Clamshell Alliance Fall 2025 newsletter

[Brian Tokar]

A just-released newsletter from the latest revival of the now-legendary Clamshell Alliance, which advanced affinity group-based organization and nonviolent site occupations vs. nuclear power plant construction in the northeastern US in the late 1970s.  A number of core activists have reunited to challenge the current tech-driven wave to ‘revive’ nuclear power in the US:

From: "In...@clamshellallinace.com via Clamshell Alliance" <clam-world+info_at_c...@gaggle.email>

Subject: [Clamshell Alliance] Clamshell Alliance Fall 2025 newsletter

Date: November 21, 2025 at 8:10:26 PM EST

To: "Clamshell Alliance" <clam-...@gaggle.email>

Reply-To: "In...@clamshellallinace.com" <in...@clamshellalliance.com>

Dear Friends, 

 

Welcome to the first fall newsletter of the revived 21st century Clamshell Alliance! As you may know, a group of seasoned Clams has been meeting monthly for a few years and has recently developed an up-to-date website at clamshellalliance.com, filled with news and interesting insights into nuclear power and the global surge of renewable energy. 

  

This newsletter contains a host of stories on the continued resistance to nuclear power locally and nationwide. You can read about current attempts to ‘revive’ nuclear power in the US and how people are fighting to stop it. We include perspectives from labor and Indigenous activists, updates on the nuclear waste issue, progress on offshore wind in the northeast and an important action alert from Massachusetts, among other topics. Please pass this information on and invite others to join our contact list. 

  

We want to expand the reach of the anti-nuclear power message through social media and other avenues, and we want to be able to pay for the website and its upkeep. So, we urge everyone reading this to consider a $100 tax exempt donation to further the work. Or more or less, whatever you can afford. You can contribute online or by check. Please click on clamshellalliance.com/donate or write a check to our fiscal sponsor, the Institute for Social Ecology (with Clamshell Alliance clearly indicated in the memo line) and mail it to the ISE at P.O. Box 48, Plainfield, VT 05667. 

 

Besides keeping our new website updated, we have recently helped launch a new antinuclear coalition in Massachusetts (see article below), supported showings of Eric Wolfe’s new documentary, “Acres of Clams,” and begun working to revive a national activist network. Your donation will support these and more efforts like them over the coming year. 

 

Let’s work together to put the brakes on escalating nuclear insanity! 

  

No Nukes! 

 

Brian Tokar for the Clamshell WAG (Website Affinity Group), which also includes Sharon Tracy, Tom Wyatt, Brenda Loew, Joseph M. Hunt and Barry Feldman, 

 

 

PS: Please check out the latest addition to the website, a "Clam Tales" page featuring 38 short videos of Clam activists sharing unique personal stories of individuals and events from the Clamshell Alliance's history. These are mainly outtakes from interviews filmed by Steve Thornton and edited by Eric Wolfe. 

Our Fall 2025 Clamshell Alliance Newsletter 

 

Contents 

 

You can read the beginning of each article below the Table of Contents, and then tap on “click 

here” to see the rest. If you see “message clipped” at the bottom of this email, please click View 

entire message. Once you’re done reading an article, return to this email to see more articles.  

 

• The antidote to false rumors of a nuclear revival? Start organizing! — Linda Pentz Gunter 

• The nuclear mirage: why small modular reactors won’t save nuclear power — Arnie Gundersen 

• Workers and the Energy Transition — Jeremy Brecher 

• Indigenous Nations vs. Nuclear Development — Earl Hatley and the Navajo-Hopi Observer 

• Offshore Wind Gains Despite Trump Trickery — Doug Bogen 

• Nuclear Waste: Failure to Dispose Safely and Responsibly — Joseph M. Hunt 

• Victory in New Mexico – Tom Wyatt  

• New Massachusetts Coalition Aims to Protect 1982 Nuclear Referendum Law — Shel Horowitz and Cliff McCarthy  

• Overblown Threats of Terrorism, Then and Now — Arnie Alpert 

 

 

The antidote to false rumors of a nuclear revival? Start organizing! 

By Linda Pentz Gunter, Beyond Nuclear 

 

There is a nuclear revival going on right now, but it’s a revival of rhetoric, not reality. The government and nuclear power industry’s saturation propaganda campaign is running 24/7 to promote a largely imaginary “nuclear renaissance” and dramatically expand the use of nuclear power. 

 

But for all the fast talk about fast-tracking new reactor construction, in blind obedience to four executive orders from the Trump White House ordering it so, nothing much is actually happening. 

 

Whether it’s developing and deploying so-called small modular reactors (SMR) or micro reactors, or reverting to the traditional 1,000+ megawatt versions, progress, if any, will be inexorably slow and exorbitantly expensive for a number of key reasons. 

 

[To continue, click here] 

 

 The nuclear mirage: why small modular reactors won’t save nuclear power 

by Arnie Gundersen, Fairewinds Energy Education 

 

Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are the nuclear industry’s latest shiny dream. It is more hope than strategy. SMRs only exist in the imagination of the nuclear industry and its supporters. SMRs can only be found on glossy PowerPoint slides. That is why the Paris-based nuclear consultant Mycle Schneider dubbed SMRs “power point reactors.” There are no engineering plans, no blueprints, no working prototypes.  

 

Still, hope springs eternal, and the idea is to build advanced atomic fission reactors, typically defined as producing up to 300 megawatts of electricity per unit, less than a third the size of a conventional nuclear plant.  

 

… But let’s not be fooled by the word “small.” Even a single SMR is a massive, highly radioactive industrial machine, capable of powering a mid-sized city and containing a radioactive inventory far greater than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  

 

[To continue, click here] 

 

 Workers and the Energy Transition 

By Jeremy Brecher, Labor Network for Sustainability 

 

Energy runs the world, and how energy is produced and used is undergoing a historic transformation. As UN secretary general Antonio Guterres recently said, “We are on the cusp of a new era. Fossil fuels are running out of road. The sun is rising on a clean energy age.”  

