This past spring the Kentucky General Assembly adopted a resolution “declaring that nuclear power generation is a clean and dispatchable means of providing baseload electricity to the residents and businesses of the Commonwealth.” The resolution was signed by the Kentucky governor.
Shortly afterward the Kentucky Resources Council released The Good, the Bad & the Ugly: 2025 Kentucky General Assembly Regular Session in Retrospect. The report graded the pro-nuclear resolution as part of the “Bad” legislation passed by state lawmakers this year:
The General Assembly could declare that “up is down,” but that would not make it so. Likewise, declaring nuclear energy to be clean does not address the significant environmental and human health costs associated with the mining, milling, and beneficiation of nuclear fuel, or the legacy of nuclear wastes with no permanent storage strategy.
In its 2024 IRS filing the Kentucky Resource Council reported annual revenue of $631,173. The nonprofit’s opposition to nuclear power has earned it a place on the InfluenceWatch profile for Opposition to Nuclear Energy. The combined annual revenue of all known American NGOs opposing nuclear power is north of $3.3 billion.
Objective research strongly refutes the characterization by the Kentucky Resource Council that nuclear power is dirty and dangerous. Relative to everything else we use for energy, nuclear is the only thing that makes the top of the lists for clean, safe, reliable and abundant.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, nuclear power “is a zero-emission clean energy source” that produces “minimal waste.” Putting that in perspective, the DoE page gives this example: “All of the used nuclear fuel produced by the U.S. nuclear energy industry over the last 60 years could fit on a football field at a depth of less than 10 yards!”
This is particularly impressive because nuclear power is also the largest source of emissions-free energy that we have, providing triple the output of the weather restricted wind and solar options. In 2024, according to reports from the Department of energy, nuclear provided 8.2 quadrillion BTUs of energy, versus 2.6 quadrillion BTUs combined for wind and solar.
Some analysts also dispute that there is such a thing as nuclear “waste.” Depleted nuclear fuel rods are indeed still radioactive, but that’s really the upside as well as the downside, because the depleted rods can be re-enriched back into usable fuel rods. “That waste can also be reprocessed and recycled, although the United States does not currently do this,” notes the Department of Energy.
As to safety, Our World in Data has reported that nuclear power “results in 99.9% fewer deaths than brown coal; 99.8% fewer than coal; 99.7% fewer than oil; and 97.6% fewer than gas” and is “just as safe” as wind and solar power sources. The report estimates just one fatality from nuclear energy every 33 years, versus one every 25 years for wind power.
Nuclear is also the most reliable source of electricity that we have, with a capacity factor of 92.3 percent. Nothing else is close. Nuclear is always on when it is needed. This is not true of wind (average capacity factor 34.3 percent) and sun (23.4 percent) because they are restricted by the weather and daily rotation of the Earth.
Wind and solar also chew up a lot of land to produce that unreliable power. According to the Department of Energy:
Despite producing massive amounts of carbon-free power, nuclear energy produces more electricity on less land than any other clean-air source.
A typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear facility in the United States needs a little more than 1 square mile to operate. NEI says wind farms require 360 times more land area to produce the same amount of electricity and solar photovoltaic plants require 75 times more space.
To put that in perspective, you would need more than 3 million solar panels to produce the same amount of power as a typical commercial reactor or more than 430 wind turbines (capacity factor not included).
As with nearly all anti-nuclear nonprofits, the Kentucky Resource Council also works to impede the use of hydrocarbon fuels, such as natural gas and coal. This means the tax-exempt NGO is opposed to 78 percent of all the sources of electricity generated in America.
Like most nonprofits that claim to be environmental groups, KRC’s anti-nuclear stance cements its position as an anti-energy nonprofit. If they really cared about the Earth and the people living on it, they’d support the cleanest, safest, least intrusive on the land, and most limitlessly scalable source of electricity humans have ever created: nuclear power.
Ten other examples of anti-energy nonprofits profiled at the InfluenceWatch page for Opposition to Nuclear Energy include:
