Our next nuclear nightmare? Is past prologue for new nukes in the Great Lakes?

This Great Lakes Together Blog is the first in a three-part series on radionuclides in the Great Lakes region. Today’s post is by guest author Barry Boyer. Barry Boyer is Professor of Law Emeritus and former Dean of the Law School at the State University of New York at Buffalo. At the Law School, he taught courses in Environmental and Administrative Law, and health and safety regulation. Boyer has been active in a variety of environmental organizations, including serving as a Trustee of the local chapter of The Nature Conservancy and becoming a founding member and past President of the organization now known as Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper. He also serves as active leader with the Great Lakes Ecoregion Network.

When I was a child growing up in the early Cold War Era, part of our indoctrination against the Communist Menace was being educated about the fearsomeness of nuclear weapons. On our black-and-white TVs with their flickering cathode-ray tubes, we saw government films of nuclear tests in the American West featuring buildings—houses like our neighborhoods!—being blown apart by the shock waves from atom bomb detonations. Later we learned that those nuclear tests put radioactive Strontium-90 into our milk supply, and thus into our bones, across much of the nation. In my Florida elementary school, we performed drills in which air raid sirens sent us cowering under our little desks—scant protection next to the wall of windows that would become shrapnel in a nuclear explosion. Grown-ups who were wealthy enough to build bunkers called “fallout shelters” in their basements or back yards debated whether they should shoot neighbors who tried to crash their party during a nuclear disaster.

But we Americans were the good guys, and if we remained strong enough to keep the Commies at bay, nuclear power was supposedly our friend. The Peaceful Atom would give us electricity “too cheap to meter,” maybe even empower us to use its explosive power for moving earth on a grand scale. Expand the Panama Canal!

The Atomic Energy Commission, comprised of technical experts working in partnership with some of our largest corporations, would ensure that our very competent society could manage this powerful, potentially deadly force with complete safety. Or so we thought. Commercialization of nuclear power for generating electricity was rapid, and widespread. Power plants built with pressurized water reactors, first developed in the nuclear navy, sprang up around the Great Lakes and everywhere else where they could find sufficient cooling water.

By the time I entered law school in the 1960s, cracks in the nuclear edifice were beginning to appear. The first year I attended the University of Michigan in 1966, the experimental Enrico Fermi nuclear plant near Detroit suffered a partial core meltdown that could have reached the campus in Ann Arbor where I was attending classes if it had progressed to a full-scale explosion. That was not a crazy scenario, since the experimental plant used liquid sodium rather than water as a coolant, and elemental sodium is explosive when it comes in contact with water and releases hydrogen gas. Fortunately, they were able to get the plant under control, and embark on a very long and very expensive cleanup.

Enrico Fermi 1 plant, Circa 1963 Energy.gov, Wikimedia Commons

After graduating and working a few years in Washington, DC, I landed my first teaching job at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Western New York was grappling with the failed promise that spent nuclear fuel could be recycled economically to re-fuel power reactors. There were stories in the community of temporary workers (including some high school kids) at the West Valley plant getting a year’s worth of radiation doses in an afternoon. There were also concerns about radioactive fallout from the plant spread over the nearby countryside, and the eventual closure of the facility because fuel recycling was not economically feasible. When West Valley was shut down, the community was faced with another very slow, very expensive cleanup scenario. Radioactive wastes still reside at West Valley, including a radwaste landfill that might erode—upstream of the drinking water intakes at Buffalo, Toronto, and many smaller municipalities.

West Valley wasn’t the only nuclear landfill in the region. Waste from the Manhattan Project that brought us into the nuclear age remained in a landfill near the banks of the Niagara River north of the falls in Lewiston—again, upstream from the intakes of Toronto and other municipalities. Another long, slow, costly remediation began.

Then, in 1979, another nuclear plant suffered a partial core meltdown. Three Mile Island, on the Susquehanna River near Pennsylvania’s state capital at Harrisburg, was a very scary situation that resulted from a cascade of failures—a bad valve that got stuck in the wrong position, instrumentation that produced a cacophony of alarms and warnings that overwhelmed the operators. Finally, one human took an appropriate action to avoid catastrophe. For days, the plant hovered on the brink of disaster, as public officials tried to tamp down growing panic among the populace of this urban area and people fled the region to avoid a potentially unpleasant death.

This was the last gasp of the 1960s nuclear boom. Problems for the industry had been building up for a while. People did not want these potentially dangerous facilities in their neighborhood—or their state, or their region. They organized to fight each new nuclear plant that was proposed, and a small cadre of public interest lawyers arose to represent opponents of each new nuclear plant. The industry had not yet managed to develop a standard nuke plant design that was certified to operate safely, so the lawyers found a lot to litigate. Each new proposed nuclear plant was one-of-a-kind, and as a result many of its myriad systems and structures could be put on trial in a licensing proceeding before the Atomic Energy Commission, then appealed to the federal courts. Delays and construction costs escalated. The nuclear boom turned to nuclear bust.

By the time my kids were born, in the 1980s, nuclear power plants weren’t being built any more. The nuclear electricity that had once been thought “too cheap to meter” was now too expensive to build. Those of us who had been concerned and involved in opposing commercial nuclear power in varying ways breathed a sigh of relief and turned our attention to other problems. Happily, our kids and grandkids wouldn’t have to worry about the risks of radionuclides.

Until now. Like plutonium, bad ideas have a very long half-life, and the nuclear mirage still retains its toxic appeal. Both north and south of the Great Lakes, financial interests are pushing new roles and more development for nukes: extending the life of existing nuclear plants beyond their designed lifespan; promoting smaller next-gen reactors (is it a great idea to proliferate nuclear materials in many new sites?); promoting nuclear power as the solution to climate change (it isn’t); and siting a proposed nuclear waste dump in north-western Ontario.

The Trump Administration is enthusiastically backing the increased nuclearization of America. In May, the President signed one of his innumerable Executive Orders directing federal agencies to “unleash the domestic nuclear industrial base” and pave the way for deployment of next-gen nuclear reactors. The Order also directs the Secretaries of Energy and Defense to “utilize all available legal authorities to site, approve, and authorize the design, construction, and operation of privately-funded nuclear fuel recycling [and] reprocessing” technologies at agency-controlled sites. As the Washington Post reported, this provision continues “a decades-long pursuit of nuclear energy recycling in the U.S. with a history of spectacular failure.”

All of these topics deserve careful scrutiny and widespread public involvement. That isn’t happening, as we rush toward our next nuclear future. Are we humans clever enough, and wise enough, and are our societies stable enough, to manage proliferating nuclear materials that will be hazardous for thousands of years? I wish I could think so.

It may be time to revive an old slogan from the 1970s: “Better active today than radioactive tomorrow.” But how can a person who doesn’t have the relevant technical background engage with the complex science and politics of nuclear energy? The easiest route is to participate in an organization that has expertise in addressing the risks of nuclear power. Over 110 groups have been working for the past ten years to persuade the Canadian and U.S. Governments to designate radionuclides as Chemicals of Mutual Concern (CMCs) under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. Designation would require the governments to prepare binational strategies, which “may include research, monitoring, surveillance and pollution prevention and control provisions.” [GLWQA Annex 3]

Getting this designation has proven to be a challenge. In June 2025, the chief government advisors to the officials who will make the final decision recommended that the governments drop radionuclides from further consideration as CMCs. In September, 126 groups jointly submitted our critique of the governments’ recommendation. Look for upcoming blogs on this topic in the coming weeks. In the meantime, the submission and background studies are posted at https://www.greatlakesecoregion.org/toxics-radionuclides-team

If you have questions or wish to find out how to get involved in the campaign, contact the Great Lakes Ecoregion Network’s Toxics and Radionuclides team lead John Jackson at jjackson@web.ca.

GLEN welcomes diverse perspectives on Great Lakes protection. Please note that the views in our posts are those of the author. To learn more about GLEN please visit our website at https://www.greatlakesecoregion.org/