URGENT! No More Data Centers and No More Nuclear in Illinois - Nuclear Is NOT Clean Energy!
Illinois State Assembly and Governor J.B. Pritzker
As part of their action research, 7th Grade Students at Minnie Miñoso Academy in Chicago created this urgent petition to Governor Pritzker and the Illinois State Assembly, demanding that they take action to to stop the construction of data centers, strictly regulate or shut down the ones that already exist, and that using nuclear energy to power energy hungry data centers is NOT a green solution!
As educators we want young people to learn how to take a stand against the politics of disposability and extractivism. The goal of their current youth participatory action research project is to investigate the environmental and social impact of data center construction in Illinois, including the Quantum Campus, alongside how this connections to surveillance technology and the military industrial complex. Students are examining the manufactured energy crisis created by data center proliferation, and how the nuclear industry is trying to exploit this to generate a false “nuclear renaissance.” They have researched how data centers and nuclear power plants disproportionately harm Black, Latine, Indigenous, and poor communities, and that both technologies poison the land, the water, and the air - disrupting precious ecosystems, drastically increasing local atmospheric temperatures, and making surrounding areas unlivable.
Please take action and support these young activists who are taking a stand for environmental justice!
Sponsored by
To:
Illinois State Assembly and Governor J.B. Pritzker
From:
[Your Name]
Dear legislators_______________,
We are 7th grade students from Minnie Miñoso Academy in Chicago and we are highly concerned about the expansion of nuclear energy in Illinois. During this legislative session, we know that you are co-sponsoring the POWER Act (SB4016/HB5513), and we appreciate the policies in this bill that will place further restrictions on data centers in an effort to protect our water resources and reduce energy costs for Illinoisans in conjunction with the Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act.
However, we take issue with how the Assembly defines “clean energy,” and are concerned about Governor Pritzker’s Executive Order 2026-01: Executive Order to Accelerate New Safe Nuclear Power Generation in Illinois. We have studied the devastating environmental, health, and social impact of both nuclear energy production and nuclear weaponry, as well as the connection that both nuclear technologies have to the increased expansion of data centers in states like Illinois.
We can’t trust that nuclear reactors are safe because the people who check them have lied and said they are safe when they are not. Multiple reactors in Illinois have contaminated groundwater and sewage systems because they were leaking radioactive waste.
For example, a 2014 incident at Exelon’s Dresden facility in Grundy County, Illinois, involved the release of about 500,000 gallons of highly radioactive water. Contamination was later found in the plant’s sewer lines and miles away in the city sewage treatment plant in Morris, Illinois. This is just one of the many leaks of radioactive water that have happened in Illinois - there were 35 leaks that nuclear companies reported just between 2007-2017.
Not only are aging nuclear power plants in Illinois causing problems already, they will continue to cause problems for our health and environment in the future. All nuclear power plants produce nuclear waste, which stays radioactive for more than 100,000 years. We do not have a good plan to contain this waste, so nuclear energy is not a clean energy.
Therefore we are asking that you make rules to protect us from the harms of data centers without expanding nuclear energy, and that you change the Power Act so that nuclear energy is not defined as “clean energy.”
Thank you for your time and consideration.