Annual Revenue of Nuclear Energy Enemies Tops $2.8 Billion—but That May Be as Good as It Gets for Them

Last week, Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous was placed on leave. According to the New York Times, since his 2023 arrival Jealous has endured a “rocky tenure” that involved disputes with “some employees and the organization’s union.” From 2008 to 2013 he appeared to enjoy a far less “rocky tenure” as president of the NAACP. Opponents of nuclear energy owe a debt of gratitude to Jealous. He has now helmed two of America’s wealthiest anti-energy and anti-nuclear nonprofits.

All told, the domestic opposition to nuclear energy now has combined revenue in excess of $2.8 billion.[*]

NAACP is an abbreviation for the “National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” As such, it sure doesn’t seem like the NAACP should be worried over energy policy. But worried they are.

In 2018, after Jealous had left, the NAACP passed a resolution titled “In Opposition to Nuclear and Fossil Fuel Technologies as Safe, Viable Alternatives to Renewable Energy,” which opposed against nearly all of the energy on which the world relies.

According to its most recent, publicly available tax filing, covering 2023, the NAACP took in annual revenue of nearly $43.6 million. This makes the civil rights group the 12th wealthiest nongovernmental organization (NGO) of the known opponents of nuclear power.

The Sierra Club is another matter. It is one of the oldest and most strident opponents of nuclear power and nearly all other energy that we rely on. The Sierra Club website maintains it is still “unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy.” Its recent annual revenue of $173.4 million is good for just sixth largest on the list of anti-nuclear nonprofits.

Why Does It Matter?

Nuclear power is by far the most reliable, safest, and cleanest source of electricity that we have. According to the Department of Energy, once a nuclear power plant is up and running it has a capacity factor of 92.3 percent, meaning it almost always runs at its highest rated power output.

Nothing else comes close: not natural gas powerplants (59.9 percent) and not coal (42.6 percent.) The weather-dependent wonder twins, wind (34.3 percent) and solar (23.4 percent), check in at the very bottom of the list.

The other benefits of nuclear power are summarized in the InfluenceWatch profile of the Opposition to Nuclear Energy:

Nuclear power plants produce no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions.… A 2020 analysis from Our World in Data reported that nuclear energy “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,” making it “just as safe” as wind and solar power production. The U.S. Department of Energy has concluded that “nuclear energy produces more electricity on less land than any other clean-air source” and that it would require “more than 3 million solar panels to produce the same amount of power as a typical commercial reactor or more than 430 wind turbines.”

The profile showed that nuclear fuel is also a functionally limitless source of reliable electricity:

A 2009 analysis of nuclear fuel supplies posted by Scientific American estimated that the “economically accessible uranium resources” known to the U.S. Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) at that time would have been enough to run all of the nuclear reactors on Earth for “more than 200 years at current rates of consumption.” The report also predicted that “exploration and improvements in extraction technology are likely to at least double this estimate over time.”

“Two technologies could greatly extend the uranium supply itself,” concluded the Scientific American analysis. “Neither is economical now, but both could be in the future if the price of uranium increases substantially. First, the extraction of uranium from seawater would make available 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium—a 60,000-year supply at present rates.”

Why does opposition to nuclear power matter?

Most and possibly all groups that oppose nuclear power also oppose the use of petroleum, natural gas, and coal. Radical NGOs that take such a position are functionally opposed to 91 percent of all energy used by Americans for everything we do. These nonprofits are the epitome of not just anti-energy extremism, but functionally the enemies of modern industrial civilization.

They belong to a “go back to live hungry, cold, and in caves” movement that now rakes in at least $2.8 billion annually.

Recent annual revenue of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade association for the nuclear industry, was $57.3 million. That’s not high enough to crack the top 10 on the anti-nuclear list.

Even the pro-nuclear Heritage Foundation, the largest of the right-center, free-market think tanks, has annual revenue of $100 million and uses this to do much more than just climate and energy policy.

By contrast, at least six anti-nuclear nonprofits do nothing but climate and energy policy and have individually reported annual revenue of $60 million to $274 million more than Heritage.

