As we write this, the commonwealth’s climate and clean energy bill is struggling to obtain the votes to pass in informal sessions after having stalled during the regular legislative session. While there are many promising components to this bill, as members of the Sunderland Energy Committee, we are gravely concerned about the bill’s classification of nuclear power as “a clean energy fuel.” Only from the narrow perspective of carbon emissions can nuclear power be considered “clean” — and even that is debatable, given the large amount of embedded carbon in mining and processing nuclear fuel.

From every other perspective, nuclear power is far from clean or green, and far from safe. There is still no long-term solution to dealing with nuclear waste, much of which will remain hazardous for at least a quarter-million years. (Has any government or civilization lasted more than a few thousand, let alone a quarter-million years?) Plus, as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima have demonstrated, no amount of fail-safe engineering can protect us from the unexpected and unthought-of “accidents” that the human mind did not anticipate.

We would respectfully encourage our legislators to ask the people living on Native American reservations in various parts of the country, where the tailings from uranium mining have permanently contaminated their drinking water and irrigation systems, whether nuclear power is clean, green, or safe. We believe they would receive a fairly stern answer.

We are concerned that this greenwashing of nuclear power would signal a renaissance of the flagging nuclear power industry. Govs. Maura Healey and Ned Lamont are now discussing a deal for Massachusetts to purchase “clean” nuclear power from Connecticut’s Millstone nuclear power plant if Connecticut agrees to purchase power from the proposed Vineyard Wind 2 project. And Google has signed a deal to build small modular nuclear reactors to power its electricity-hungry data centers, which are increasingly tasked with running computationally heavy AI applications.

Tech giants Amazon and Microsoft are following suit. In our view, casting our lot with nuclear power is a Faustian bargain that goes in precisely the wrong direction.

While we surely understand the need to reduce fossil fuel use and thereby reduce carbon emissions to reach both statewide and national benchmarks, nuclear power is not the way to do it. To us, this amounts to kicking the can down the road and forcing future generations to deal with the mess and hazards that are — and have been — the legacy of nuclear power.

Our committee firmly believes that the cheapest and most effective measure we can take as a society to curb carbon emissions is to use less energy. That is the message we have tried to convey to the residents of Sunderland since our appointment in 2005 and the reason we knocked on virtually every door in town in 2014, urging homeowners to get energy audits and reduce their consumption.

The clean energy bill as written takes as a given that our level of energy consumption, especially electricity consumption, will increase and that we need to find more ways of generating more and more energy without burning more fossil fuels. It seems to us, on the other hand, that the path we need to take is to wean ourselves from our current energy addiction, not just, or not only, our fossil-fuel addiction.

Surely renewable energy will have an important place in our energy future. But it will not enable us to live as we live now. An unsustainable way of life is just that: unsustainable. Nuclear power will not make it sustainable. We have to find another way to live that makes fewer demands on our fragile, finite planet. This means living a less energy-intensive lifestyle.

We realize full well that this suggestion is not popular. But popular or not, we feel obligated to speak the truth as we see it. If we are to have a livable planet for future generations, we cannot keep going as we have been going, no matter the power source. The Limits to Growth study made this clear in the early 1970s. A society committed to limitless progress, growth, and development cannot be sustained. To our knowledge, their forecasts and models have not been refuted, even after several updates (1992, 2004).

Since then, many other reports and studies have confirmed their conclusions, such as those of the Post Carbon Institute. We ignore their advice at our peril.

We urge readers to contact their legislators to remove nuclear power from this clean energy bill.

Aaron Falbel, Meg Fisher-Krugman, David Goodwin and Laura Williams are members of the Sunderland Energy Committee.