Nuclear has long been debated in terms of intergenerational justice. The rise of nuclear environmentalism that presents nuclear energy as the solution to decarbonize and thus meet the challenges of climate change, however, raises a fresh and urgent set of questions concerning justice between and among generations. I argue that to work through the questions around nuclear in the age of climate change we need to begin with an anti-colonial feminist lens. Such an approach foregrounds reproductive justice concerns to critically examine the assumptions in nuclear environmentalism and offers an alternative perspective on the inter-and intra-generational stakes of nuclear as a climate solution.
Specifically, anti-nuclear anti-colonial feminism aims to think through the entanglement of reproductive, inter-, and intra-generational justice amid radioactive colonialism and the antiblack climate. Anti-nuclear anti-colonial feminism changes how intergenerational relations are conceived and thus the terms of the debate. Nuclear needs to be rethought—no longer in isolation as a substance or technology—but rather as a facet of a system of racist-colonial relations that seeks to reproduce itself indefinitely. I argue that we need to reckon with its already underway unreckonable intergenerational effects and consider how current treatments of nuclear work as a form of violence that is at once environmental and reproductive, serving to reproduce one form of life to the detriment of all. My claim is that instead of the expansion of nuclear, we need to develop forms of responsibility for the already existing violently uneven forms of planetary and somatic entanglement with it. How we care for this relation has serious if not fully knowable outcomes for presently living and unborn generations, and indeed for the possibility of the reproduction of forms of life over others.
The claim that nuclear energy is “ethically mandated” rests on the assumption that it is the cheapest, quickest, “clean,” way to achieve decarbonization on an adequate scale. I can merely note here the widely documented fact that nuclear spectacularly fails on all these accounts. From the perspective of many nuclear environmentalists, the “risks” of nuclear are justifiable since they will lead to the long-term consequences of decarbonization and mitigation of climate change. Such “risks” and the unshakeable problem of waste are often justified by appeal to (utilitarian) ethics that, as philosopher Stephen Gardiner has shown, is misleading, not least because the “greatest good” is determined by the use of a cost-benefit analysis lifted from classical economics. On this calculation, the good equates to low costs and low carbon emission maximum energy. Other considerations tend to be excluded in advance. On this view, it is unjust to deprive future generations of abundant energy and to leave them with a radically compromised climate. Consequently, nuclear advocates claim that not investing in new nuclear would amount to an abdication of our ethical responsibilities to future generations. There is still the tricky matter of leaving the waste as inheritance. But, the argument goes, this is a trifling concern since we can be confident in the progress of our (or descendant’s) technological development. Soon enough we will contain, master, and neutralize the waste.
When considered in terms of intra-generational justice, proponents argue that the expansion of nuclear is an ethical duty since it is unjust to deprive developing nations of abundant cheap energy. They claim that the expansion of nuclear power enables widespread development without further carbon emissions. Consequently, it seems to effectively resolve one of the major problems of whitestream climate justice, that is, the need to balance climate mitigation with equal development. Yet, as the authors of the article “A Call for Antiracist Action and Accountability in the Nuclear Community” explain: “claims that technological fixes will address climate injustices obscure the complex relationship of the nuclear fuel cycle with aspects of race, gender, and socioeconomic status.” In this post, I begin to unpack this obscured “complex relationship” and call all womxn and feminist philosophers to join me in resisting nuclear environmentalism.
Anti-Colonial Feminisms
My use of the term anti-colonial is informed by Max Liboiron (Red River Métis/Michif and settler) in Pollution is Colonialism, as well as my long-standing engagement with anti-colonial thinkers and militants such as Frantz Fanon. Despite the differences between them, both approaches start with accounts of colonial land relations, as opposed to intentions. On Liboiron’s view, the features of colonial land relations always have pollution as the outcome, are marked by fantasies of disposability and containment, and are therefore predicated on access to Indigenous lands and bodies. Starting with colonial land relations allows us to see how colonialism reproduces itself (and our role in it) despite well-intentioned efforts (such as environmentalism) that seek to treat its worst effects. On my view, nuclear environmentalism is a great example of this phenomenon, and thus the need for ecological approaches that start with an understanding of colonial land relations. Starting with colonial land relations entails carefully moving between different scales, to trace the afterlives and radioactive nodes of nuclear—(whether weapons or energy)—that link those living with nuclear in a virtual web of what Lou Cornam calls “the irradiated international.” The term anti-colonial stresses a political commitment and shared project, one that is profoundly informed by the insights, demands, and struggles of Indigenous and other people subject to colonialism, imperialism, and racism, but is not confined to members of such groups. An anticolonial approach also does not claim to be doing “Indigenous” philosophy—a claim that often effectively amounts to erasure and appropriation (or unintentional reproduction of colonialism).