Just those six radical anti-energy nonprofits have combined annual revenue of more than $1.5 billion.

The Top 10 Nuclear Energy Enemies

These are the 10 largest anti-nuclear NGOs, as measured by the reported revenue in their most recent IRS filing:

1. World Wildlife Fund ($8 million)
2. World Resources Institute ($8 million)
3. Environmental Defense Fund ($247 million)
4. California Teachers Association ($7 million)
5. Natural Resources Defense Council ($1 million)
6. Sierra Club ($4 million)
7. Rocky Mountain Institute ($7 million)
8. League of Conservation Voters ($5 million)
9. GRID Alternatives ($3 million)
10. Southern Environmental Law Center ($8 million)

Nine of those 10 have made the eradication of carbon emissions a top policy goal, arguably their most important objective. At best, their opposition to the only abundant fuel that produces no carbon emissions places them at the pinnacle of hypocrisy.

The outlier is the California Teachers Association (CTA), which presumably exists to advance policies unrelated to energy production—one wildly hypothetical policy might be educating the children of California. Nonetheless, in 2021 the CTA co-signed a letter to President Joe Biden, asking him to phase out “nuclear energy as an inherently dirty, dangerous and costly energy source.”

The recent big mover in the anti-nuclear space is the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), which has increased its annual revenue by more than $100 million just since 2020. As recently as 2012, RMI reported annual revenue of $10 million and wouldn’t have been close to the top-10 on the anti-nuclear list.

Action for the Climate Emergency (ACE) is another anti-energy growth stock. ACE reported $17.3 million annual revenue for the year ending June 2024. This is more than double the 2023 revenue and good for a top 30 ranking in the updated list of anti-nuclear NGOs.

For the year ending June 2019, ACE reported just $2.3 million total revenue. At this time, ACE was an acronym for a far less alarming name: “Alliance for Climate Education.”

It is probably not an accident that ramping up the climate panic with the new name corresponded to a sevenfold increase in loot received.

Promoting more panic was likely a strategy that paid off big for many anti-nuclear groups. Now nearly 50 groups have reported total revenue in excess of $10 million, and nearly 150 have cracked $1 million or more.

The full list includes nearly 300 nonprofits. Their combined annual revenue has grown to $2.8 billion, up from the $2.3 billion when this list was first compiled in August 2023. (An alphabetical listing of the names is available at the Opposition to Nuclear Energy InfluenceWatch profile.)

High-Water Mark?

But it’s possible this could be the financial high-water mark for anti-nuclear hysteria.

Because the IRS has always been a year or two behind in publicly posting IRS tax filings from nonprofits, it is impossible to compile the current annual revenue for such a large group.

Also, over the last year, much has changed regarding the federal government’s energy policy and attitude toward the nonprofit sector. The Trump administration is reprioritizing nuclear power and traditional hydrocarbon energy and de-emphasizing weather-dependent wind and solar energy.

This is all bad news for the climate and energy grants sent to nonprofits during the Biden administration, many of which are now being canceled or clawed back. As one example, from 2021 through 2024 the Biden administration approved more than $19 million in grant awards for the Rocky Mountain Institute. But in April, the Trump administration announced it was canceling $6.8 million of this total.

In what was likely not a coincidence, RMI announced in May that it was laying off 10 percent of its staff due to “increased uncertainty around revenue sources.” It’s certainly getting more difficult to profit from anti-nuclear panic. Maybe that’s why the Sierra Club sent Ben Jealous to the bench.

[*] This is a very conservative estimate of total revenue that excludes (at a minimum) tens of millions of dollars that arguably could or should be counted. For example, it excludes groups that have opposed nuclear power in specific cases, but have not yet stated explicit official opposition to it, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists. The full methodology is explained here: Annual Revenue of Opponents of Carbon-Free Nuclear Power Exceeds $2.3 Billion.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/annual-revenue-of-nuclear-energy-enemies-tops-2-8-billion-but-that-may-be-as-good-as-it-gets-for-them/