Renewable Energy

February 4, 2026 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

The Double-Threat: New Nuclear Power and the Data Center Boom

**Graphic by Rise and Repair Alliance, riseandrepair.org**

By Lindsay Potter

Small modular and so-called “advanced” nuclear technology is riding the coat tails of yet another capitulation to the seemingly unstoppable march of
“progress.” Progress not in feeding or housing families, lighting or heating homes, or providing jobs and education, but in the unchecked development of computer technology and artificial intelligence.

In the face of soaring cancer rates over the last five decades, despite consistent proof of the connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons proliferation, despite the generations-long objections of indigenous communities bearing the burden of uranium mining, and the more than seventy years of reactor operations without a true high-level radioactive waste storage solution — tech billionaires are personally financing the next wave of nuclear energy infrastructure.

But why? Renewable energy sources are growing at a remarkable rate. Scientists and researchers have shown that current and projected grid loads through 2030 and 2050 can be met using renewable sources without nuclear. Renewable energy costs less. According to Forbes, nuclear is the most expensive way to generate electricity. Renewable sources can be built in a fraction of the time it takes to construct new nuclear. However, the goliaths of computer and technology innovation insist small modular nuclear reactors (SMNRs) are the only way to generate enough power for their coming wave of new data centers.

What are SMNRs?

There are many different reactor designs out there, with different fuel sources and parent companies, but a small modular nuclear reactor is typically any reactor producing between 20-300 megawatts of electricity. There are no commercially operational SMNRs in the United States. Many SMNR designs require fuel different from conventional reactors and those experimental fuel sources are still under development and not scaled commercially. Companies such as Oklo, already permitted to proceed with a SMNR design at the Idaho National Lab site, would be unable to produce fuel until at least 2030. According to Reuters, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates the domestic demand for certain new types of SMNR fuel could reach 50 metric tons per year by 2035. However, the only U.S. maker of the fuel produced 900 kilograms in 2024. All of this takes enormous amounts of funding to develop and test. This fuel processing infrastructure still requires mining of new uranium and leaves additional radioactive waste — from the reprocessing of waste fuel into new fuel.

The first SMNR project approved in the U.S. was cancelled when the cost per megawatt hour ballooned 53% and subscribers pulled out. The four SMNRs that are operating — in China, Russia, and Argentina — cost 3-7 times more than predicted. The capital costs per kilowatt hour for SMNRs are 41% higher than for large reactors. A 2022 study found that SMNRs increase the volume of nuclear waste by a factor of 2-30 times over conventional reactors.

In nuclear reactor operator Xcel Energy’s current 2024-2040 resource plan, its own modeling EnCompass software did not choose an SMNR when given the option to select one among future sources of energy generation. This proves even Xcel’s own software, when confronted with projected energy demands, cannot justify the cost of new nuclear infrastructure.

The data center connection

Nukewatch joins other water protectors and environmental groups at the Rise and Repair Rally Day at the Minnesota capitol to protest the proposed repeal of the state’s 31-year-old nuclear moratorium.

Data centers, used to power A.I. computing technology, can require an entire large-scale commercial reactor’s output equivalent. New nuclear reactors are not necessary to address the climate crisis, to cut out fossil fuels, or to meet the needs of the average person. New nuclear is being green washed and promoted because it is the silver bullet for the data center boom’s astronomical energy appetite.

The largest data centers can use as much electricity as the entire city of Minneapolis. If the total number of data centers proposed in Minnesota are built, they would require as much electricity as every home in Minnesota, or roughly 2.3 million houses. Many regulators and local governments do not have oversight in place for how to track and vet these data center projects. Georgia Power anticipates that data center growth will cause electricity demands to triple in the next decade.

But some communities are fighting back. In Tucson, Arizona, local leaders voted down Amazon’s Project Blue data center proposal. In Missouri, the St. Charles City Council unanimously adopted a year-long moratorium for data center proposals in the area. In Denver, local resistance and the city council halted a SMNR 48 hours after it was proposed.

Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are being handed out as subsidies to experimental SMNR developers. Additionally, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are directly investing in or are in negotiations to purchase power from SMNR startups. Such tech figureheads as Bill Gates, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Peter Thiel (a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies), Unity software’s David Helgason, and Amazon’s “Climate Pledge Fund” are privately funding SMNR research and development.

