the grave and forgotten injustices faced by our planet’s most destitute, and effectively brings to light some of nuclear history’s darker chapters. I think “please don’t dump waste in the Native American burial ground” is a perfectly legitimate ask, and we ought to be ashamed of having done this. However, what No to Nuclear omits is just as telling as what it highlights; Gunter repeatedly fails to explain why such crimes are either unique or inherent to the nuclear industry. Without those second and third steps, the argument is immature, and certainly doesn’t support a claim as radical as “nuclear power should never be used.” Several times, she brings up the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the world’s most exploited, downtrodden countries, and her discussion of it is illustrative of both the book’s primary strength and its most glaring weaknesses. The examples of abuses she provides are harrowing and ought to be considered in future mining policy. But there also exist uranium operations that leftists could look at without flinching: Cameco’s mines in Saskatchewan’s Athabasca Basin run a workforce that is roughly 46 percent Indigenous, are organized under the United Steelworkers, and operate under collaboration agreements with the First Nations whose land they sit on and under the scrutiny of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. As leftists, we should not tolerate the conditions Gunter describes, but rather than ban the entire technology, we should strive to generalize the humane practices that already exist. No to Nuclear does not explain why this cannot be done. What’s more, the Congo is arguably just as infamous for its cobalt mining, a critical industry in certain renewables, as it is for its uranium mining. While solar panels themselves do not require cobalt, the broader renewable energy ecosystem—particularly battery storage—depends on supply chains that raise ethical concernssimilar to those raised with respect to uranium mining. Omitting this is, charitably, a massive...