Why anti-colonial feminist? Understanding of colonialism as land relations cannot be disentangled from the imposition of a system of gender-sexuality as a crucial tactic in land expropriation, dispossession, and genocide. Default (white) ecofeminist approaches to nuclear have focused on the intergenerational and reproductive ethics of nuclear weapons. Anti-colonial feminist perspectives, however, are longer and wider. Longer, since unlike approaches that consider nuclear “risks” as a theoretical future or one-off event, anti-colonial feminists work with the fact of continual and widespread nuclear use and often live with its past, present, and perilous future. They are wider since they include the whole nuclear fuel chain, as well as analyses of heteropatriarchal power that begin with racial capitalism, (settler) colonialism, and imperialism, and because they reflect on a different set of issues and values (such as land-based relations and spiritual obligations) targeted by nuclear. These wider and longer perspectives offer important lessons for all of us and our shared nuclear climate future.
As Winona LaDuke and Ward Churchill warned in 1985:
The new colonialism knows no limits. Expendable populations will be expended. National sacrifice areas will be sacrificed. New populations and new areas will be targeted, expended and sacrificed. There is no sanctuary. The colonialism is radioactive; what it does can never be undone. Left to its own dynamics to run its course, it will spread across the planet like the cancer it is. It can never be someone else’s problem; regardless of its immediate location at the moment, it has become the problem and the peril of everyone alive, and who will be alive. The place to end it is where it has taken root, where it disclosed its inner nature. The time to end it is now.
We would do well to listen now. Let’s be clear. Nuclear energy = extractivism or colonial land relations + imperialism. We cannot divorce nuclear weapons from nuclear power. As Anne Sisson Runyan notes: “the same nuclear fuel chain upon which weapons rely would remain intact and balloon as more and more non-nuclear weapon states adopted nuclear power. That nuclear fuel chain runs from uranium mining to nuclear power and weapons production and testing as well as the resulting nuclear waste. While apocalyptic visions of nuclear war suggest indiscriminate destruction, the relatively non-spectacular field chain is highly discriminatory.” Starting with the mines, with the denuded, disemboweled, irradiated land and the near decimation of all it sustains, we cannot forget that nuclear entails the extraction of a finite resource that remains radioactive for at least 100,000 years. Reckoning with the abandoned mines and the uncountable open piles and streams of radioactive tailings, reckoning with the man camps, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, and other related forms of gender-based and sexual violence, reckoning with the global trails of inter-species/generational illness, the premature and often horrific death, it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry in the face of claims that nuclear is a “green” “sustainable” net zero energy source that some philosophers have concluded we are “ethically mandated” to endorse. How is this possible? How did they reach this conclusion? And how is nuclear environmentalism becoming a commonsense solution for climate futures?
One explanation is that from Niger to India to Canada, uranium is on Indigenous land. In addition to mines, facilities at various stages of the nuclear cycle are overwhelmingly sited within or near BIPOC communities. Discounting those worst affected by the nuclear fuel chain is a prerequisite for greenwashing nuclear. The agency, resistance, and knowledge of the BIPOC womxn who have resisted and chronicled its effects are erased and forgotten. Luckily for the industry, this erasure is relatively easy in a world that disqualifies such womxn from epistemic credibility.
The view that nuclear is best for the common good presupposes constricted notions of the common and the good. Indeed, the fallout of nuclear on BIPOC womxn and children is not coincidental. Nuclearism is inextricable from the reproductive futurity of colonialism and imperialism. Nuclear has been tied to the imposition of dimorphic gender, a narrow model of (nuclear) family life, and associated patterns of proper conduct and consumption (patterns that require abundant energy—energy that is supposedly supplied by nuclear power). As the reproduction of a colonial regime of gender-sexuality, nuclear kills two birds with one stone: (1) dispossession: gaining land for use as “sinks,” buffer, or sacrifice zones that (radioactive) colonialism is predicated on. This serves the end of (2) genocide: by attacking and undermining Indigenous and non-normative forms of kinship, gender-sexuality, community power, and organization, as well as associated forms of land tenure and relative autonomy, and through wildly harmful and intergenerational and reproductive health effects, nuclear is effectively a eugenic measure that supplements others strategies such as forced sterilization and family separation.