Why the moratorium matters

Despite opposition from the Prairie Island Indian Community — the closest reservation to a nuclear reactor and temporary waste storage in the U.S. — and environmental groups, the 1994 Minnesota state legislature passed a law permitting nuclear waste storage onsite at the Prairie Island reactors. This 1994 law included the nuclear moratorium — which bans consideration of proposed new nuclear reactors. Xcel requested additional waste storage at Prairie Island in 2003, 2005, 2008, 2023, and 2024. Over the last 55 years, the Prairie Island Indian Community has received only a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars given to other towns or communities near the reactors.

A few stalwart pro-nuclear legislators have tried over the last thirty years to repeal the moratorium. Several bills failed in 2025 and are likely to be introduced in the next session. The moratorium is a crucial point in keeping SMNRs and more data centers out of the state of Minnesota and protecting fresh water. While a hyperscale data center can require millions of gallons of water a year, a small modular reactor can consume on average 1.5 billion gallons of water per-year for cooling, depending on the design and size of the reactor.

The severe health and environmental risks posed by highly radioactive nuclear fuel waste was at the heart of the creation of the moratorium in
Minnesota, and that problem remains unresolved, especially in the face of a new nuclear boom.

The U.S. has more than 95,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive used nuclear fuel and has no long-term storage solution. The only attempted storage site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada had an estimated cost of $96 billion. After spending $8 billion and eighteen years, the project failed. Any repository would need to isolate radioactive waste from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years, requiring engineering beyond anything existing today and incurring maintenance costs generations beyond the operational life of any nuclear reactor.

According to Brice Smith, in his report for the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, in the scenario of proposed expansion of nuclear power through 2050, in order to keep up with the production of high-level radioactive nuclear waste fuel, a new Yucca Mountain repository would need to open every three to six years to store the waste.

It is crucial now, more than ever, that states such as Minnesota maintain their nuclear moratoriums. These are the only guardrails to slow down data centers and the wholesale deployment of untested new nuclear technology. Without the moratoriums, there is an imminent threat that much of the funding meant to help transition the grid to renewable energy will be spent on nuclear infrastructure that is designed to serve the needs of tech giants, not the needs of the people.

Some, such as Minnesota Senator Spencer Igo, sponsoring legislation to repeal the moratorium, have suggested that the moratorium is impeding innovation in the nuclear power sector. To the contrary, according to a Congressional Budget Office report examining funding from 1948-2018, nuclear received three times more research and development funding than renewables and twice as much as fossil fuels. With the wealthiest and most technologically resourced people on the planet — and the federal government and U.S. military backing this industry it is hard to imagine any impediment.

Igo and others insist that removing the moratorium would only be in the service of using ‘all the tools in the toolbox’ and that regulators can be trusted to ensure only infrastructure that serves the public interest will be built. But time and again the NRC and Minn. Public Utilities Commission have been found to cater to the wealth of corporate utility shareholders who heavily lobby regulators. These regulators almost never deny applications.

Those who stand to gain from new nuclear deployment will scheme to see data centers and small reactors in towns across the country ahead of any large movement to stop them. Communities have already risen up to protect local water, the right to affordable energy, and the right to fight further consolidation of wealth. People everywhere must join the call to keep nuclear moratoriums, in fact to increase the number of them nationwide, in a stand against the railroading of the public by the wealthiest few. Just as Exxon lied about climate change science, the Silicon Valley influencers have been pushing nuclear as green in order to stage this very play, and now their aims are being laid bare.

Sources: U.S. Dept. of Energy; TechCrunch; Sierra Club; Forbes; Arjun Makhijani and Brice Smith, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research; Ed Lyman, Union of Concerned Scientists; Mark Jacobson, Stanford University; Reuters; National Academy of Sciences; Scientific American; S.F. No. 1706, Minnesota Session Laws; MPR News; KJZZ News; KCUR News, NRDC

July 14, 2025 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Irony Lives: “Clean Energy” Tax Credits Critical for Nuclear’s Future

The nuclear power lobby has abandoned its former motto ⸺ “electricity too cheap to meter” ⸺ and replaced it with the fairy tale that nuclear reactors are “clean” and the “answer to climate change.” The industry has spent so much money lobbying on Capitol Hill and on campaign financing, that Congress bought the whole charade and added nuclear reactor operations to its list of “clean energy” tax credit beneficiaries.

