Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

The Sierra Club was joined by a charismatic and aggressive young attorney named Ralph Nader, who had won the public’s trust in the mid-1960s, and become a household name, after criticizing the safety of American cars. It is hard to overstate his influence in turning the public against nuclear energy. “A nuclear accident could wipe out Cleveland,” Nader told an Ohio newspaper in 1974, “and the survivors would envy the dead.”85 Antinuclear groups publicized a report written by a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, which claimed 400,000 infants had died from radioactive fallout from weapons testing.86 Nader and other antinuclear activists claimed that nuclear was far worse for the environment than fossil fuels. While the water that comes out of nuclear plants is clean, it is also warm, which could change the environment and impact animals. While nuclear plants produce no air pollution, they could overheat and melt, killing as many people as a bomb, they said. And while nuclear waste is the only waste from energy safely stored at the site of production, Nader and other campaigners constantly implied that it could somehow poison waterways or be used as a bomb.