When we look at the whole fuel cycle, from the mine to the dump, from the perspective of the womxn who live and work with nuclear, we understand that it is not simply a “risk” of nuclear meltdown or “leakage” from proposed waste storage sites that is the issue. As philosopher of science, Kristin Shrader-Frechette, explains in What Will Work: Fighting Climate Change with Renewable Energy, Not Nuclear Power: “Children are at risk from commercial fission, however, not merely because of accidents and normal emissions from the nuclear-fuel cycle. Current national and international radiation-protection standards also fail to protect them adequately. In fact, for most pollutants, children are at roughly a 10-times-higher risk than adults, because their organ, metabolic, and detoxication systems are not fully developed.” The “reference-man model” elucidates the failure to account for differential vulnerabilities to radiation and other pollutants. Schrader-Frechette continues:
Given children’s much higher radiosensitivity, it is surprising that international and national radiation standards fail to protect them [children] adequately. One of the central reasons they fail is that hazards of ionizing radiation are assessed in terms of the reference-man model. As ICRP put it: ‘Reference man is defined as being between 20–30 years of age, weighing 70 kg [154 pounds], is 170 cm [5 feet 7 inches] in height, and lives in a climate with an average temperature of from 10° to 20° C. He is a Caucasian and is a Western European or North American in habitat and custom.’ In fact, the reference-man model is built into the main US computer program, RESRAD, used to assess radioactive risks after remediation of radioactively contaminated sites. Yet RESRAD and reference-man models for radiation risks focus only on male cancer risks, although women’s cancer risk is roughly 50-percent higher when both receive the same radiation dose. Moreover, because the reference-man model focuses only on cancer, it also ignores noncancer harms. These radiation harms include genetic defects, immune-system damage, blood diseases, spontaneous abortion in the early weeks after conception, birth defects up to 14 weeks after conception, and higher risks of neonatal mortality—after radiation exposure. The reference-man model likewise ignores the permanent 25-point drop in IQ for every sievert (100 rem) of in-utero ionizing-radiation exposure during the critical weeks (8–26) of brain formation.
The use of “the reference-man” has weighty implications for the nuclear question specifically, and for possible climate futures more generally. The use of the reference-man as the normative threshold of concern and figure of ethical and political salience is a concrete manifestation of what Sylvia Wynter calls “Man.” In brief, this is the form of life or way of being human that overrepresents itself as the universal. It represents the interests, needs, and values of its current form of existence as the interests of the human species itself. On Wynter’s account, Man has been imposed as the norm and zenith of what it means to be human. She argues that this genre of the human is at the root of the problems of nuclear warfare and of the anthropogenic climate change generated from mass ecocide since 1492 (or the colonization of the Americas).
Atomic concerns run throughout Wynter’s long career. In Wynter’s more recent work, the threat of an “unparalleled catastrophe for our species” (a phrase borrowed from Einstein’s pronouncements on the bomb) remains but is threaded into a global and species-wide narrative of the “existential threat” of climate change. At the base of these threats, is the genre of the human, Man, that pursues deathly ends that it (mistakenly) believes are necessary for species survival. Addressing climate change, therefore, means departing from the onto-epistemic framework that is its driver, and transforming our sense and practice of what it is to be human in fundamentally different terms. Otherwise, our solutions—such as nuclear energy—risk deepening the problems we purportedly seek to address.
The assumption that the reproduction and survival of humanity is the perpetual reproduction of the same, that is of one parochial and highly problematic form of life (Man), is at work in arguments for nuclear energy as well as associated forms of longtermism and the technological fantasies of many so-called climate solutions. In short, nuclear promises to reproduce and sustain the form of life that drives anthropogenic climate change. Whether it can deliver on even that promise is unclear.
Man reproduces itself by attacking the (re)generational capacities and relations of all that deviates from it. Consequently, we need to foreground the concerns of reproductive justice, as well as the needs and lives of BIPOC womxn and children in our considerations of nuclear, without however, unwittingly reproducing default whitestream environmentalist heteronormative appeals to “Nature” and colonial land relations predicated on fantasies of purity and containment. Anti-nuclear anti-colonial feminism asks us to orient ourselves to alternative ways of conceptualizing and practicing (inter- and intra-generational) relations. It challenges us to expand what are usually conceived of as reproductive and intergenerational justice. As we undertake the urgent work of refusing nuclear environmentalism we might also start to explore promising alternatives such as (re)generation (Wynter), alterlife (Michelle Murphy), queer inheritance and responsibility for toxic progeny (Heather Davis), and support Indigenous anticolonial practices of kinship with “bad relations” (Liboiron). Rather than looking away from the places and people already intimately entangled with nuclear or speculating into a distant future, we must ask what living with this dangerous and demanding relation might mean and what forms of care and responsibility for those most intimately harmed by it could take.
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Romy Opperman
Romy Opperman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, NYC. Romy’s research centers on feminist Africana, Indigenous, and decolonial thinkers to foreground issues of racism and colonialism for environmental and climate ethics and justice and to highlight the importance of marginalized perspectives for liberated climate futures. Specifically, her work is oriented by philosophies that trouble theories of justice inherited from liberal political philosophy, and by practices of freedom operative in Black ecologies, place-based movements, and struggles overland and ecological issues. Forthcoming work includes “Sylvia Wynter’s Challenging Caribbean Critique” in Creolizing Critical Theory: New Voices in Caribbean Philosophy and "Black Trash and Intimate Ecological Resistance"(Critical Philosophy of Race).Romy is currently writing a book tentatively titled Groundings: Black Ecologies of Freedom.