Now, with the Trump backlash against any acknowledgment of climate change or fossil fuel pollution, House Republicans are pushing drilling, mining, and burning and want to rescind all the Congressional “clean energy” tax credits.

Proving that irony is not dead, the myth-making nuclear industry is crying foul, as some of the tax credits identify and “incentivize” reactors as “clean energy assets” ⸺ the very fiction that the industry created.

Consequently, over 100 utilities, industry suppliers, and reactor developers, organized by the Nuclear Energy Institute, wrote to Congress April 30 demanding retention of the tax credits which keep alive dreams of new reactor construction.

The credits are essential to nuclear’s economic future, the letter says, and are “critical to strengthening U.S. energy security” ⸺ meaning the industry cannot compete any more, and its CEO’s have said so.

Speaking in New York City on Nov. 27, 2013, World Bank President Dr. Jim Yong Kim said, “The World Bank Group does not engage in providing support for nuclear power. … we don’t do nuclear energy.”

The U.S. Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism concluded in 2009 that governments should help stop nuclear weapons proliferation by “discouraging … the use of financial incentives in the promotion of civil nuclear power.”

John Rowe, a former chairman and CEO of the nuclear power-heavy Exelon Corp. said “unequivocally,” in March 2012, “that new [reactors] don’t make any sense right now…. It just isn’t economic, and it’s not economic within a foreseeable time frame.”

Even the former CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute, Marvin Fertel, told Scientific American in 2012, “We won’t build large numbers of new nuclear in the U.S. in the near term. Today, you ought to build gas.” And Bill Johnson, CEO of Progress Energy, said in the same article, “Nuclear can’t compete today.” In 2011, Siemens Corp. declared that, following Germany’s decision to close all 17 of its reactors by 2022 (all built by Siemens), the company would stop building new reactors anywhere in the world. “The chapter for us is closed,” said Chief Executive Peter Löscher.

Calling new reactors “too expensive,” Jon Wellinghoff, a former chair of the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said in 2009, “We may not need any, ever,” adding that renewables “like wind, solar and biomass would be able to provide enough energy to meet base load capacity and future demand.”

Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of the reactor engineering giant General Electric, said in 2010, “If you were a utility CEO and looked at your world today, you would just do gas and wind. … You would never do nuclear. The economics are overwhelming.”

Asked about Duke Power Florida’s August 2013 decision to cancel new reactor plans, former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Peter Bradford told the Tampa Bay Times that a nuclear construction boom, “was just this artificial gold rush. And yes, it does show the renaissance is dead.” ⸺ JL

April 7, 2025 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Seven Reasons Why Nuclear Energy is Not the Answer to Solve Climate Change

For more than a decade, Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson has demonstrated how the U.S. and 139 other countries can transition to renewable energy for all purposes by 2050, without nuclear energy. Yet the debate on the necessity of nuclear power to abate climate chaos lingers on. Jacobson testified before the Minnesota House of Representatives, alongside Nukewatch, in February 2025 to oppose the repeal of the state’s longstanding moratorium on new nuclear reactor construction.

By Mark Z. Jacobson

Some advocate that nuclear power is a “clean” carbon-free electricity source, but they don’t look at the full scope of its impacts. New nuclear electricity costs about 3-14 times that of onshore wind per unit electricity generated. Nuclear also takes 7 to 21 years longer between planning and operation than wind, and produces 9 to 37 times the emissions per unit electricity generated as wind. In addition, nuclear creates risk and cost associated with weapons proliferation, core meltdown, uranium mining, radioactive waste, and carbon-equivalent emissions.

Nuclear advocates claim it is still needed because wind and solar are intermittent and need natural gas for backup. However, nuclear itself never matches power demand so it needs backup. Even in France, which has the world’s highest-penetrating nuclear energy programs, the maximum ramp rate is 1 to 5 % per minute, which means they need natural gas, hydropower, or batteries, which ramp up 5 to 100 times faster, to meet peaks in demand. Today, in fact, batteries are beating natural gas for wind and solar backup needs throughout much of the world.

Dozens of independent scientific groups have further found that it is possible to match intermittent power demand with clean, renewable supply and storage, without nuclear or fossil fuels, at low cost.

Finally, many existing nuclear reactors are so costly that their owners are demanding subsidies to stay open. In 2016, three upstate New York reactor operators requested and received subsidies to stay open using the argument that the reactors were needed to keep emissions low. However, subsidizing such reactors may increase carbon emissions and costs compared to replacing them with wind or solar.

