Let us introduce ourselves
Nuclear Energy Information Service is a non-profit organization committed to ending nuclear power and advocating for sustainable ecologically sound and socially just energy solutions.
To accomplish this end, NEIS:
- Educates, activates and organizes the public on energy issues.
- Builds and mobilizes grass roots power and nonviolent opposition to nuclear power.
- Advocates sustainable and ecologically sound energy alternatives.
When we started NEIS in 1981, we had four main reasons for opposing nuclear power:
1. it’s an unacceptable and unnecessary safety and health risk
- because of the tremendous disasters it could cause and has caused. Among the most prominent of the many nuclear disasters and mishaps experienced worldwide to date are Fukushima, Japan (2011), Chornobyl in the Ukraine (1986), Three Mile Island (1979) and Brown’s Ferry (1975) in the USA, and Windscale, England (1957);
- because of the routine, allowed releases of radionuclides into the environment by less than diligent regulators; and
- because of the environmental damage caused by every step of the nuclear fuel chain.
2. it’s exorbitantly expensive compared to other ways of meeting legitimate energy needs for electric service;
3. it produces long‑lived and dangerous radioactive wastes which must be kept out of the environment for hundreds to thousands of years, at a great financial cost to society;
4. nuclear power is not needed. Renewable energy resources (like hydro-power, wind, and solar) already produce as much total net energy as does nuclear power. Energy conservation and efficiency can save us far greater amounts of electricity (and do so at a lower cost) than is produced by all nuclear power plants in operation in the U.S. today.
Since our founding, we have had to add four more objections to the continued use of nuclear power:
5. it contributes worldwide to the uncontrolled spread of nuclear expertise, materials, technology, and eventually weapons, as has been demonstrated in Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel, and presumed in Iran;
6. it cannot efficiently or safely help solve other serious energy-related environmental problems like Climate Disruption, and
7. it cannot and does not end our dependence on foreign oil imports, despite what nuclear industry advertising claims.
8. there is a great and increased risk of a terrorist incident at a nuclear plant or – surprisingly, much more dangerous – at radioactive waste storage sites, and along proposed transportation routes.
NEIS is not just against nuclear power. We are in favor of energy conservation, energy efficiency, cogeneration and renewable energy resources.
NEIS wants them to take over nuclear power’s role in electricity production, which will also help improve the condition of both the environment and the economy. This is the direction in which our country should go as it makes future energy choices. This is discussed more here: Energy: As If Common Sense Mattered. (link to come)
