Room: The Amalgamable Archive

Source Collection The Amalgamable Archive

Nuclear power, no thanks!

In 1975, the Danish activist Anne Lund used the optimistic and lighthearted appearance of the sun to design a protest logo. The ‘Nuclear Power? No Thanks’ logo, also known as the Smiling Sun, was designed for the OOA, the Organisation for Information about Nuclear Power. At the time of creating the logo, Lund had no prior design experience. In an interview, she explained the choice for the sun as a symbol. Up until then, most anti-nuclear imagery, like children and pregnant women surrounded my neutrons, had focused on the danger and negative impacts of nuclear energy. Instead, Lund wanted to shed light on a positive alternative in the form of renewable sources, like solar energy. Over the years, the design became an international symbol of the anti-nuclear movement, and the logo has been translated and adapted innumerable times.