As we wait for even a single new reactor to be built, climate change will accelerate. Utility-scale wind and solar farms, on the other hand, take an average of only one to five years from planning to operation. Rooftop solar PV projects are down to only a six-month timeline. So, transitioning to 100% clean, renewable energy for all purposes as soon as possible would result in tens of millions fewer deaths than a nuclear scenario. Here are seven major problems with nuclear energy:

1. Long Time Lag
The time lag between planning and operation of a nuclear reactor includes the time to identify a site, obtain a site permit, purchase or lease the land, obtain a construction permit, obtain financing and insurance for construction, install transmission, negotiate a power purchase agreement, obtain operating permits, build the reactor, connect it to transmission, and obtain a final operating license.

The planning-to-operation (PTO) times of all nuclear reactors ever built have been 10-22 years. For example: the Olkiluoto 3 reactor in Finland – PTO time of 22 years; the Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor – PTO time of 20 years; the Vogtle 3 and 4 reactors in the U.S. state of Georgia – PTO times of 17 and 18 years, respectively; the Flamanville, France, Unit 3 reactor – PTO time of 20 years; the Haiyang 1 and 2 reactors in China – PTO times of 13 and 14 years, respectively; the Taishan 1 and 2 reactors in China – PTO times of 12 and 13 years, respectively.

Planning and procurement for four reactors in Ringhals, Sweden started in 1965. One took 10 years, the second took 11 years, the third took 16 years, and the fourth took 18 years to complete. Many claim that France’s 1974 Messmer plan resulted in the building of its 58 reactors in 15 years. This is not true. The planning for several of these nuclear reactors began long before. In addition, 10 of the reactors were completed between 1991-2000. As such, the whole planning-to-operation time for these reactors was at least 32 years, not 15; that of any individual reactor was 10 to 19 years.

There is no evidence that small modular reactors (SMRs) will reduce PTO times compared with large units. Indeed, no commercialized SMR exists worldwide. In the United States, the only company building an SMR with its design approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission lost its main purchaser, lost 84% of the value of its stock from its peak, was sued by its shareholders for securities fraud, and laid off 28% of its full-time staff, all near the end of 2023. Their test reactor, if it will be built at all, is not anticipated to be available until after 2030, far too late for it to be an effective solution to air pollution or climate change.

2. Cost
Lazard [the world’s largest independent investment bank] found in a 2023 study that the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for a new U.S. nuclear reactor is more than three times that for onshore wind or utility-scale solar PV. The cost of nuclear is an underestimate for several reasons. First, Lazard assumes a construction time for nuclear of 5.75 years. However, the Vogtle 3 and 4 reactors, the only ones built in the U.S. in the past 20 years, took 9 and 10 years, respectively for construction. Lazard also assumed a mean capital cost at only 70% of the actual cost of the Vogtle reactors ($35 billion for 2.23 GW). These changes alone suggest an LCOE of nuclear that is 3 to 14 times that of onshore wind.

Lazard’s cost estimate for nuclear energy does not include the cost of the major nuclear meltdowns in history. For example, the estimated cost to clean up the damage from three Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor core meltdowns, is $460 to $640 billion. This is $1.2 billion, or 10 to 18.5 percent of the capital cost, of every nuclear reactor worldwide. In addition, Lazard’s cost estimate does not include the cost of storing radioactive waste for hundreds of thousands of years. In the U.S. alone, about $500 million is spent yearly to safeguard high-level waste from about 92 civilian nuclear reactors. This amount will increase as more waste accumulates. After the nuclear reactors retire, the spending must continue for hundreds of thousands of years with no revenue stream from electricity sales to pay for the storage. There is no reason to think SMRs will be less expensive than large reactors.

3. Weapons Proliferation Risk
The growth of nuclear reactors for electricity generation and research has historically increased the ability of nations to harvest plutonium or enrich uranium to be used in nuclear weapons. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognizes this fact. They concluded in the Executive Summary of their 2014 report on energy, with “robust evidence and high agreement” that nuclear weapons proliferation concern is a barrier and risk to the increasing development of nuclear energy:

“Barriers to and risks associated with an increasing use of nuclear energy include operational risks and the associated safety concerns, uranium mining risks, financial and regulatory risks, unresolved waste management issues, nuclear weapons proliferation concerns, and adverse public opinion.”

