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
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
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