  

If we get on the right side of this transformation we can solve many of the most serious problems we face – not only climate destruction and environmental degradation, but also racial injustice, insecurity, economic inequality, job degradation, healthcare collapse, international cooperation, world peace, and many others. 

   

[To continue, click here] 

 

 Indigenous Nations vs. Nuclear Development 

By Earl Hatley, a member of the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi, centered in NW Vermont, writes: 

 

We know that both the Biden and Trump Administrations’ push for an "all the above" strategy for energy production includes nuclear power, with nuclear claimed to be a "green alternative" to fossil fuels. This is leading to increased uranium production and processing, along with attempts to solve the storage problem by pushing for a site in southeastern New Mexico near the Texas Panhandle border. 

 

All this is having an impact on Indigenous Nations from New Mexico to South Dakota, where new proposals for mines within Indigenous reservations and sacred sites (Black Hills, Grand Canyon, New Mexico, Nevada, etc.). 

 

[To continue, click here] 

 

 Offshore Wind Gains Despite Trump Trickery 

By Doug Bogen, Seacoast Anti-Pollution League 

 

Despite some technical and political challenges, offshore wind power continues to be a key opportunity for achieving a safe and sustainable energy future in the US, especially off the northeast and west coasts. During the Biden administration, ongoing planning for offshore wind farms led to a commitment for 30 gigawatts (GW) nationwide by 2030 – equivalent in capacity to 25 nuclear plants like Seabrook – with an additional 15 GW to be floated in deeper waters by 2035.  

 

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) went to work identifying and auctioning lease areas in federal waters off both the east and west coasts as well as the Gulf of Mexico. In total, about three dozen lease areas covering almost 3.5 million acres have been leased, with the potential to generate 19 GW and netting over $5 billion to the federal treasury.  

 

[To continue, click here] 

 

 Nuclear Waste: A Failure to Dispose Safely and Responsibly 

By Joseph M. Hunt 

 

This is a national crisis, building steadily over 75 years, with poorly managed and stored radioactive waste from nuclear weapons production and commercial energy from nuclear power plants cluttering our communities, highways and ports without a clear plan to resolve it.  

 

Nuclear energy supplies 18% of U.S. electricity, declining because of the surge in renewable energy, and that means 2,000 metric tons (MT) of waste are generated each year. More than 95,000 MT of spent fuel are being stored at sites in 39 states. There are 54 nuclear power plants with 94 active commercial reactors, plus 35 university and government facilities. That excludes other waste stored temporarily in uranium mining and processing storage sites.  

 

[To continue, click here] 

 

 Victory in New Mexico 

By Tom Wyatt  

 

In the anti-nuclear movement, victories don’t come that often. All the more reason for celebration this past October when Holtec International and Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance’s (ELEA) decided to terminate their plans to build an “consolidated interim storage facility (CISF)” for high level radioactive waste in southeastern New Mexico. This project would have constructed and then operated the world’s largest high-level radioactive waste dump. Since no permanent solution to the disposal of radioactive waste has been devised, the idea that this facility would be “interim” is in fact highly misleading and unlikely.  

 

A diverse coalition fought together against this facility. Beyond Nuclear, a key participant, reports that “this hard-won environmental justice (EJ) victory” was the result of the work of “countless Indigenous, as well as grassroots EJ, environmental, and public interest allies for more than a decade of tireless work, to block this dangerous dump and the many thousands of “Mobile Chernobyl” radioactive waste shipments its opening would have launched nationwide.” 

 

[To continue, click here] 

 

New Massachusetts Coalition Aims to Protect 1982 Nuclear Referendum Law 

By Shel Horowitz and Cliff McCarthy, for the Commonwealth Coalition for Democracy and Safe Energy 

 

Sixty-seven percent of Massachusetts voted in a public referendum in 1982 to require several common-sense safety protections such as having safe disposal of radioactive waste, an evacuation plan, and a decommissioning plan—as well as citizen approval of any new nuclear power plant built in the Commonwealth. 

 

Now, Section 45 of H.4144—Governor Healey’s energy bill, “An Act relative to energy affordability, independence and innovation”—proposes to repeal that landmark and landslide vote in order to fast-track new nuclear in Massachusetts. But safe energy activists from (in alphabetical order), Cape Downwinders, Citizens Awareness Network, Clamshell Alliance, Greenfield Solar, and Warheads to Windmills have formed the Commonwealth Coalition for Democracy and Safe Energy to urge their State Senators and Representatives to remove that provision. 

 

[To continue, click here] 

 

 Overblown Threats of Terrorism, Then and Now 

By Arnie Alpert 

 

Three days before the Clamshell Alliance peaceably occupied the nuclear plant construction site in Seabrook in 1977, New Hampshire Governor Meldrim Thomson called me a terrorist.   

“Our advance information indicates that the planned demonstration of April 30 is nothing but a cover for terrorist activity,” he said, quoted in a front-page, above-the-fold article in the Manchester Union Leader. 

 

The governor’s “advance information” was absurd. In fact, the Alliance had been openly planning the demonstration for months and was circulating a set of “guidelines” for any planning to join. The first guideline, printed on a mimeographed sheet, said, “All occupiers must have preparation in non-violent action before taking part in the April 30 occupation 

 

[To continue, click here] 

 

 

For regular updates on the nuclear industry, renewable energy and rising 

antinuclear resistance, please check back frequently at clamshellalliance.com and on our Facebook page. 

 

No Nukes! 

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[Brian Tokar]