This week, New Jersey’s public utilities commission awarded clean-energy credits to three vintage nuclear reactors. In doing so, the state joined New York, Illinois, and Connecticut in falling for the nuclear industry’s latest scheme: keeping itself afloat with public money that was supposed to incentivize a cleaner, greener future. Bills moving through legislatures in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Maryland could soon mean all the top nuclear energy-producing states in the northeast would be using public funds to prop up an aging and uncompetitive technology.

The laws differ from state to state, but all are designed to hide nuclear giveaways (bought with millions of dollars of lobbying) under the cloak of climate-friendly energy. Each plan sets up some sort of zero-emissions standard or green-energy credit, and then defines parameters that ensure a large cut of those programs are funneled to nuclear operators. In Illinois, energy behemoth Exelon banked $150 million* in public zero-emissions credits in 2017; New Jersey’s new law will put twice that in the pockets of Exelon and PSEG, the owners of the state’s three still-functioning reactors.

Whether these plants need the subsidies and rate hikes to stay open, or are just maximizing shareholder value, is open to debate. So, too, is whether governments are supposed to pick winners and losers in what is supposed to be an energy “market.” But it’s no longer a question whether nuclear power should be part of any long-term plan to counter global warming.

Nuclear power is not what anyone can consider carbon neutral. While it could be said that the fission inside a nuclear reactor does not produce much carbon dioxide, that is only one part of the total lifecycle of atomic energy production. Beyond the operation of the reactor, the nuclear fuel cycle includes the mining, milling, processing, enrichment, fabrication, and transport of the uranium-based fuel. Each step is energy intensive and creates a lot of greenhouse gases.

The power plants themselves have sizable carbon footprints. New nuclear facilities require, at minimum, more than a decade of heavy construction, with all the diesel-powered equipment that entails. The reactor and containment buildings use prodigious amounts of cement and steel—the production of which is a large contributor to global CO2—and the shipping of these large components only compounds their emissions contribution.