The building of a nuclear reactor for energy in a country that does not currently have a reactor forces the country to import uranium for nuclear energy production. If the country so chooses, it can also secretly enrich the uranium to create weapons-grade uranium and harvest plutonium from uranium fuel rods for use in nuclear weapons. The link between nuclear energy and weapons was clarified further as follows: “For example, uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing facilities are dual-use in nature because they can be used to produce fuel for power reactors or fissile material for nuclear weapons.”

4. Meltdown Risk
To date, about 1.5 percent of all nuclear power reactors ever built have melted down to some degree. Meltdowns have been either catastrophic (Chernobyl, Russia in 1986; three reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi, Japan in 2011) or damaging (Three-Mile Island, Pennsylvania in 1979; Saint-Laurent France in 1980). Nuclear energy developers, including developers of SMRs, have proposed new reactor designs that they suggest are safer. However, these designs are generally untested, and there is no guarantee that the reactors will be designed, built, and operated correctly or that a natural disaster or act of terrorism, such as an airplane flown into a reactor, will not cause the reactor to fail, resulting in a major disaster.

5. Mining Cancer Risk
Underground uranium mining (which comprises over one-third of all uranium mining) causes cancer in many miners because uranium mines contain radon gas, which is a radioactive decay product of uranium. Some of radon’s decay products, such as polonium, are carcinogenic. The risk of radon-related cancers (including lung cancer, leukemia, and extra-thoracic cancer) from underground uranium mining is high. Because SMRs require uranium just as large reactors do, cancer risk from underground uranium mining extends to SMRs as well.

6. Carbon-Equivalent Emissions & Air Pollution
There is no such thing as a zero- or close-to-zero emission nuclear reactor. Even existing reactors emit carbon or carbon-equivalent emissions due to the continuous mining and refining of uranium needed for the reactor. This includes emissions from the background grid while consumers wait 10 to 22 years for nuclear to come online or be refurbished, relative to 1 to 5 years for wind or solar.

In addition, all nuclear reactors contribute carbon-dioxide-equivalent (CO2e) emissions from the water vapor and heat they release. This contrasts with solar panels and wind turbines, which reduce heat or water vapor fluxes to the air. The rest of the emissions associated with nuclear are due to the CO2e emitted during the construction and decommissioning of the reactor and due to producing the energy needed to mine and refine uranium. A nuclear reactor may take decades after it starts running to offset the emissions it allowed from the grid during its PTO phase.

China’s investment in nuclear reactors that take so long between planning and operation, instead of wind or solar, resulted in China’s CO2 emissions increasing by 1.3 percent from 2016 to 2017 rather than declining by about 3 percent. The resulting difference in air pollution emissions may have caused 69,000 excess deaths in China in 2016 alone, with additional deaths in years prior and since. SMRs face similar carbon-equivalent emissions and air pollution mortality.

7. Waste Risk
Last but not least, irradiated fuel rods from nuclear reactors are radioactive waste. Most fuel rods are stored at the same location as the reactor that irradiated them. This has given rise to hundreds of radioactive waste sites in many countries that must be maintained and funded for at least 200,000 years — far beyond the lifetime of any nuclear reactor. The more of this waste that accumulates, the greater the risk of radioactive leaks, which can damage water supplies, crops, animals, and humans. Small modular reactor designs only exacerbate the waste dilemma.

— Mark Jacobson, submitted this testimony on Jan. 17, 2024 to a U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee. here reprinted and edited for space.

A.Zoom recording of Prof. Jacobson’s March 4 presentation and his slides.

B. MN Plan for 100% Wind, Water & Solar by 2050: Zero Air Pollution and Zero Carbon From All Energy Without Blackouts at Low Cost in Minnesota (Research/Data)

https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/21-USStates-PDFs/21-WWS-Minnesota.pdf

C. 100% Wind, Water, and Solar (WWS) All-Sector Energy Roadmaps for the United States

https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/WWS-USA.html

D. Infographic Roadmaps to Transition Cities, States, and Countries to 100% Wind-Water-Solar (WWS) for all Energy Purposes

https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/wws-roadmaps/home

Global Plan for 100% Wind, Water & Solar by 2050: A Solution to Global Warming, Air Pollution, and Energy Insecurity for 149 Countries (Research/Data)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L-cKZ8ev-GLmcjd4lYqLH7l1xZRhX6IN/view

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