No To Nuclear: Author Linda Pentz Gunter in Conversation with Sharon Tracy
Photo: Pluto Press
On Wednesday, September 4, Linda Pentz Gunter of Beyond Nuclear discussed her new book, No to Nuclear: Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress and Provokes War (Pluto Press, 2026), in conversation with longtime anti-nuclear power activist Sharon Tracy. More than 35 people packed the Clapp Memorial Library in Belchertown for a short reading and a wide-ranging discussion followed by a lively Q&A session.
Sharon Tracy, of the Seacoast (NH) chapter of the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance in the 1970s and a lifelong anti-nuclear activist, introduced the book by praising its readability and its author’s use of humor instead of technical arguments that make readers’ eyes glaze over. Linda Pentz Gunter elaborated, saying that the word “nuclear” was “clinical and clean-sounding,” and that her goal had been to write “from a human perspective, focusing on people all along the nuclear fuel chain.” She outlined the book’s main points, including “the integral ties between nuclear power and nuclear weapons,” the colonialism and racism of uranium mining and nuclear weapons testing, and the current “obsession” with “new” Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) that she called a “fantasy.” The aim of the book, she said, was to “build an indictment” of nuclear power and, for those pressed for time, recommended its short, hard-hitting appendix, “Ten Reasons to Reject Nuclear Power,” also downloadable from Beyond Nuclear’s website.
Pentz Gunter said that No to Nuclear does not focus only on the harm that the operation of nuclear power does to human beings, but also on its “complete disdain and disregard for all the other creatures we share this planet with,” notably marine wildlife, as nuclear facilities routinely contaminate the rivers and oceans with radioactive waste, “as the Japanese are doing right now” with the contaminated water from the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns. “Justice”, she said, “is the through theme” connecting all these points.
In her questions, Tracy steered the conversation to the looming prospect of new nuclear facilities coming to Massachusetts under Governor Maura Healey, who is a strong advocate of SMRs. She asked, “how can we work on politicians who have fallen prey to the nuclear industry myths?” Pentz Gunter responded that the best way to sway politicians was to educate and organize people to exert pressure on them from below.
Governor Healey’s energy legislation, the Energy Affordability, Independence & Innovation Act, sought to repeal a 1982 law that required strict safety measures and a voter referendum before any new nuclear facility could be brought to Massachusetts. In the preamble to the legislation unveiled last May, Healey said that repealing that law would eliminate “a major barrier to the consideration of new small modular reactors that could improve reliability, stabilize prices, and decarbonize the region’s power grid.” That provision cleared the state legislature but, thanks to energetic lobbying by residents and safe energy organizations, it has been removed from the version approved by the state senate on July 1, 2026.
Despite citizen opposition, on September 30, 2026, Healey, along with other regional governors, will hold a nuclear energy summit at UMass Lowell, “exploring the role advanced nuclear and fusion energy can play in New England’s energy future.” Anti-nuclear and safe energy groups around the state are organizing to make their voices heard at the summit.
No to Nuclear refutes the nuclear industry’s inflated claims for untested SMRs that both political parties seem to have embraced, as both the Biden and Trump administrations have handed out enormous subsidies to projects that Pentz Gunter asserted will take at least a decade to come online, and at a tremendous cost that will be borne by the taxpayers. She argues in the book that these much-vaunted “new” nukes are not in fact new at all, but the same old ones in shiny new packaging.
Drawing from the book, Penz Gunter gave several examples of nuclear projects around the country and the world, including in Indigenous and economically disadvantaged communities. She pointed to the U.S. Southwest, where Navajos mined uranium ore without protective equipment and died of lung cancer. She recounted the grisly story of the 1961 assassination of the democratically elected leader of the Republic of the Congo. “The story of Patrice Lumumba is a uranium story,” she said,, one that implicated the U.S., the U.K, Israel, and France, and added, “eighty percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima bomb came from the Congo.” In the Cold War climate of the time, the fear that Lumumba would turn over the newly independent country’s uranium to the Soviet Union justified the atrocity, as did a racist and colonialist mentality still prevalent today, as the greed for precious metals such as cobalt trumps the unfolding genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Many of the people in attendance at the library were old-time activists from the U.S. anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s, which was born right here in the Pioneer Valley and first gained critical mass in the decentralized grassroots organizing and nonviolent civil disobedience of the Clamshell Alliance. It must also be said that most of them (this writer included) were just plain old. However, the atmosphere at the book event, even as old friends greeted each other, was neither nostalgic nor elegiac. It was charged with a strong sense of urgency, driven by the projected soaring demand for electricity to fuel AI data centers and the resurgence of a nuclear industry greedy for the massive government subsidies being handed out to renewable energy projects, aggressively marketing itself to a new generation. Much of the Q&A focused on the best ways to expose and reject nuclear industry propaganda to a new generation sold on myths that nuclear power is safe, green, and clean.
As Linda Penz Gunter wrapped up her remarks, she reminded the audience that the elected officials seeking to build new nuclear facilities and reopen decommissioned nukes across the country, and echoing the industry talking points, were engaged in a “massive betrayal of their constituents.” Nuclear power preys on indigenous communities and is the “slowest and most expensive way to generate electricity”. It cannot serve as a stopgap until more renewables like solar and wind come online. In fact, it will block their development by siphoning off the government subsidies intended for renewables. There are the radiation exposures to human beings and the environment all up and down the nuclear fuel chain, routine radiation leaks from nuclear power facilities and—lest we forget—the perennial danger of catastrophic accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. No one yet knows how or where to store the high-level radioactive waste safely. And, as No to Nuclear reminds us, history has demonstrated that “Atoms for Peace”—the use of nuclear power for civilian energy production—“is also a pathway to war.”
For more information on how to get active, contact:
Beyond Nuclear: https://beyondnuclear.org/
The Clamshell Alliance: https://clamshellalliance.com/
Massachusetts Peace Action: https://masspeaceaction.org/
Citizens Awareness Network (CAN): https://www.nukebusters.org/
Gen Z support for advanced nuclear is well above the public average. Trying to recycle these anti-nuclear talking points to attack new ways of doing nuclear is not going to be persuasive to young people who have very easy access to more complete and sometimes outright contrary information. There are good and bad ways of doing nuclear. By opposing all forms of nuclear, the activists of old have removed themselves from the conversation about how to discriminate the good from the bad, and have no credibility as impartial educators.